2. Background: The Landscape of Flag Fen

The archaeological site known today as Flag Fen was completely unknown before its discovery in November 1982. Before that it had lain concealed beneath almost two metres of peat and river-borne flood clay, known as alluvium, which started to cover it up sometime in the later Iron Age, over 2000 years ago. But the discovery did not happen by chance. Like many archaeological finds, this one came to light as the culmination of many years of patient and painstaking research.

The story began in 1970 when I happened to read in an archaeological magazine that Peterborough New Town was to be extended eastwards to cover the known archaeological site of Fengate. At the time I worked for the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, Canada, and I was in England trying to find a suitable site for a future series of excavations. And Fengate looked very promising indeed. So I returned to Peterborough the following year with a small team of Canadian students and recruited an equal number from various British universities. That first season revealed what we now know to have been one of Britain’s earliest Bronze Age field systems and the results were so good that our Canadian sponsors, together with the old Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments at what was to become the Department of the Environment (the forerunner of English Heritage), decided to back us for the next few years. By the end of the project, in 1979 we had revealed a remarkable story.

The first farmers arrived in the area sometime around 4000BC and clearance of trees and woodland from the landscape was well under way by 3000BC. That was when a series of Neolithic shrines and other features, which may have been arranged along an ancient route way were constructed. These finds included a rather tragic grave which held the bodies of a man and a woman and (possibly their) two children. The man had been killed by a flint arrowhead which we found lodged between his eighth and ninth ribs. That burial is on display in Peterborough Museum. Some five centuries later, around 2500BC, at the start of the Bronze Age, the earlier farmed landscape was carefully divided-up into one of the first field systems in Britain. The fields were marked-out by ditches, banks and hedges and were laid out at right angles to the developing wetland. They were subdivided into blocks of land that were separated by double-ditched droveways (for livestock), which ran down to the wetland edge. These fields too were intended for the use of animals, mostly cattle and sheep. The farmers themselves lived in small, isolated single farmsteads dispersed through the fields. Much later, excavations in the 1990s and early 2000s revealed that there were closely similar landscapes of ditched fields further along the fen-edge towards the village of Eye and on the other side of the Flag Fen basin, on the edge of Whittlesey ‘island’, at Northey.