| Abstract: |
Fieldwork reveals that a circular earthen bank with a perimeter of 5586m in the centre of Savernake Forest is the boundary of a single structure intended to exclude animals from a large enclosure. It can be positively related to records of a Tudor attempt to evict commoners and to restore woodland degraded by domestic stock and deer. At its southernmost point the bank was aligned to incorporate an existing, possibly prehistoric or early historic, cross valley dyke straddling Shovel Bottom. Documentation reveals that the commoners resisted their exclusion, and the project was probably abandoned; timber and underwood remained confined to the same coppices existing previously. In the latter-eighteenth century, the same area was converted to parkland, and the layout of rides focusing on Eight Walks was established, in consultation with Capability Brown. Hence the Great Inclosure's functions were reversed: instead of an area of `thick and strong wood' within scrubby heathland, as previously envisaged, it became open parkland, even when the surrounding land was covered in woodland plantations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is noted that the cross valley dyke in Shovel Bottom, and a comparable feature in Great Lodge Bottom, both straddle small chalk valleys, but cease when reaching the clay-with-flints alongside. They therefore replicate, at the small scale, the situation with the Wansdyke, which also has gaps across areas of clay. It is conjectured that these cross valley dykes demarcated valuable arable land, which was held territorially amidst a landscape otherwise used as a common pool resource for pasturage and hunting. |
