Flint Farm, Danebury

An aerial photographic survey was carried out on a tract of countryside around Flint Farm, near Fullerton, Hampshire as part of the Danebury Environs Programme (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 undertaken in conjunction with excavations by Professor Barry Cunliffe of Oxford University on the sites of two presumed Iron Age/Romano-British settlement enclosures (Rowbury Farm and Flint Farm) lying 3.5km to the northeast of Danebury. The aerial survey was designed to set these excavations and preparatory geophysical prospection of the enclosure sites carried out by the English Heritage team into a broader landscape context and 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.

The Flint and Rowbury Farm enclosures located within a network of “Celtic fields” mapped from aerial photographs. The ploughed out remains of the earlier field systems surrounding the settlements on which their subsistence was presumably based are generally only resolved in the aerial photographs whilst the magnetometer surveys provide significantly greater detail of the enclosed settlements and the character of occupation within them. #the integrated use of the two techniques is therefore important for understanding the landscape as a whole. Features in red were once built up above the ground level (e.g. banks and the mounds of barrows; those in green represent features that were originally cut into the ground (e.g. pit and ditches); the magenta lines mark the location and alignment of medieval ridge and furrow cultivation; modern boundaries are shown in grey. © All rights reserved. English Heritage 100019088. 2005.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 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.

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 chonology and the relationships of internal features.

The results of the aerial survey together with the geophysical survey and excavations are due to be published in 2006 in an update and revision of work in the Danebury Environs.

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.

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.