Today’s image shows a common geological phenomena that we sometimes encounter on archaeological sites called patterned ground. It looks rather like the ripples you get in the clouds called a Mackerel sky. It is very visible in this picture, taken in 2002, at a site on the cliff top at Ramsgate. The ripples in the ground are actually masking a large Iron Age and Roman enclosure ditch on the left hand side of the picture and a middle Bronze Age mortuary structure comprising a small ring ditch surrounding a group of pits containing pottery vessels and cremated human bone in the north part of the site.

Around 21,000 years ago, large areas of patterned ground were formed as the land surface went through cycles of freezing and thawing. Fine clay and silts percolated into the fractures in the chalk producing the linear stripes and polygons that you can see here.