An aerial photographic survey was carried out on a tract of countryside around Flint Farm, near Fullerton, Hampshire to the northeast of Danebury hillfort. The survey was undertaken in conjunction with excavations by Professor Barry Cunliffe of Oxford University on the sites of two presumed Iron Age/Romano-British settlement enclosures as part of the Danebury Environs Programme.
The Danebury Environs Programme is a project dedicated to the study of the development of the landscape surrounding the important extensively excavated hillfort of Danebury in the later prehistoric and Roman periods. The aerial survey was designed to give a broader landscape context to the excavations and preparatory geophysical prospection of the enclosure sites carried out by the English Heritage Geophysics.
The survey was carried out using all specialist oblique and non-specialist vertical aerial photographs of the survey area held by the NMR and the Unit for Landscape Modelling at Cambridge University (ULM) as well as the cover held by Hampshire County Council.
Results
Some of the photographs of the main enclosures were taken during periods when features were showing especially well as cropmarks. As a result the correlation between the findings of the aerial and the geophysical surveys were remarkably close, although as expected the geophysical survey showed features in more detail and was able to record features that are too indistinct to pick up from the air (notably at Flint Farm).
Excavation at both sites in 2003 and 2004 showed that whilst both date to the Iron Age there are significant differences in their chronology and the relationships of internal features.
The surrounding landscape
The main result of the aerial survey was to set the enclosures being examined into their wider landscape context. One key element of this was the plotting of a number of apparent trackways that link the various enclosures and also have an integral relationship with the field systems that surround them. In several cases they follow the alignment of the field systems, but it unclear which came first.
In addition to this, a number of new sites were discovered and one feature previously identified as a Bronze Age round barrow has been re-interpreted as a possible Neolithic short long barrow.
The images used on this page are copyright English Heritage unless specified otherwise. For further details of any photographs or other images and for copies of these, or the plans and reports related to the project please contact the English Heritage Archive.
For further information on a project or any other aspect of the work of the Aerial Survey team please contact us via email using the link above.
