Villages buried by time

By Steve Cunningham

�

AMATEUR archaeologist Peter Phillips was always intrigued by the bumps and ridges in fields near his Isle of Wight home.

Then his wife won an air flight of the area in a raffle - and Mr Phillips was able to view the bigger picture. His photographs showed the outline of 80 homes, thought by experts to be the remains of a thriving 14th-century community.

The farmland, about half a mile square, has not been built on for hundreds of years. 'I'd often thought the topography indicated there might have been a settlement there,' Phillips said. 'Sheltered by downland and with a stream, it is just the sort of place that a� community might choose.'

Phillips first had his suspicions roused about the farmland after retiring to the island six years ago. While renovating his 16th-century cottage, he uncovered several pieces of medieval pottery in the garden.

Archaeologists say records show the village existed in 1316, but shrank and disappeared. In 1379 there were 79 households there, but by 1665 only 27 remained.

The unearthing of lost villages is, however, becoming more common as developers search for more building plots.

An ancient settlement turned up in Scotland in April 2000, when preparations were being made to develop an area into a golf course or holiday complex.

The lost village, which may date from the 11th century, was uncovered by archaeologists near Eldbotle Hill on the Archerfield Estate, the ancestral East Lothian home of the Duke of Hamilton. The medieval community is belived to include stables and a royal hunting lodge.
It is thought that the area was buried by sandstorms during the 16th century, when the inhabitants left.

The Duke was not surprised. 'We have always known it was a site of historic interest. Eldbotle means old place and it was always thought that monks lived there and, after the sandstorms, they left.'

Archaeologists�also claim to have found the village homes of three great heroes - King Alfred the Great, Herward the Wake and the legendary Beowulf.

Alfred's legendary lost village was apparently found under an apple orchard near Wedmore, Somerset, in 1997. Saxon rings and coins were discovered in the village and excavations in the orchard of a 15th-century house unearthed pottery and timbers 1,000 years old.

Cratendune, the 'lost' village of Hereward the Wake, turned up five centuries after vanishing from history.� Hereward led a rebellion against William the Conqueror at Ely in 1071 and his village, according to ancient papers, put it a mile south of Ely.

However, in early 1999, workmen began unearthing evidence just to the west of the Fenland town. Thousands of pottery shards and coins were excavated. Later a latticework of ditches and earthworks was found over a site covering about 16 acres, suggesting a dense population on an area surrounded by misty marshes - a perfect hideout for Hereward and his men.

Lastly, and without so much physical evidence, comes Beowulf's lair.� Beowulf, the epic poem of warriors, dragons and death that stands at the root of English literature, had existed only in readers' imagination. It tells of a young warrior who arrives from his own country to find Hrothgar's land being ravaged by the monster Grendel; he kills Grendel, and then his terrible mother, before later being killedby a dragon and given a hero's funeral on a great pyre overlooking the sea.

The venue for these terrible goings-on was always supposed to be southern Scandinavia. But now an archaeologist reckons clues in the poem mark it down as the Isle of Sheppey, on the south bank of the Thames Estuary.

�