Funds needed to make preservation scheme work (From Gazette & Herald)

Funds needed to make preservation scheme work

Dominic Powlesland, of the Landscape Research Centre, who for years has led the major archaeological project at Heslerton, says it's important that the EH initiative succeeds and here he explains why....

MORE than 90pc of the evidence of human activity in Britain is to be found in the countryside. With the exception of scheduled monuments and a small number of others covered by associated management schemes, the buried past is afforded poor protection.

If we compare the attitudes to the preservation of the evidence of our past to the conservation of wildlife, it is clear that the human past has been considered far less important. The theft of birds eggs is, for instance, considered a crime and yet the theft of metalwork, often the only material that will enable us to date a site, is not.

Many earthworks and other monuments that survived as visible features of the landscape only 50 years ago have been flattened as a consequence of government-driven agricultural policy.

Archaeological deposits are, for the most part, fragile and invisible in the landscape, they document the human occupation, agriculture and land management of 10,000 years of our past, once destroyed they cannot be replaced.

The choice of 'Ripping Up History' as the name for this new initiative designed to bring farmers, English Heritage and government together is perhaps confrontational. In no case that I know of has any farmer gone out and deliberately deep-ploughed a site. Farmers are not vandals, they have a living to make and land to maintain but their actions are largely dictated by agricultural policy and the pressures to produce cheap food.

For over 25 years a small team from the Landscape Research Centre have been working in the Vale of Pickering to try to identify and understand the valuable evidence of our past. The farming community are under more pressure now than ever before and yet they have given us tremendous support and encouragement; it should not surprise us that the farming community are just as excited about what we are finding beneath their land as we are.

During the last four years, we have been concentrating our efforts on large-scale surveys designed to identify how much archaeology is buried and how well preserved it is. The southern side of the Vale of Pickering, between Rillington and Potter Brompton, has been the focus of intensive human settlement from about 4000BC onwards. More importantly, much of the archaeology in this area has been uniquely preserved by a layer of blown sand which has protected large areas from plough damage until very recently.

The announcement of this new initiative, and DEFFRA's new emphasis on sustainability in the landscape, offer a great opportunity to develop management plans that will both allow farming to thrive and important archaeological sites to be preserved.

If this initiative is to succeed, then it is essential that sufficient funds are made available to compensate the farming community and that arrangements are very long-term. Farmers have been constantly kicked from pillar to post by changing and complex subsidy arrangements and short-term approaches, such as set-aside, which do little to maintain the nature of the landscape, leaving fields as dead areas inundated with thistles and nettles.

We welcome this new approach, in that it will give us the first opportunity to offer farmers something in return for putting land down to grass and thus preserving the unique book of the past that lies buried beneath the fields. By selectively preserving the best of our past we can secure a future for our past.

Preservation is merely the first step. We need to understand what we are preserving and we need to leave it for future researchers who will be able to find out more than we can using new knowledge. Through a programme of preservation and research, the buried archaeology could form the basis of a magnificent educational resource, providing access to the past for the wider public through fieldwork and reconstruction.

The story of the archaeology of Heslerton could not have been told without the support of the farming community. The hundreds of hectares of geophysical survey undertaken in and around Heslerton, as any visitor to the current exhibition in Malton Museum will see, are astonishing.

If this new initiative leads to the preservation and long-term study and interpretation of this recently discovered evidence within a functioning agricultural landscape this would be English Heritage's greatest contribution to our past. We look forward to the challenge.

Updated: 11:30 Wednesday, July 30, 2003