On a clear day in June 1929, Wing Commander Gilbert Insall was flying over Caistor St Edmund Roman town in Norfolk (Venta Icenorum; see CA 270) when he spotted cropmarks near the confluence of the rivers Tas and Yare. Archaeological interest in Caistor and its environs was already intense thanks to the remarkable photographs of cropmarks that had been taken within the town’s walls during the dry summer of 1928 (reported on by Mortimer Wheeler in the June 1929 edition of Antiquity), but these new markings would prove to be much older.
Insall was a hero of the First World War, having been awarded the Victoria Cross for conspicuous bravery, skill, and determination as an aviator in 1915, and in peacetime he became an expert in the fast-developing field of aerial archaeological reconnaissance. In 1925, he had discovered the Neolithic timber monument known as Woodhenge, leading to Maud Cunnington’s excavations of 1926-1928, and Insall recognised the similarities of the cropmarks he had spotted flying over Caistor to those in Wiltshire. He was not alone in this observation: in the September 1929 edition of Antiquity, O G S Crawford reported that ‘another Woodhenge has been found, just outside the city of Norwich’.
Soon after the site’s discovery, it attracted the attention of Grahame Clark, who was working at Cambridge University’s Department of Archaeology and Ethnography, and would become renowned for his work at Star Carr 20 years later. Clark noted that the position of the monument – known as Arminghall Henge – on the outskirts of Norwich left it vulnerable to destruction from the city’s growing infrastructural needs. A century earlier, its landscape setting had been significantly impacted by the construction of the railway line linking Norwich to the wider rail network in the 1840s, but most pressing in the early 1930s was the building of electricity pylons, which still mar its setting today.
Great prehistoric sites: Norfolk and Suffolk – Excavating the CA archive