Dry summer helps experts to look down and back on the past

NEW discoveries about ancient in Yorkshire have followed the exceptionally dry early summer, English Heritage has revealed.

The conditions allowed hundreds of “cropmark sites” – the marks produced when crops grow over buried features – to be photographed from the air.

Hundreds of these sites were recorded across the country but flights over Holderness proved especially productive with 60 new sites found in just one day. They included livestock and settlement enclosures, field systems and trackways.

Flights from airfields at Sherburn-in-Elmet near York have also revealed a wealth of information. Some sites not visible since the drought of 1976 have appeared again and other sites have revealed new details, such as the Roman fort in Newton Kyme, near Tadcaster.

The 2,000-year-old rectangular fort is known to have an earth and timber bastion, but an aerial survey revealed a stronger defence built in 290 AD, with stone walls and a huge ditch.

Dave MacLeod, English Heritage Senior Investigator based in York, said: “We try to concentrate on areas that in an average year don’t produce much archaeology. Sorties to the West Midlands and Cumbria, together with more local areas such as the Yorkshire Wolds and Vale of York, have all been very rewarding.”