Lets hear it for the Bronze Age, the Anglo-Saxons .....and even the Romans

I live in Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire. If you drive through the county north/south on the A6 or east/west on the A45 you’ll pretty much pass the door. From your car you probably won’t notice anything remarkable.

And yet at the end of my street is the site of a medieval castle, walk a little further and there is the site of a 7th century Anglo Saxon tribute centre. Within a mile or two are a Bronze Age round barrow, two Roman Villa sites, the Roman town of Irchester and a scattering of abandoned medieval villages.  Why is it all here? Simply because we are just above the valley of the River Nene, formed 10,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age when the water from billions of tons of melting ice scoured out the valley as it forced its way east to the North Sea.

That process pretty much determined the future of this part of the country. The river valley was fertile, the river itself both a source of food and a way to get around. So, across the millennia, those Bronze Age chappies buried their warrior chieftains here, then the Iron Agers built their roundhouses, the Romans came and installed tiled bathrooms and central heating and, when they scuttled off back to the Med, the local medieval types had a go at town planning by building a few villages.

Then in 1349/50 the Black Death arrived and wiped out half of Europe. Whilst this was clearly a bad thing it did create a lot of job vacancies. Here in the Nene Valley villagers and farmers abandoned the poorer, boggy land in the valley bottom and moved up to newly vacant higher land along the ridges. In effect the valley was abandoned save for grazing, and nothing much was built there for the next 500 years. True, in 1845 the Northampton to Peterborough Railway was opened, having taken just 1 year to build 47 miles of track! But then, nothing; until the growth of 20th century road building created a huge demand for the sand and, especially, the gravel deposited all those years ago by the melting glaciers.

Gravel extraction, controversial at the time, has had two huge benefits. As part of the process, archaeologists were allowed to excavate prior to the gravel being removed. So, firstly, all the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman and Medieval remains mentioned here were discovered, recorded and where possible preserved. Secondly the gravel pits along the Nene Valley, once mineral extraction ended, are becoming havens for wildlife with the real prospect of a ribbon of connected reserves right along the valley between Northampton and Peterborough.

I am lucky enough to work as a volunteer in the Nene Valley and the mix of nature and history, archaeology and industry fascinates me. When the first Sand Martins fly back from Africa each year I’m sure that the Anglo Saxon children were as pleased to see them then, as we are now. When the first cuckoo calls, the Roman farmers knew as well as we do that Spring had arrived for sure. And when I walk around the sites of the abandoned medieval villages I am reminded that people just like me and just like you have lived, loved, worked and played in this landscape for thousands of years.