Background

During 2010 or thereabouts, the then chairman of Maulden History Society Brian Lazelle told me that there was supposed to be the site of an old manor house in the field at the back of St. Mary’s church. Apparently a number of people had tried to locate the site over a fair number of years without any real success. Of course, this was like waving a red-flag at a bull as far as I was concerned, and wondered if there was anything that I could add that might help to solve the mystery. In true Monty Python style, perhaps I could try something completely different.

A plan of action

After thinking about the problem for a bit, I wondered if something could be gleaned from a simple air photograph of the site. My meanderings went along the lines that maybe some spatial structure could be determined by analysing the air photo, i.e. in terms of two dimensional frequency structure in the image via a 2D Fourier transform. Bearing in mind these were the days when LiDAR data was not available to the general public.

With the above in mind, I set about developing software to perform some very customised digital image processing on the photo.

After writing, debugging and refining my code, I set it loose on the image to the side here, sat back and waited to see what results it would throw out. I knew that my software was going to produce a large number of “processed” images as output, in fact it produced 9000 plus! Alright, I had to accept that one, and spent a whole evening looking through thumbnails of the output to see what I could find.

After getting bleary eyed, and feeling somewhat punch drunk by the whole episode, a pattern started to emerge in roughly the centre of the image. It was an approximately black rectangular feature. There were other shapes that appeared and disappeared at certain spacial frequencies, although this black rectangle was very consistent over a fairly wide frequency range.

With the above in mind, I georeferenced the processed image, from that I could obtain the size of the rectangle, and most importantly it’s grid coordinates. So one sunny evening, armed with the grid references of each of the four corners, and GPS receiver in hand, I wandered off to the Church Field to see what I might be able to find on the ground.

The first corner (the lower right hand one) that my GPS lead me to was a direct hit. I found myself standing on what looked like a rounded corner feature. Well that was exciting, there was something. I then moved to the other three corners, the second one which was less pronounced, while the remaining two were not really apparent at all. I expect they could have merged with the ground over the years.

Photogrammetric ground survey

My next step was to do a ground survey of the prominent lower right hand corner feature. For this I used photogrammetry so that a 3D dense surface model could be developed of the feature. Setting out some coarse photo targets around the feature, and photographing from a number of different angles, I then proceeded to turn these field survey images into a dense surface model.

Presenting the results

After cleaning up the data from the 3D photogrammetric scan I produced both a map and 3D animation of the corner feature. At least now I was ready to present my results to some people who might be able to give me an opinion about the whole affair.

Then the fun started

I first ran the results by our chairman at the time Brian Lazelle and he thought that the dimensions of the rectangle were fairly consistent with the size and location of the old manor house. I seem to remember, at the time, that he had made at least some study of these type of buildings, so all in all this was a step in the right direction. He suggested getting a more archaeological opinion from some people that he was in contact with, which in retrospect was a bad move, although not Brian’s fault.

The archaeological opinions were quite caustic and damming! What they said makes me laugh all these years later. They said (in thundering voices) “We can’t understand how it is even possible to find something like this using the methods that you have used!”. I wasn’t interested in their opinion about my methods, just did they think it was an archaeological feature or not. They followed on with (still thundering) “We don’t even know what spacial frequencies are!”. Because they didn’t know what spacial frequencies are, then surely such things can’t possibly exist, can they? So, really at the end of it all, my work was simply dismissed without further investigation. I did contact the county archaeologist back in 2012. I’m still waiting for a reply to my e-mail in 2024.

Clearly I had stepped onto somebody’s hallowed ground, a “closed-shop” so to speak. I find it distasteful that the spirit of collaboration was quashed in such a manner. Certainly I’m not an archaeologist, I was simply trying to bring a different perspective to the table, that’s all. And “they” talk about the “skills shortage”, not any wonder if that’s the attitude “they” take.

So after successfully alienating myself from the local archaeological community I vanished into the deep background without trace. I remember at the time thinking: “Chris, you are playing with the wrong people again”.

So rant aside: I’ve put up the information on this page, just in case at least one person finds it useful. Perhaps someone in the future might start looking for Berrystead Manor. It is an interesting site and there is a complexity of features present on the ground of which serious professional archaeologists might be able to make sense of at some stage.