Fieldwalking and Landscape Surveys
This area of the project will involve first collecting information about an area or feature from maps, the Historic Environment record and old documents, then carefully recording all visible features (hedges, ditches, other boundaries, lanes, paths, land use, crop or soil marks, stands of trees, earthworks, remains of buildings or walls etc) These notes, along with drawings and photographs, will form part of the historic record of the area and can be referred to during desktop research as more information is collected.
R. H. Johnson has written an excellent contribution to the Mellor History Project The Physical Landscape of Mellor describing how the landscape evolved before people settled in the area and how the geological history has influenced past historical events in Mellor.For more information on the techniques of Fieldwalking and Landscape Survey, follow this link for a short guide to Field Survey from the British Archaeological Jobs Resopurce journal (the document contains 27 pages and may take a few minutes to download)