Ancient Landscapes

I spent some time last night researching a landscape feature near here called Rowe Ditch. This is a ditch and earth bank some two miles long which runs north-south and was possibly built by the earliest 'English' or Anglian settlers in the Arrow valley in the 7th century. The Ditch runs over an earlier feature, a sort of enclosure perhaps with a hut, which has revealed Iron Age through to Roman 'items'. So the Ditch in theory is later than Roman, and the theory is that it was built to defend a small tribal area from the non-Romanised Welsh, other Germanic brigands or the Romanised natives.

But the internet also threw up some stories about this valley that I found interesting. As recently as 1973 an Iron Age deer figurine was found on one of the forest trails leading up from the valley, about 100 yards from here. The piece is now in a gallery in London. It was five inches wide and four inches tall, and was washed out of the hillside by heavy rains. I presume it came originally from the Iron Age hillfort above it on the steep slope but I find the survival and chance discovery of such objects very poetic; the journey of a piece of jewellery. There is also a 'shrunken village' in the valley which is centred on the houses we live in, presumably the builders' rubble that Michael keeps finding in his fields; centuries of over-written occupation, demolition, burnings, rebuilding. Architectural layering of the valley-side.

The story I found most astonishing was the discovery 20 years ago of a possible Bronze Age religious site centred on a spring across the fields, almost visible from the house, under the Byton side of Shobdon Woods Hill. The site could have been created/erected four thousand years ago. I wonder what it looked like. A secret place, a small wooden or stone shrine around the spring, decorated with flowers like well-dressing, or more like a parish church, a place to mark births and partnerships and deaths? How did it connect to other shrines, other sacred places? The Lugg here is surrounded by 'mounds', possibly burial mounds or defensive structures or old house bases above the flood-marsh. A picture emerges of human presence (if not occupation) here 4000 years ago - how important was the religious site? - and then the creation of the hillfort a mere 2000 years ago. Suddenly my Celtic river-spirit head seems quite possible - perhaps she came from that spring! I am interested in poetic history, not historical accuracy, and the layering of history here is astonishing. The possibility of human presence in the valley and along the river stretches much further back in time than I had imagined.