Archaeology

‘Radwell Only’: a village cut off from the world by the A1 motorway

Published Wednesday 22 July 2020 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Andrew Bryant’s map, 1822

The sign from the A507 (the former Great North Road) to the village reads ‘Radwell Only’: the community lies on a single street running west from here. Radwell Lane passes under the A1 motorway, crosses the River Ivel and stops at the parish boundary on the west side. The parish is a curious reversed-L shape, the area to the northwest being part of Stotfold in Bedfordshire. How did it get to be such a strange shape? What do we know of its history? There has never been a large village in the parish. It had an unexpectedly large population at the time of Domesday Book in 1086, which can hardly have lived in cottages surrounding Radwell Lane.

There is a lot of archaeological evidence from Radwell, despite it being a small parish. It covers human history from the Late Neolithic (third millennium BC) onwards, allowing a general assessment of land-use over the centuries. For the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, the Roman period and the later medieval period onward, we can identify at least some of the places where people were living. There is an intriguing possibility that the medieval estate, based around Radwell Bury, was a direct successor to one of the most magnificent Roman villas known in the area.

The origins of Ickleford

Published Wednesday 15 July 2020 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Ickleford in 1822 (from a map by Andrew Bryant)

Ickleford today seems little more than a suburb of Hitchin, separated from it by only a few dozen metres of open land. Its history is quite distinct, though. A journey through deep time into the Middle Ages takes us through the communities that have had their homes here. To understand how the present village came to be, we need also to look at its neighbour Holwell, at Pirton (of which it was once part) and further afield into both Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire.

Find out more here about the origins of Ickleford.

The Ice Age in North Hertfordshire

Published Wednesday 17 June 2020 | By Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews

Part of a mammoth’s tusk found in Baldock in the 1920s

Thinking about ‘the Ice Age’ brings up images of tundra, mammoths, Neanderthals and great sheets of ice across the landscape. This simple picture is wrong in many ways. Firstly, there have been many different ‘Ice Ages’ in the history of the earth. The period most people think about as the ‘real’ Ice Age is the geologists’ Pleistocene era, from more than two-and-a-half million years ago to the beginning of the Holocene, almost 12,000 years ago.

Even if we want to think of the Pleistocene as the important Ice Age, we still need to dispel some common misconceptions. It lasted from about 2,588,000 to 11,700 years ago and was not a period of constant cold. True enough, it was a time of repeated glaciations, but these were mixed with much warmer periods. We should think more in terms of repeated rapid climate change. For more than 2 million years, the climate flipped between cold and warm, with the shift between them sometimes much less than a century. The change could be short enough for an individual to notice the variation in climate during their lifetimes.

Find out more about the Ice Age in North Hertfordshire here.