Selected projects
4.19.20 Landscape survey in Burrow with Burrow and Leck Parishes, Lancashire
A survey of an important and well preserved historic landscape at High Park, Cowan Bridge, Lancashire, was undertaken in the summer of 1997 by the RCHME on behalf of Lancashire County Council, assisted by grant aid from English Heritage. The survey was undertaken to provide more complete information about this landscape, and to enable informed management decisions to be taken. Several seasons of aerial photography in the early 1980s had identified the area as retaining a complex of burial monuments, field systems, and settlement sites, much of which had not been recorded on an earlier 1960s sketch survey. A recent change of ownership and subsequent change of management regime made detailed survey a priority, but also allowed access for it to be carried out.
 |
High Park lies on the upper slopes of the fells that form the south-west corner of the Yorkshire Dales, above the flood plain of the River Lune. The earliest features identified include a line of large Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age cairns, and three other possible funerary cairns. A series of small cleared fields associated with up to seven house platforms probably date to the later Bronze Age, and are succeeded by a Middle Iron Age coaxial field system. No settlements can be definitely associated with this field system, but by the Romano-British period a number of settlements or enclosure complexes linked by trackways had been superimposed on earlier features. A number of later, perhaps eighth- to fourteenth-century, rectangular building platforms have also been identified, some of which reuse the Romano-British sites, others are associated with a new curvilinear field system, post-dating the coaxial system. The establishment of a deer park during the medieval period is likely to have aided the survival of the earlier features, and within the park area later remains are limited. A branched trackway, perhaps a packhorse or drove route does cross the survey area, and outside the area of the park a series of ditched enclosures probably represent a medieval field system. There are also remains of shielings and a late farmstead, which was abandoned before 1845.
The new survey will aid interpretation and understanding of the continuous development of Lancashire's landscape from the prehistoric to the medieval period, and will contribute to the production of an education pack. It is hoped that adjacent areas can be surveyed in the future, and it is proposed that an integrated management plan be drawn up.