Archaeological Landscapes in the High Peak

Last Thursday, as part of “Fresher’s Week,” the Department of Archaeology organized a day-long fieldtrip to various archaeological sites in Derbyshire’s nearby Peak District for the new MA students. I don’t know why one would turn such a trip down, but as it’s optional, we MSc students had the chance a few months ago to sign up for vacant slots. And thus I and our Irish roommate Killian found ourselves outside of the main Archaeology building in downtown Sheffield at 8:30 Thursday morning, meeting a stream of other new Masters students as we waited for the vans and professors.

Our guides were two professors from the Department, an Irishman who heads the Landscape Archaeology programme and an older professor who runs the plain-old MA Archaeology programme. Landscape archaeology is a lovely new(ish) direction in the discipline that seeks to look beyond isolated “sites” here and there and get a sense of the larger prehistoric landscape as its earlier inhabitants would have culturally perceived it. As most of our stops in the High Peak were related to various sources of control over regional landscapes, Prof. Johnson had some great insights.

Now, the Peak District in Britain’s oldest national park (set aside in the 1950s, I believe) and comprises England’s best climbing, caving, and ‘walking,’ as the British rather understatedly call hiking. The area butts right up to Sheffield – in fact, there is a lovely wall of gritstone cliffs that drops off just a few miles over the heath from the City Centre. Driving through the small picturesque and quintessentially country-side English villages and hamlets, one would be forgiven for believing that we had traveled decades back in time and not just mere kilometers. In between the small villages huddled against 14^th century country churches fed by calm brooks nestled in deep, shaded valleys, we would get fleeting views of harsh cliffs or a wide horizon of brilliant red heather. Twice I caught sight of truly alien vistas - sandy hill tops crowned with sharp crags that would seem to be at home on New Zealand’s Central Plateau. The entire geology of the region underlies the soil with either limestone or gritstone – each having a marked effect on the vegetation of the region. The gritstone supports acidic heather and doesn’t produce suitable soils for farming. The limestone, however, is where all the farming and the legendarily thick and soft vibrantly green British fields flourish.

In the end, we visited a 16^th century aristocratic manor and parkland, a Neolithic henge and long barrow, a 14^th century church, an 11th century castle, a Roman fort, and a Late Bronze Age and Iron Age hill fort. In the next day or two, I’ll endeavor to post a separate entry for each of the sites we visited, each with accompanying photographs. If I had a scanner, I could include a map with our locations marked, but perhaps I’ll attempt something similar digitally.

Incidentally – I was woefully out of the loop on the fantastically huge Anglo-Saxon gold horde reported last week. If you’d like to read more about that (and other interesting archaeology and anthropology articles I find interesting), don’t forget to check Ashley’s and my links section to the right of the page.