Investigations of the archaeology and past vegetation of Shirley Moor
The Shirley Moor area has been studied with regard to its potential in identifying the possible. relationship between past human populations and the marsh. This work has been funded by the Romney Marsh Research Trust. The research was based on the idea that human communities (from prehistory onwards) would have exploited large marshland areas for their rich resources. Studies on the Somerset Levels, for example, have identified prehistoric settlements and route-ways both on and around the marsh and have illustrated a complex relationship between these people and their marshland environment. It was proposed that on Romney Marsh these communities would have lived along the dry land edges of the marsh and on peninsulas and islands within the marsh. The Shirley Moor area contains a number of possible foci for human activity including the peninsula upon which Shirley Fann and Glover Farm are located and Chapel Bank (see Figure 1). We proposed to use archaeological and pollen evidence to identify past human activity through archaeological finds and through its effect on the vegetation as reflected in pollen diagrams.
Previous work on the vegetation history of Romney Marsh by Drs Antony Long, Martyn Waller and Deborah Long at Southampton and Kingston Universities, also funded by the Romney Marsh Research Trust, has shown that in very general terms, the marsh was vegetated by alder fen woodland towards the former cliff-line, with acidic vegetation., characterized by heathers and Sphagnum mosses, around the centre of the marsh (see Romney Marsh Irregular no. 10). It has been suggested that this pattern of vegetation across the Marsh probably lasted from approximately 4500 to 1800 years ago.
The buried peat bed at Shirley Moor has been dated by radiocarbon dating to a period from approximately 5400 years ago to approximately 3390 years ago, recording local vegetation change across Shirley Moor from the Late Mesolithic to the middle of the Bronze Age, when peat formation ceased and a clay sediment was deposited· across low-lying areas. The pattern of vegetation change through tune here is very sirqilar to that identified at Horsemarsh Sewer further to the east. At Shirley Moor, the marshland vegetation during the Neolithic and early Bronze Age was dominated by alder fen woodland with mixed woodland including hazel, lime, ash and elm on the dry areas, including the Shirley Farm peninsula and on Chapel Bank. There was lirtle evidence in the pollen record for any clearance of the woodland or for any form of arable activity on the berter drained soils of Chapel Bank or on the Shirley Fann peninsula during early to mid prehistory. As far as the pollen record can show us, there is little evidence of substantial human activity in the Shirley Moor area. The archaeological evidence tells a similar story, with few artifacts identified by field-walking. There was some evidence of Mesolithic flint scatters and some Medieval and post-Medieval portery.
This indication of a scarcely-exploited resource-rich marshland area such as Shirley Moor during early prehistory is interesting in itself. It suggests that the available resources of the marsh may not have been important enough to be exploited by past communities. The alder fen woodland across the marsh is likely to have been fairly impenetrable and therefore difficult to exploit. The lack of evidence for human impact on the marshland environment also suggests that population densities around Romney Marsh were considerably lower than those further north on the chalk downs, where there is evidence of intensive exploitation by humans from early prehistory.
This project has added to the bank of data collected looking at the past vegetation communities of the Romney Marsh area. Romney Marsh is now established as an important and unique site for the preservation of evidence of vegetation history during the past I 0,000 years in the south-east of England, where such evidence is rarely preserved and also for the study of the impact of coastal processes such as shingle bank evolution and devolution oft vegetation communities. This project at Shirley Moor has shown that prehistoric hmnan communities during early prehistory had little impact on the marsh and its peat-forming vegetation. These communities were therefore very small and evidence of their presence has not yet been found or they were located further f rom the marsh, probably concentrated on the North and South Downs.
Deborah J. Long
(now at the University of Stirling)
