26th-30th September. After an epic drive down south (in 7 and a half hours!) I arrived in Penzance with David and Fiona from Historic England’s Geospatial Imaging team, for a week of surveying Iron Age courtyard houses, unique to the Lands End peninsula and the Isles of Scilly, on the famous site of Chysauster. The houses all had a central open courtyard area, with several rooms attached. More information on the site can be found on English Heritage’s webpage: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/chysauster-ancient-village/.
We also visited Carn Euny, another Iron Age Romano-British settlement site, 30 minutes south (as seen on the cover image). Info here: http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/carn-euny-ancient-village/
The layouts of these very impressive structures are very complex – there’s even a semi-detached house! So they were quite challenging to record, but armed with plan drawings and context sheets, we sucessfully laser scanned three of the houses with the most upstanding, exposed stonework and took photographs for SFM photogrammetry, as a record of their current condition.
The weather also took a turn for the dramatic, and I was very thankful for my wellies as torrential downpours and sweeping mists arrived at the start of the survey. On a clear day, the views from the village are spectacular – you can see all the way to Penzance and the coast beyond, but then the fog was thick, I could barely see past the walls of the house I was recording!
Luckily, the sun was out on the last day of the survey, and we ended with a site visit to another Iron Age village site, called Carn Euny, to see the fogou (an underground passageway with a large, central chamber). Chysauster also has a fogou, but this has been sealed up for safety. The purpose of these structures is not clear, but the main theories suggest they were either storage areas, places of refuge in times of warfare, or special religious places.
