Serendipity FFWAP*

This might make a good subject for a guess the activity competition, I certainly had no idea what was going on until we spoke to Alison who is marching down the field here towards us.

We had gone for a circular walk from Huggate that takes in the deep dry chalk valley of Horse Dale.  It was a dry day, for which we should be grateful, though heavily overcast for most of it (as in this photo) - and the photos of the dale were flat and uninspiring.  An excuse therefore to repeat the walk on another day this year as part of our exploration of the Dales of the Yorkshire Wolds.

And though we have done this walk before, we turned off the road from Huggate in the wrong place.  Had we carried on to the public footpath, we would never have encountered these four people.  We first saw three of them sat in chairs in amongst the stubble of an arable field on the Wold top.  Then we saw the fourth one toiling upslope into view with this wheeled contraption.

Alison came over to intercept us and move us out of the line of the man coming upslope.  C can always be relied on to strike up conversations with strangers, and so Alison then explained to us they were amateur archaeologists carrying out a magnetometry survey.  The device on the wheeled frame is detecting changes in the Earth's magnetic field, and is communicating the data to a GPS unit that is mounted on a tripod on the opposite side of the field.  Alison showed us on her phone the results gathered so far which show the outlines of an Iron Age settlement, it was one of those Wow! moments, quite astonishing to see the large number of outlines of former buildings and structures that once stood in this field.

I had read somewhere that the Wolds have the greatest concentration of known Iron Age and earlier archaeological sites in Britain outside Orkney.  The dry chalk tops were more easily cleared and farmed by our distant ancestors than the lower lying ground in say the Vale of York, where considerable work would be needed to drain the extensive marshlands that covered the flatter ground.  And Alison and the other members of FFWAP* are adding sites and details to the archaeological inventory.

Back in Huggate, the Huggate hog was slumbering in his hut, and as always seems to be the case, we bumped into Alan who was returning to his home after feeding his stock.  More of Alan in a future backblip.  The extra is from the largest of the Huggate ponds.

* Fridaythorpe, Fimber and Wetwang Archaeological Project.

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