As reported on the Irish OpenStreetMap website, we recently “finished” mapping all the buildings in Co. Down. Due to my goal to get high up in the UK statistics (I made it to #1), I apparently mapped 3,283 tasks, if I’m reading the statistics right. Thanks to the grid system, that led to a fairly systematic coverage under my watchful eyes, resulting in the spotting of 13 potential unrecorded archaeological sites. It took me until today to write the reports to the department in Northern Ireland, because it’s not as much fun as mapping.

Link to overpass-turbo query

I usually add a note=might be a something site, discovered by b-unicycling YYYY-MM-DD to the way, so that I can look for them in overpass-turbo, once I get around to writing the reports to the respective government department. I then add reported by b-unicycling YYYY-MM-DD or something along the lines to the note, so that I know I have reported that one already. This is really only to help me keeping track of what I have discovered and what I have reported.

The way to spot these sites are usually crop marks or what they call on Time Team (see Wikipedia) “lumps and bumps” in the fields (or something suspicious in a lake which might be a crannóg, but those didn’t occur in Co. Down, not on the tiles I mapped anyways (okay, Jonny?). They appear as usually darker marks in the vegetation of a field, because the archaeological monument has a different soil composition than the surrounding soil, so that plants grow differently. The best crop, apparently, to spot them, is wheat. And there was a lot of wheat being grown in Ireland in 2022, when all that crisp Bing imagery was taken. The untrained eye might confuse them with tractor marks, especially when the imagery isn’t crisp enough and they cannot see whether there are two lines or one. Also, so called “fairy rings” (see Wikipedia) might throw you off which are often perfect circles or parts of perfect circles caused by fungi. They are completely natural and not of archaeological value. It would help to compare different years of aerial imagery for these, but we are not exactly spoilt for crisp aerial imagery. A useful website of different generations of Esri imagery is this. Sometimes, what looks like a very obvious cropmark of a ringfort will turn out to be an abandoned horse riding track. Tough luck. (And true story.)

Very obvious example on Bing of a cropmark of a “moated site” which I discovered in Co. Kilkenny recently, since confirmed by an archaeologist

I think it was danieldegroot2 who started adding maybe:historic=archaeological_site to them, and I usually still do that. I would like to mark the more or less obvious crop marks independent of that, though, because they are visible (if your eyes are tuned in on them, as mine are by now). Until the sites get explored, which most of them will never, because there are just too many, and there’s no money in archaeology, we will never know what they are and if they are indeed anything. So, the maybe:historic=archaeological_site isn’t the worst solution. The heritage department in Northern Ireland was very pleased with my reports, at least that’s what they wrote, and they said that those sites will be added to their database (https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/8bb16b64f0994385a5c141027ae9d33e/) within 15 days. That is A LOT faster than how things are done in the Republic of Ireland where I’m still waiting for verdicts for sites I reported since 2022. One of the reasons is that the people in Northern Ireland have a “monument class” called “crop mark” which is of course in itself not a monument type, but it allows them to record these without even a site visit. This is quite important, when people try to get planning permission to build on that site, and the heritage department can then send an archaeologist along to monitor the construction work and record possible finds. A pain in the behind for the landowner, but it’s important. In the Republic, they sometimes trust the crop marks, and I have had sites confirmed within weeks, but in most cases, it takes a lot longer.

The possibly most exciting find in Co. Down is what might (MIGHT!) be a banjo enclosure. The name is really self-explanatory (Wikipedia). It’s only exciting to me, because I haven’t found one before.

I had thought about starting a proposal for archaeological_site=cropmark, but luckily, I checked taginfo, and it seems that there is a (not documented) tag used 875 times which is historic=crop_mark. But does that apply to “lumps and bumps”? From an archaeological standpoint, it does not, but I think we could use it as an umbrella term, since most of us are not archaeologists. So I think I’ll go with that in the future, and maybe retrospectively for Co. Down.

And as a reminder: Metal detecting without an archaeological license in the Republic of Ireland is illegal and wrong, so don’t get any ideas. Having just watched a licensed detectorist at a licensed site - it is a highly skilled job. A lot goes on after the beep.