Saving Sites (from the Plough)
In 1870, agricultural land improvement outside Dorchester-on-Thames involved levelling the ramparts of the Iron Age oppidum at Dyke Hills. Colonel Lane-Fox, later the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, wrote to the Saturday Review of 2nd July describing damage to the site: Hitherto the neighbouring ground has been grazed, and the harmless sheep is no foe to history; but it has lately occurred to the owner of the ground that a few shillings more of yearly profit might be gained by turning pasture land into arable; and to such a sordid motive as this, these precious antiquities are at this very moment being sacrificed.
Despite 120 years of heritage legislation, Dyke Hills, Oxfordshire is still under the plough. Photograph English Heritage.
This was one of the high profile cases that contributed to Sir John Lubbock’s National Monuments Preservation Bill in 1873, which eventually reached the statute book in 1882 as the first Ancient Monuments Act. Sadly, despite 120 years of increasingly effective ancient monument legislation in the UK, archaeological damage caused by cultivation remains a largely unresolved problem. In England, many thousands of archaeological sites – including nearly 3000 scheduled monuments – are still being ploughed. It is particularly ironic that Dyke Hills should remain one of these. This lack of progress stands in stark contrast to the immense gains of the 1980s and 1990s in mitigating damage by development, road-building and aggregate extraction.
