Over thousands of years of history, the chalk grasslands of the South Downs have witnessed almost every aspect of the human condition, from burial rites and domestic life to agricultural, industrial, recreational, and military activities. These events have helped to shape its distinctive landscape, and while many leave enduring marks, other traces are more ephemeral, and not always visible to the naked eye. A recent aerial survey project, however, has illuminated a wealth of features spanning the Neolithic period to the Cold War, within a 192 square kilometre area of the South Downs National Park to the north of Brighton & Hove.
The survey, which was undertaken by Historic England’s Aerial Survey Team as part of the NHLF-supported Changing Chalk initiative (a four-year partnership led by the National Trust), involved a detailed study of over 9,500 aerial photographs from the Historic England Archives, taken by archaeologists, the RAF, and the Ordnance Survey between the 1920s and 2018. These were complemented by LiDAR images (aircraft-mounted laser scans that can be used to build 3D digital models of the ground below) from the Environment Agency and, together, these pictures have allowed researchers to explore traces of human activity spanning millennia.
Their findings have fed into a new interactive map that members of the public can use to explore the landscape, add their own data, report the current condition of earthworks, and share personal connections to a site. Detailed discussions of the project have also been published in a new Historic England research report (see ‘Further information’ on p.41 for more on this and the map), highlighting a diverse array of features, from monuments and earthworks to structures and routeways, as well as revealing buried remains visible only as soil- or cropmarks, and providing vital records of lost sites that have been ploughed out or built over since they were last photographed.
