Dray's Ditches, Bedfordshire, and Early Iron age Territorial Boundaries in the Eastern Chilterns

Abstract

The linear dyke known as Dray's Ditches, about half a mile long, runs at right angles to the Icknield Way, whose modern track approaches it near its mid-point. The name ‘Dray's Ditche’ first appears on a map engraved by Thomas Jeffrys in 1765, and its course is marked, between Great Bramingham and the Old Bedford Road, on a map of 1774. In 1540 Leland wrote that ‘in the hye way I saw hard on eche syde 3 longe trenches, as they had been for Men of warre’. Davies referred to a ‘treble row of ditches, which run in a straight line from Bramingham to Warden Hill, where they run aslant up the hill’; whilst Beldam described ‘several trenches called Gray's Dykes which run down in irregular lines of two ditches between three banks, from a tumulus on the Warden Hills, a little to the south of the Icenhilde Road, and traverse it exactly at its junction with the old Luton and Bedford Road, but now disappearing in the cultivated fields on the opposite side of the road’. A subsidiary earthwork which runs along the western foot of Galley Hill for about half a mile, enclosing a flat area of some hundred acres, has also been described as part of this system. This earthwork, however, was considered by Crawford, in 1934, to be ‘merely an old enclosure around an arable field’, and excavation has proved his view correct.