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 and hut circle north of Crab's Ledge survive
reasonably well. The field system clearly displays its pattern and
construction; it also shows the influence of the underlying topography in its
orientation, with indications to the west of corresponding changes both in the
local topography and the field system orientation. The hut circle on the slope
of Crab's Ledge presents unusually clear remains for a surviving settlement
site now in the inter-tidal zone, and provides valuable evidence for the
nature and location of settlement in the now-submerged lower levels of the
prehistoric landscape. The wider prehistoric land-use context is well
illustrated by the contemporary settlement and field system survivals nearby
around the coasts of southern Tresco. The peat formations closely associated
with the field system are an unusual and rare survival whose analysis has
provided valuable evidence for the date of the field system, its reason for
abandonment and its environmental context. They have also made an important
contribution to research on rates of sea level change that form a major
influence on all aspects of human development on Scilly.
Details
The monument includes a prehistoric field system and an associated hut
circle surviving across the middle and upper shore between Crab's Ledge and
the south coast of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly. The field system walls are
intimately associated with three successive formations of early peat deposits
exposed on the middle shore.
The field system walls are visible as rows of rubble and small boulders,
giving an overall width of about 0.5m-0.8m. In some walls the slabs are
generally small, laid flat and almost level with the present shore surface;
some others include closely spaced edge-set slabs, commonly 0.3m-0.5m high and
0.9m long, with their long axis usually along the wall line.
The exposed area of the field system covers approximately 1ha and shows a
rectilinear subdivision of the gently sloping surface between the present
upper shore of Tresco and the inter-tidally exposed raised outcrops of Crab's
Ledge. At least four roughly parallel walls, 20m-40m apart, run NNW-SSE down
the shore, dividing its surface into broad strips. These walls are exposed
over various lengths, the easternmost wall being visible over only 6m, while
the next wall to the west extends for 100m to the edge of Crab's Ledge with
various breaks in its visible continuity.
The resulting strips are subdivided into long rectangular plots by occasional
cross-walls on a roughly ENE-WSW axis, examples in the western half of the
exposed area cross the strips roughly on the mapped line of Mean High Water,
with others about 60m down the shore. A suggestion of finer subdivision occurs
close to the north of Crab's Ledge, where two walls run WSW and about 18m
apart from the longest of the downslope strip walls. The southern of these two
walls runs up onto the raised area of Crab's Ledge itself; as it does so, it
passes 1m north of a hut circle partly levelled into the slope. The hut circle
has an internal diameter of 3.5m, defined by a rubble wall 1m wide and faced
internally by edge-set slabs to 0.5m high; a similar facing is also evident
along the wall's northern outer face.
In the west of the scheduling, two walls extend west onto a boulder and rubble
shelf from the line of the westernmost downslope wall. The northern of these
has an ENE-WSW alignment, conforming with the other strip cross-walls, but the
southern wall extends WNW for at least 26m, its alignment at odds with the
rest of the exposed field system, and possibly reflecting an adaptation of the
field system axis to changes in underlying topography as it approaches Sea
Carn to the west.
On the NNW, the field system's visibility extends to the points where its
walling becomes masked beneath much later deposits on the upper and middle
shore and by a sand dune behind them, though the field system's remains are
considered to extend beneath those later accumulations beyond this monument.
The limits of the field system's visibility on the east, south and west are
defined variously by some masking by later shore deposits and by disruption of
walling by wave action.
On the upper middle shore, large exposures of early peat deposits extend
across the northern sector of the field system's visible extent; another small
exposure of an early peat occurs on the north west edge of Crab's Ledge
itself, crossed by an isolated length of prehistoric walling near the south of
the field system. Sampling of the northern exposures of peats during the early
1990s indicated three successive layers of peat formation, of which at least
the uppermost is later than the field system walling that it abuts. Analysis
of the peats showed a predominantly open vegetation in the vicinity and
indicated their formation in coastal conditions, perhaps saltmarsh, whose
effect on the soil would have ended the useful life of the of the low-lying
fields that the walling defines. As radiocarbon dating has shown that the
uppermost peat began to form in the later Iron Age or early Romano-British
period, and continued accumulation into the early medieval period, the
laying-out of the field system in this scheduling is demonstrably earlier than
that date range. The level, origin and dating of this peat deposit has also
been used to clarify estimates of the rate of sea level rise Scilly.
Beyond this scheduling, further exposures of broadly contemporary field
systems with settlement remains occur nearby along each side of Tresco's
southern tip, in Bathinghouse Porth and Appletree Bay, and exposed on an old
land surface beneath the dunes in the adjacent coastal cliffs.
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.
