Cornwall NMP
The Cornwall NMP project began in 1994 carried out by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit. To date 85% of the county, including the Isles of Scilly, has been mapped. The mapping phase of the project is due for completion early in 2005 and this will then be followed by the production of a management report and other publications.
Over the last ten years more than 30,000 individual archaeological features have been mapped and recorded. Roughly 10,000 previously unknown sites have been identified and added to Cornwall’s Historic Environment Record. On completion of the project these sites will be incorporated into English Heritage’s National Monuments Record.
Cornwall has a rich and varied archaeological heritage and this is reflected in the wide range of sites mapped during the project. One of the most striking aspects of Cornwall’s historic landscape is the extraordinary legacy of its tin and copper mining industries. So much so that a bid is being prepared for the mining heritage to be granted World Heritage Site (WHS) status.
The heyday of Cornish mining was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when, driven by local technological innovations, the industry was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, and numerous ruined engine houses, a relic of that time, have become an enduring and evocative feature of the Cornish landscape. The origins of Cornish mining, however, lie in the much deeper past. Long before the invention of powerful steam engines that enabled deep rock mining, tin and copper were being excavated from shallow workings such as these at Wheal Bal near Cornwall’s south west tip. The value of NMP mapping of early workings like those at Wheal Bal is that these features do not appear on any other maps. By surveying them the project has furnished a third of the data gathered by the WHS team to define the total extent of Cornish mining.
Leaping forward in time, many of Cornwall’s wartime defences are visible on RAF aerial photographs taken during the 1940s. By mapping individual features, such as pill boxes, anti-tank ditches and anti-aircraft batteries, a picture can be built up of the complete defensive networks protecting the county’s key strategic locations. This is a fine example of a heavy anti-aircraft battery near the river Tamar which forms the county border with Devon. There are two phases of construction: the four gun emplacements seen here were built towards the end of the war, traces of four earlier emplacements, dating from 1940, can be seen towards the top of the enlarged image.
Ironically, although it is sited in Cornwall, this battery formed part of the defensive ring around Plymouth. The way batteries like this worked was to put up a barrage of fire to force bombers to fly higher, thereby reducing their accuracy. The downside of this, of course, is that wayward bombs often fell onto residential areas. During the Plymouth blitz in the spring of 1941, the Cornish towns of Torpoint and Saltash, a few miles south of this battery, sustained severe damage.
Archaeologists in Cornwall are fortunate that in upland parts of the county the survival level of many sites is very good. Here on Bodmin Moor (right), for example, are the remains of stone-built round houses set within a series of curvilinear fields. This settlement is likely to be Bronze Age in date. Elsewhere on the moor are further prehistoric settlements as well as abandoned medieval hamlets, and aerial survey has enabled these extensive relict landscapes to be mapped in their entirety.
Away from the moors, in the farming heartland, many archaeological features have been levelled by ploughing. In some cases below-ground remains do survive and in certain dry summers these remains can be seen from the air as crop marks.
In this photo, taken at Coswarth in central Cornwall, an oval enclosure can be seen as a dark green mark in a field containing a paler green cereal crop. This mark reveals the line of a ditch. Because the depth of soil in the ditch is greater than elsewhere in the field and has retained more moisture, the plants growing over it are taller and are ripening later than the rest of the crop, hence the colour contrast.
Excavation of similar enclosures has shown that this site is likely to be a settlement of late Iron Age or Romano-British date enclosed by a bank and ditch. In Cornwall these sites are traditionally called rounds. Rounds usually have entrances with gates, and contain several round houses although in this particular example all that can be seen is the enclosing ditch. The house in the foreground provides a pointer to the size of the round. Rounds are the predominant settlement type from this period in lowland Cornwall and NMP mapping has identified as many as five hundred previously unknown examples, more than a third of the total number of such settlements recorded in the county.
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