J. M. N. Colls and the Baildon Moor Prehistoric Field Complex

Abstract

In 1846 J.M.N. Colls described an ancient co-axial field system on Baildon Moor in West Yorkshire in a paper in the journal Archaeologia, believed to be the first account of its kind in UK archaeological literature. Even then, the remains were sparse and it has long been believed by most later commentators that all field evidence for the system had long since disappeared. However, encouraged by a survey of Baildon Moor commissioned by English Heritage in 1994 in connection with an entirely different objective (a survey of cup-and-ring-marked rocks) the author has re-examined the moor and, armed with both Colls' 1846 map and the 1994 survey, found that traces of the system reported over a century and a half ago by Colls still survive on the ground. The paper describes Colls' original account along with later Victorian re-workings of his material and compares in detail the system recorded by Colls with both the results of the 1994 survey and of extensive fieldwork carried out by the author in 2007. It attempts to set the Baildon Moor field system into its wider archaeological context and concludes that Colls' account stands out, not only as the first, but as a remarkably good one for its time.