Yorkshire Wolds NMP

The Yorkshire Wolds project was carried out between 1981 and 1991 and was a precursor to the National Mapping Programme (NMP). The objective of the project was to produce an accurate and comprehensive map of the plough-levelled prehistoric and Roman landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds, as derived from aerial photographs and to provide a framework for future fieldwork and academic research.

The Yorkshire Wolds is an area of rolling chalk hills which has been under intensive arable cultivation for many decades.. The free-draining thin soils and predominance of cereal crops are ideal for the formation of cropmarks of buried archaeological features that can be recorded by regular aerial reconnaissance. This has allowed archaeologists to build up a remarkable picture of how the landscape was divided in earlier times revealing an extensive pattern of burials, settlements, ceremonial sites and land divisions dating from the Neolithic through to Roman times.

The project was undertaken at a time when computer-aided rectification of aerial photographs was being developed and this helped to ensure a high level of accuracy in the resultant maps.

A report was published in 1997, Ancient Landscapes of the Yorkshire Wolds by Cathy Stoertz, who also did most of the interpretation and mapping, looking at more than 35,000 photographs. The publication contains a complete copy of the mapping at a reduced scale of 1:25,000 and a narrative exploring the key findings of the project.

For further information on a project or any other aspect of the work of the Aerial Survey team please contact us at: AerialSurvey@english-heritage.org.uk.

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 NMR English Heritage's public archive.