Today’s image, for Day 267 of the VM_365 project,  is the third and last of Dave Perkins’ reconstruction drawings, which show the progressive development of the landscape at Lord of the Manor, whose story has been revealed so vividly in aerial photographs and archaeological investigations and traced in the reconstructions shown on VM_365 Day 265 and Day 266.

The complicated development of the prehistoric funerary monuments ended in the Late Bronze Age, with the insertion into the mounds of groups of pots and urns containing cremated human remains. The mounds of the barrows then stood in the landscape for many centuries, becoming overgrown with vegetation and diminishing through erosion.

The prehistoric mounds were eventually overlaid by the graves of an extensive Anglo-Saxon cemetery. Perhaps the barrow mounds, as memorials of the older inhabitants of the area, continued to influence the choice of burial sites, but they may only have shown as rises and hillocks barely distinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

In the later medieval period much of the Lord of the Manor landscape may have been ploughed as a rising population, recovering from the effects of the Black Death, created a demand for agricultural produce. Ozengell Grange, which is also close to the Lord of the Manor barrow group, was an agricultural estate owned by the Monastery of St Augustine, who farmed much of the land where the barrows once stood. The once impressive prehistoric monuments, which were designed to preserve the memory and display the power of the ancient inhabitants, were reduced by the plough over many centuries.

There was no trace of the prehistoric monuments in the wide, flat and featureless fields that were left in the later 20th century, until they gave up their secrets to the archaeologists who were monitoring the crop marks each season and painstakingly plotting and investigating the sites they encountered.