Walk the ground today and you would find ordinary grassland giving way to bogland to the south, with nothing underfoot to suggest that a whole system of organised fields once covered the hillside. The place carries its history entirely out of sight.

In July 1969, a reconnaissance flight captured something the ground had long stopped showing. The photograph, taken as part of the Cambridge University Collection of Aerial Photography and catalogued as CUCAP AYN 72, revealed a series of small quadrangular fields arranged across an area roughly 300 metres from west-southwest to east-northeast and about 100 metres from south-southeast to north-northwest. At the centre of this pattern, cropmarks or soil discolouration suggested the outline of a house and associated paddocks, the kind of small enclosed areas typically used to confine livestock close to a dwelling. Whoever farmed here laid out their land with a clear logic, working the slope above the bog in a compact, ordered arrangement. No date has been firmly attached to the field system, and without excavation it is difficult to say whether it belongs to the early medieval period, the later medieval centuries, or some other era entirely. What the aerial image shows is a community at work, now vanished so completely that no surface trace whatsoever survives.