"Rock Walls and Roman farms" Topic

As I am playing the groans of the Britons era, I am wondering about the use of stone walls in farming in this time – or was this a eternal farming method of fencing?

Hi

I think they used more ditches than walls in Britian.

Ditches probably indicate hedges along the ditch, think Bocage Lite.

I think it might depend on where in Britain they were. Places that have dry stone walls now probably had them back then, too.

Or possibly the country was n't densely populated enough to require such formal – and labour intensive – divisions. A string of large-ish stones would probably do the trick as a field boundaries.

Walls aren't mainly about keeping the neighbouring farmer from accidentally planting on your land, though --- they are about keeping your livestock in and other people's out.

iron age stone walls are still seen in some uplands of Britain, they used what ever was around, wood, stone ect.

I grew up in Kansas, where we didn't do walls, but it was my understanding that walls were in part a convenient way of disposing of the wretched stones your plow (plough) kept turning up.

Grelber

Depends where in Britain your field is. Stone walls would be rare in the South-East lowlands. They have been used in the upland areas of the West and North since the Neolithic.

The countryside was more open in general. Today's 'traditional' look only developed with the enclosure movement which was post-medieval. There was always a need to stop your livestock from wandering off though!

A common means of enclosure was to cut the saplings and bushes on the edge of the cleared ground part way through and then fold the upper part over to the ground, making a fence-like border. The technique is called "plashing" link . It is still in some use today.

If you want a fairly academic introduction, see PDF link

Essentially, if the houses are stone built then the fields are likely to be either proper field walls or rubble banks.
Other areas may be a combination of ditch, bank or lynchet (where the surface one side is higher than the other as in a terrace). There may be a whole set of lyncheted fields on a slope, defined by the terrace boundary. The English Heritage document above only mentions hedges from medieval times but I suspect they were around earlier, especially where banks were used.

It seems that Iron Age farmland was pretty divided up. In Anglo-Saxon times, open field farming became more popular. Enclosure then reintroduced more field boundaries. This started quite early – I've read of local strife caused by an enclosure attempt in the 13th century. The big push came with the various Parliament acts in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Individual field boundaries may be fairly insubstantial, with a more substantial boundary around the outside as both a defence against grazing animals and possibly as a statement of ownership.

Field boundaries for a long time were often about keeping grazing animals out of a cultivated area rather than keeping them in. They either grazed rough ground or were tethered, as I've seen in various places in Europe even today.

In some areas the older feature of cairn fields may have been seen. These are rare now and seem to have been a pre-bronze age feature. It was a way of clearing rocks, leaving them around as cairns.