Landscapes of the South Coast Study Day
Landscapes of the South Coast Study Day
Saturday 07 May 2016
10.00-16:00
Lecture Theatre B, Building 65
Avenue Campus
10:00 / Coffee10:10 / Welcome
10:15 / Prehistoric Submerged Landscapes of the Channel and Solent River System
Dr R. Helen Farr, University of Southampton
The marine Solent landscape on our doorstep today is very different from that in the past. Maritime archaeological research on prehistoric sites such as Bouldnor Cliff and Wootton Quarr enable us to tell a story of a changing landscape, environment and human activity in the region through the Holocene. Submerged prehistoric landscapes and the archaeological sites within them are increasingly being targeted for research due to their potential to conserve organic materials that are rarely preserved on land. Further research in the Channel/Mancheshows this can also be the case for sites that predate the Last Glacial Maximum.
11:00 / The Changing Coastline in Later Prehistory and the Evidence for Cross Channel Trade
Professor Timothy Champion, University of Southampton
The rise in relative sea-level after the last Ice Age peaked in the centuries around 2000 BC, though coastlines continued to evolve, sometimes producing dramatic new landscapes. Erosion of softer geological deposits is still a major threat today, while deposition of the eroded material has created features such as the Chesil Beach and the Dungeness foreland. The sea had inundated the lower reaches of many river systems, creating estuaries such as Plymouth Sound and Poole Harbour. At the same time, the higher sea levels slowed down the speed of the lower reaches of the rivers, causing them to deposit their silts, forming landscapes such as Romney Marsh. Though cross-Channel trade had clearly been carried on since the separation of Britain and the Continent, the river estuaries provided ideal locations for trading and industrial activities, as shown by evidence from sites such Mount Batten near Plymouth, sites in Poole Harbour, Hengistbury Head and Dover. As well as the evidence from the terrestrial sites, we now have a growing body of material from prehistoric shipwrecks, where boats failed to make the shore safely.
11:30 / Coffee
11:45 / Submerged villages: post-Reformation coastal and rural parish landscapes and their churches around the Three Harbours 1500-1800
Dr Jude Jones, University of Southampton
The landscape of the South Coast running between the Selsey and Gosport peninsulas bears little resemblance to its early modern appearance. Pre- and post-War housing has extensively obliterated the sense of rural of coastal isolation and evidence of its pastoral and/or maritime character. Small villages, which previously housed handfuls of families clustering around a central nucleus formed by church, manor house and parsonage now, are so submerged under modern housing that their parish boundaries are inextricably intermingled with other parochial conurbations.
In this talk the constituents, forms and patterns of early modern parishes set around the Three Harbours of Portsmouth, Langstone and Chichester will be discussed and contrasted with what remains of Hampshire and West Sussex’s more rural parochial downland landscapes. This should allow us to recover some understanding of their earlier character and the lives that populated them during a period, whose history and architecture may seem easily recognisable to us at present, but which maintains a certain strangeness and unfamiliarity once you dig beneath the surface.
12:30 / Lunch
13:30 / Trade, Ships and Seafarers: South Coast Maritime Communities, 1565-1577
Dr Craig Lambert, University of Southampton
The period 1565 to 1577 witnessed the beginning of England’s growth as a maritime power. In the 1560s the Hawkins family from Plymouth, along with their erstwhile cousin Francis Drake, led a series of trading and plundering raids to West African and the Caribbean. In 1576 Martin Frobisher led the first of his three expeditions in search of the North-West passage to China and in 1577 Francis Drake began his circumnavigation of the globe. The aim of this talk is to set these events within the context of seafaring life at this time. It takes as a case study the southern coast of England and will focus on three key areas:
1. Trade: what was the nature of the maritime trade of the ports stretching from Bristol to the River Thames?
2. Ships: Through a series of case studies, it will show how ‘life stories’ of ships can be reconstructed.
3. Men: who were the mariners that sailed ships at this time and can we reconstruct their careers?
14:30
14:45 / Coffee
The Impact of Storminess on Coastal Living Conditions in Medieval Southeast England
Thomas Dhoop, University of Southampton
In 1262, we read that the coastal town of Winchelsea in East Sussex was in ‘imminent peril from the waves and the violence of the sea’ and therefore received a sum of money from the English crown to ‘provide obstacles against such perils and floods.’ Despite being a prominent member of the Cinque Ports Confederation and one of the principal ports of the realm, in November 1280, the town was ‘for the most part submerged by the sea.’ Winchelsea, however, was deemed valuable enough to relocate on a nearby hilltop site, still linked to the coast via the Camber Estuary and the River Brede, but safe from the sea.
Storms, such as Storm Desmond (which last year brought severe gales and heavy rainfall resulting in catastrophic flooding across Britain), were also a concern for medieval peoples living on the southeast coast. In this talk, we will explore how paleoclimatologists study storminess in the past and how historicaland archaeological datasets can aid such studies. Focussing on the Romney Marsh area, we will examine how severe storms in the late 13th century changed the coastal environment and altered people’slives in the towns that were set in this landscape;Winchelsea, Rye and New Romney.
15:45 Questions and Discussions
16:00 End of Day
N.B. The Lifelong Learning team may be photographing this event for use on our website (www.soton.ac.uk/lifelonglearning), twitter (@SotonUniLLL) & Facebook (www.facebook.com/SotonUniLLL). If you would prefer not to be included in the photos, please inform one of our organisers