The historian Gillian Darley wrote a book in 2019 entitled Excellent Essex: in praise of England’s most misunderstood county. By way of an introduction to my latest column on that county, I recommend this book to you. Darley writes wonderfully and knows the area intimately, and her point about its buried treasures is an excellent one: there is a lot to admire here.
Construction time again
It is pretty close to blasphemous that Essex is considered a county with little visible prehistory. As CA 108 (February 1988) explained, ‘Clacton is the only town in the country to have given its name to two type-sites – the Clactonian in the Palaeolithic, and the Rinyo-Clacton in the late Neolithic – but there are no spectacular hill forts and few upstanding barrows’ (see CA 288, March 2014, and CA 313, April 2016, for specific discussions of these sites). CA 108 attempted to set the record straight by making the magazine’s first major foray into the county’s prehistory at Springfield, on the eastern outskirts of Chelmsford, where air photos revealed crop marks covering a large area due to be redeveloped for industry and housing. Two sites were excavated: a cursus and, about a mile to the north, a late Bronze Age stronghold later covered by an early Saxon cemetery and a late Saxon settlement. Thus the pattern was set for CA’s reporting on – and the types of prehistoric sites featured in – Essex: mostly ones made in advance of losses to construction.
Later editions of the magazine did manage to find some greater reward in the Bronze Age, including a fine cemetery site at Brightlingsea in CA 126 (September 1991) – again found prior to its loss, alas, in this case in advance of a quarry – and a spectacular hoard from Burnham-on-Crouch in CA 252 (March 2011), found – and thankfully reported to the Portable Antiquities Scheme – by a metal-detectorist, enabling its careful excavation, recovery, and conservation.
