17th May 2011, 09:30 AM
Dinosaur Wrote:Thought you might! }
Not an immediate project, merely wanting to highlight potentially interesting surviving bits of a heavily quarried landscape and what could potentially be done with them in the future - it struck me the main quarry access road is a protected (ignoring services etc etc etc) surviving transect across another possible ex-cursus that's been pretty much totally lost elsewhere. Someone in the 70s recorded what appears to be a cursus ditch, and it would be nice to find out whether it has a parallel friend 30-40m to one side. About 1km away there are two big parallel ditches visible running for 300-400m on ancient APs and apparently co-linear with the first despite the big gap...good news is that one of the terminals may survive beyond this where amazingly there's a field that's never been quarried or built on.
Jack- we're talking lengths on varying alignments, sudden changes from continuous slots to lines of oval pits, that kind of stuff, very wierd, especially the length of slot that suddenly turns a right angle away from the cursus....next crew had to start again 4m further on but at least their bit seems to be fairly parallel- presumably they'd witnessed the previous lot being suitably dealt with :face-approve:
what you are describing appears to be totally at odds with what we do know about cursus construction and the oval pit alignment technique sounds more like you would expect in a causewayed enclosure -you presumably know about the pit cursuses in lowland Scotland?. add this to the possibility that you are in one of Roy's cult centres then this is hugely important - surely?