The aerial view shows farmland, but as you can see from the map overlay, and from Street View, housing has been built on the land since the aerial view was captured.
However, on the farmland is a series of straight lines, each about 40-50 yards long, that appear to have been scraped out. They mostly run at right angles to each other, but there are some at different angles, and they don’t seem to bear any relation to the road layout of the housing development.
Any ideas what they could be? Exploratory groundworks? Why the weird pattern?
Looking north on Flansham Lane you’ll see some sort of orchard/nursery/tree farm where the trees are planted in straight lines. Look to the east between the development and the golf course and you’ll see a field with two rows of trees and then the same markings. My guess is that those were rows of trees or shrubs that have recently been ripped out. No idea why they’re all at angles, though.
That would be my guess. scrape a little across the land to know where solid soil is, and see if there are any surprises, covering the whole area. Take elevation readings to determine the final subdivision elevation and grading.
The marks are remnants of some kind of agricultural buildings, as seen here. They’re long sheds flanked by a dozen or more small buildings. My best guess is chicken houses or something similar for swine or dairy cattle.
Google Earth notes that the Google Maps imagery is from 2007. In the imagery on Here.com and Bing.com, the scars have all healed.
They are not the scars from buildings. Google earth can show older images, and the 2005 images shows neither the buildings nor the marks. They were just open fields. So the scars appeared between 2005 and 2007.
Archeology.
Yep, those herringbone patterns are characteristic of trial trenching. It’s so you don’t miss any linear features if you just do parallel trenches, but less intrusive than a full grid.
Might be worth mentioning for readers who are unaware, but archaeological investigations will normally form part of any significant planning application approval process or conditions, and especially so in the home counties and the south of England. Each council has different requirements to comply with, but any construction programme will inevitably include a chunk of time to allow investigations and digs to be undertaken prior to commencement.
It can have quite an effect on a project if a significant find is made – it can hold up the development works for months, or even years, in some cases.
I’ve seen exactly this pattern of lines in fields near my own home (Southern England) from the window of the train - for a couple of weeks, there were shallow trenches in this pattern (maybe 18 inches deep and four or five feet wide), then they were all filled in. Nothing has been planted there (the trenches were dug last year - even if they planted bulbs, they’d have shown themselves by now).
Archaeological or geological survey trenches sounds a good explanation.
In London, it happens fairly regularly. I remember when they were building the new pedestrian bridges across from Waterloo station there were great concerns about UXBs buried in the Thames mud. If one had detonated it could have broken through to the Tube a few feet below and poured most of the river into the tunnel, which would have been rather inconvenient for commuters on the Bakerloo line.
I’ve been bingeing on Time Team lately so I almost suggested this in jest. I was surprised to learn that’s really the reason.
I guess I shouldn’t be though. If that show taught me anything it’s that you can’t so much as plant a flowerbed in the UK without a bunch of archaeologists showing up to make sure you’re not destroying something historically significant in the process.
It’s certainly more of a concern in big cities than it would be in a bit of farmland - In Portsmouth, the Planning authority has a GIS layer showing all the known bomb raids (we sometimes get asked for a map showing all the unexploded bombs. If we knew where they were, they probably wouldn’t be there).
The underlying soil is white chalk (like the Uffington White Horse). They appear both on the green fields and on the bulldozed areas (wider and more pronounced on the latter.) They may be just truck/bulldozer tracks which leaves white chalk residue from previous works (or disturbs the soil enough to also expose the underlying chalk.)
Their regular lengths and bearings could mean ground survey works for foundation drilling and testing. In this, you have trucks dragging heavy drilling machines or seismic energy sources. Yes, that’s my best guess.