a significant fascination for me is how people interpreted the landscape around them
and then how they mapped it oh it's a map video a really good example of this is a map we found
then in late 1800s by ac smith here's the map for a copy of it just take a look at this
it's an absolute piece of art, hmmm probably an antiquarian with too much money and time on
his hands now ac smith spent 30 years mapping a hundred square miles of wheelchair on horseback
i told you the map itself however beautiful that it was it wasn't there for the likes of you
or i to navigate our way around the country a road or rail or whatever it was actually there
for an entirely different purpose hmm i wonder why we haven't done a funky transition yet
so this is the quite spectacular avebury the stone circle the henge built in the neolithic period
sometime between 2800 bc and 2200 bc it's quite phenomenal
so ac smith actually did two maps now i'll come to the second very shortly they're part of his uh
his book called the british and roman antiquities of wheelchair if you take
the first one right here it's got avebury just there notably right in the middle
so the fact that avebury is right in the middle of ac smith's map probably gives us our first clue
as to what the map was for but perhaps more importantly what remains so important today
so questions, pen please thank you
so what ac smith did then was to draw up
another map this time with all the details so if the first map
was let's consider that the index well these next ones were the sub since where did i put the maps
now these maps are the second section we call them well they were the absolute desert they were
six inches to one mile and they contained everything that's relevant to this video
so can we tackle question number one what was this map for
so just walked half a mile or so to the east of avebury this landscape around
here is littered with ancient history not only every itself and the stones and the hens circle
but also to the north we've got the wessex ridgeway we've got a roman road
to our south we've got west kennett long barrow we've got a silvery hill absolutely
full and littered with ancient history and if we flip to section j on the index map we then find
these detailed maps now all of the features i've just mentioned plus a whole lot more of the same
are highlighted on this section of the map so what you're saying is that this map shows us
anything of prehistoric importance well i'll say that's question number one them
smith drew this monumental detailed map over the 30 years using his own eye but it did pull
in the resources of antiquarians from the last 100 years or so prior to him mapping this area
so question number two why is it so important
so i used two quick examples to highlight why his map was so important even today
walking down an area now uh called gallop piece and four down and uh again he took those names
from map makers 50 years prior to his work now if we zoom into the area that i'm i'm walking
along now just to our east we should find something quite noteworthy so let's zoom in on j56
so according to smith's map and his his description thereafter in this field
probably a hundred yards that way we should find a neolithic structure we should find free upright
sass and stones with a cap stone sat on top of them and he described this as a megalithic tomb
but it's just a field and there's nothing there
so clearly the megalithic structure that's back there has now gone smith saw it mapped
it and he had good reason to do that because it's now just a plouged field we did see some
stones in the trees just down there perhaps they've been dragged away a century ago
by the farmer but the context of that structure in relation to avebury and the west kennet
brown that way and the ridgeway there well unfortunately we'll never know that context
it didn't take me too long to find something else on the map which sounded utterly amazing
now in 1861 smith was part of a small team which undertook a an archaeological dig with
the permission of the land owners here right in the middle of marlboorough were down or the mall
were downs so 1861 he set about finding what was described as a essentially a chamber a sepulchral
chamber a kissed vein now he knew about this because of richard hall
around about 100 years and prior to him in the 1700s said it was one of
the most important and potentially good examples of a kistvaen that he'd ever seen
so what did smith and his team find well i think a couple of hundred meters ahead of us
is temple bottom i think that's the site of the excavation so let's go and see what
remains today and see what smith found a hundred years after richard hall's wonderful description
so somewhere in this valley it could be here because this is where the gps says it is but
it's probably off a little bit somewhere here in this valley smith and his team found the stone
chamber it was in a sorry state much degraded from when richard hall found it 100 years previous
he even found human skull bones you name it all within this chamber and surrounding it
and what's perhaps even more fascinating is he found a stone circle surrounding the chamber
there's an old map where he tries to decide which way it was facing he said east west in the end
now yet again another example how easy it was to find something on smith's maps that's no longer
here today at least that we can see so what you're saying is ac smith's maps are literally listing
hundreds of ancient features where many of them aren't there now and the fact they aren't
here anymore really highlights how important smith's maps were so final question number three
why is it boring how on earth is this map boring
so remember the original index map and all of its squares what was there anything on there
that didn't seem right to you yep have a look at the top left hand square it doesn't have a number
now that's for good reason largely because ac smith didn't map it at the heart of that square
is hill martin halfway between swindon and carl in wiltshire of course such was the boringness
of this six square miles that he literally didn't bother to map it at all in any detail
was he right was there anything in that area at all so i spent quite a bit of time myself
looking at some lidar looking at the old maps looking at heritage records and kind of agree
with ac smith it's quite boring but of course what we're talking about with ac smith is pre-history
very old stuff now in all that research that i did i did come across perhaps two features of
interest which a bit more modern history so we close off let me just show you what we found
not quite what i expected there's a bridge here well when i looked at the old maps from sort of
the late 1800s well actually said ford so i assume this was perhaps the old route between
swindon and khan that way but there's not a lot of remains here today they've actually
put a bridge in there it's got some old sleepers which in itself looks really old but i do wonder
if perhaps this was a an old route or an old trackway of some kind for it to be marked as
forward on the maps this is one of two features i found in this whole vast area the second
feature is of course a lot more interesting than a little bridge so let's go and take a look at that
so i'm now walking directly east away from hill martin and just down to my north
my left my north down there is a little stream and i thought i'd follow that on the old maps
just in case there was anything because there's a little stream coming down towards a village
perhaps there could have been an old mill or something quirky where they used the water
and lo and behold i found sluice on i thought there's a 1880 map and then on another map as
well fantastic why would you sluice a river sort of a half a mile from a village well there must be
a reason so let's go and find out because there's no other buildings marked on there anything just
loose let's go see if we can find out exactly what that looks like and what it was there for
right i'm pretty confident i'm at the exact area of where this sluice should be
the greatest job getting it
right i mean this is good because i'm now in the riverbed so something was here loads
of bricks all around here brooks in the river i wonder if you could date a brick
so there's something in this part of the river there's loads of bricks i can't date them
they're on the 1880 map so there was something here but there's no other channel i thought if
you slicing this part off just loosen it for a reason maybe you're diverting the
water somewhere but there's no other channel it's just the riverbed so being really blind
so i thought we could find something that ac smith couldn't thought we could find something
a little bit quirky a little bit interesting but maybe ac smith was right all along that this
six square mile patch of the country is perhaps the most boring to not be mapped
you