Common land and archaeology
The unploughed soils of permanent pastures managed through long-term commoning have provided ideal conditions for the safeguarding of thousands of archaeological monuments.
Archaeological and historical remains are so prevalent in large upland commons that they are instrumental in understanding how whole landscapes have evolved through the interplay of natural and human factors for thousands of years.
Certain archaeological features associated with common land can highlight aspects from the dawn of commoning itself. The first permanent farming hamlets established on the granite uplands of Devon and Cornwall from the middle Bronze Age had settlements of roundhouses amongst small fields, with wide lanes funneling onto unenclosed, communal pasture. Such layouts closely resemble those found in contemporary situations, providing evidence that commoning may be 3,000 years old. Networks of long dykes preserved on certain uplands (called "reaves" on Dartmoor) reveal sophisticated prehistoric land apportionment which lasted for half a millennium.
Some of the archaeological remains in the uplands of Scotland, England, and Wales are relicts of transhumance, with seasonally occupied settlements taking advantage of higher pastures. Summer farms or "shielings" feature in regional place-names, including "havos" in Cornwall, "hafod" or "lluest" in Wales, "shield" and "scales" in northern England, and "airigh" or "buaile" in Gaelic.
Key facts:
3,000 scheduled ancient monuments are protected on British commons.
Monuments include Mesolithic flint workings, henges, stone circles, standing stones, stone rows, barrows, hillforts, dykes, roundhouses, Bronze Age pounds, settlements, Roman camps, and industrial or military relics.
Detailed surveys reveal many unrecorded sites. For example, a study at Mynydd Mallaen in Carmarthenshire uncovered 266 features, only eight of which were previously known.
11% of all scheduled monuments in England are found on commons.
High-level arable enclosures in currently inhospitable terrain on the Berwyns of Wales shed light on prehistoric climatic conditions.
Machair common grazings in the Outer Hebrides protect Iron Age farmsteads buried in wind-blown sand, associated with polar climate shifts.
Port Meadow in Oxford has six Bronze Age Barrows and three Iron Age farmsteads, unrivaled locally in their preservation.
Over 450 listed archaeological features are preserved on the commons of Dartmoor.
An estimated 500 sites on Lewis and Harris in Scotland's National Monument Record are associated with common grazings.
Grazing and archaeology
Not only has the legal status and sympathetic management of common land enabled the protection of many thousands of monuments, but ongoing grazing remains critical to the discovery, investigation, and understanding of these features. Large numbers of archaeological structures were uncovered for the first time when appropriate grazing levels on Bodmin Moor removed obscuring scrub and dense vegetation. The presence of stone rows just inches high at Leskernick, Cornwall, reveals that these were emplaced in a well-grazed landscape. In some cases, the land may have been grazed communally for thousands of years.