Keeping the family together: Canada Farm’s Bronze Age burials

The first hint of a ring ditch emerged in 1972, when Martin Green noticed a faint, curving line in freshly ploughed soil on his Cranborne Chase farm in Dorset. Lying a mere 20m from the boundary of the great Dorset Cursus, the ring ditch was just another very small element of a vast ‘sacred landscape’ associated with the longest Cursus monument in England. This landscape comprised several hundred monuments dating to the Later Neolithic and Bronze Ages, which embellished the environs of the great spinal earthwork. Thirty-five years later, the ring ditch appeared once more, this time on a 2007 geophysical survey undertaken by Bournemouth University students supervised by Paul Cheetham.