Reasons for Designation
The Isles of Scilly, the westernmost of the granite masses of south west
England, contain a remarkable abundance and variety of archaeological remains
from over 4000 years of human activity. The remote physical setting of the
islands, over 40km beyond the mainland in the approaches to the English
Channel, has lent a distinctive character to those remains, producing many
unusual features important for our broader understanding of the social
development of early communities.
Throughout the human occupation there has been a gradual submergence of the
islands' land area, providing a stimulus to change in the environment and its
exploitation. This process has produced evidence for responses to such change
against an independent time-scale, promoting integrated studies of
archaeological, environmental and linguistic aspects of the islands'
settlement.
The islands' archaeological remains demonstrate clearly the gradually
expanding size and range of contacts of their communities. By the post-
medieval period (from AD 1540), the islands occupied a nationally strategic
location, resulting in an important concentration of defensive works
reflecting the development of fortification methods and technology from the
mid 16th to the 20th centuries. An important and unusual range of post-
medieval monuments also reflects the islands' position as a formidable hazard
for the nation's shipping in the western approaches.
The exceptional preservation of the archaeological remains on the islands has
long been recognised, producing an unusually full and detailed body of
documentation, including several recent surveys.
Regular field systems are one of several methods of field layout known to have
been employed in the Isles of Scilly from the Bronze Age to the Roman period
(c.2000 BC - AD 400); closer dating within that period may be provided by the
visible relationships of the field boundaries to other classes of monument
with a shorter known time-span of use, or by their relationship with an
earlier recorded sea level.
They comprise a collection of field plots defined by boundaries laid out in a
consistent manner, along two dominant axes at approximate right angles to each
other. This results in rectilinear fields which may vary in their size and
length:width ratio both within and between individual field systems. The
fields are bounded by rubble walls or banks, often incorporating edge- or end-
set slabs called orthostats. Within its total area, a regular field system may
be subdivided into blocks differing in the orientations of their dominant
axes.
Regular field systems may be associated with broadly contemporary settlement
sites such as stone hut circles. Some regular field systems on the Isles of
Scilly contain a distinctive association, rarely encountered elsewhere,
whereby certain of their field boundaries directly incorporate or link cairns,
entrance graves and cists in some groups of prehistoric funerary monuments.
Although no precise figure is available, regular field systems form one of the
three principal forms of prehistoric field system, along with irregular field
systems and some groups of prehistoric linear boundaries, which survive in
over 70 areas of the Isles of Scilly. They provide significant insights into
the physical and social organisation of past landscapes and they provide
evidence for the wider contemporary context within which other nationally
important monuments were constructed.
The prehistoric field system in Appletree Bay survives reasonably well,
displaying its manner of layout and construction. Its survival, reaching an
unusual depth below present sea level, is also sufficiently extensive to show
variation in its degree of subdivision, providing rare evidence for differing
intensities of land use in a now-submerged area of the prehistoric landscape.
This is enhanced by the closely associated occupation debris towards Carn
Near, demonstrating the relationship between the patterns of prehistoric land
use and settlement. Despite minor displacements by wave action, the extensive
survival of the field system well into and beyond the inter-tidal zone
confirms its overall long term stability against a considerable period of
submergence. The wider landscape context contemporary with the field system's
use is well illustrated by the nearby prehistoric field system and settlement
survivals around the coasts of southern Tresco.
Details
The monument includes a prehistoric field system on the middle and lower shore
of the southern half of Appletree Bay, extending west from the southern
headland of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly. Further remains, together with
prehistoric settlement debris, are also visible in early soil exposures
beneath sand dunes backing the adjacent upper shore. A relatively recent
inter-tidal enclosure is located on the middle shore near the southern edge of
the scheduling.
Over the middle and lower shore, the prehistoric field system walls are
visible as rows of slabs and small boulders, closely-spaced or forming
continuous lines and frequently set on edge. The slabs are generally 0.3m-0.5m
long by 0.2m-0.5m wide and 0.2m-0.5m high; in some sectors the walls act as
slight breakwaters, trapping aggregations of surface rubble alongside.
The field system's full extent known from successive surface surveys and from
aerial photographs is not normally visible at any one time due to shifting
sandbanks. The overall field system revealed from such records indicates a
rectilinear pattern based on at least four major walls with finer subdivision
by cross walls in the south east of the field system's known extent.
The four principal walls run roughly parallel on north-south or NNE-SSW
alignments, approximately 65m-100m apart. The northern ends of the western two
appear among the sandbanks of Tresco Flats and the eastern two in the upper
shore sand of Appletree Bay; their visible remains end at the south as they
approach a bedrock and boulder bank called Long Crow, curving west from Carn
Near.
The western two walls appear as large scale divisions of the terrain, lacking
finer subdivision by visible or known cross walls. By contrast, the area
defined by the eastern two walls and the present coastline is crossed by a
series of walls running down the shore, roughly on WNW-ESE axes, defining
subrectangular plots. Some finer detail recorded includes part of a trackway
defined by two NNE-SSW banks spaced 2.5m apart, exposed towards the eastern
edge of the present middle shore.
Between the alignments of the central pair of NNE-SSW walls, another
prehistoric wall extends for at least 80m on a north east-south west course,
obliquely crossing the field system's dominant axes; its course runs parallel
with the northern edge of the Long Crow bank, which will have formed a low
ridge in the pre-submergence landscape.
Although the gradual submergence of the land since the prehistoric period has
produced relatively little disturbance to the field system in the flatter
terrain of the bay, the present level of the sea is eroding a slight coastal
cliff where it meets the rising land of Tresco's southern headland in the
south east of the scheduling. There it exposes an early soil and land surface
sealed beneath the later dunes of blown sand. At three locations, the low
cliff reveals walling similar in character to that exposed on the nearby shore
but in one case retaining a fuller complement of its wall's small stone
content and an upper course of slabs giving a total height of 1m. Two of the
walls run directly into the cliff face but the southernmost, situated 45m NNW
of the Carn Near outcrop, crosses an exposure of the early land surface
revealed by a recession of the overlying dune. This southern wall is visible
for 4m, curving slightly towards the cliff at each end; much of its length
appears as a double line of edge-set slabs 0.2m-0.3m high. This wall is
considered to derive from a prehistoric settlement whose spread of occupation
debris has produced flint artefacts and fragments of prehistoric pottery from
the early soil exposed in the adjacent cliff face.
Relatively recent exploitation of the inter-tidal zone has produced a rubble-
walled rectangular enclosure on the middle shore at the north side of the Long
Crow bank; the enclosure has a fairly neat inner face and is considered to
have formed a holding tank for shellfish, crabs or lobsters.
Beyond this monument, further exposures of prehistoric field system remains
occur on the east side of Tresco's southern headland in Bathinghouse Porth and
at Crab's Ledge.
MAP EXTRACT
The site of the monument is shown on the attached map extract.
It includes a 2 metre boundary around the archaeological features,
considered to be essential for the monument's support and preservation.
