87
A PREHISTORIC SITE AT TWITTY FEE,
DANBURY.
By J. M. BULL, B.A., F.R.G.S.
[Read 30th November, 1935.]
FIELD No. 117 (Sheet nLV 14 of the 1922 Edition of
the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map) at Twitty Fee,
Danbury, is, or was before its surface had been destroyed by
digging for gravel, a fairly level piece of ground some 250 feet
O.D. with a wood adjoining it on the south and west.
This is quite a respectable altitude for this part of England;
the Danbury-Little Baddow ridge, at one end of which stands
Danbury church surrounded by Danbury camp (of uncertain
date, as it has never been excavated), is about a mile to the
west of the field and rises to a maximum height of 366 feet.
But in all other directions the land is lower and the hill of
Wickham Bishops, some six miles to the N.E., stands out against
the skyline, although its altitude is only about the same as that of
the field. The field is not far from water, as two small streams
run a short distance away, one on the south and the other on the
west side.
For a number of years a small gravel pit on the edge of the
field was worked very intermittently. A workman, however,
came across in it, and gave to me, a portion of a large vessel of
the Peterborough class of pottery which was drawn and described
by Mr. Stuart Piggott in the Antiquaries Journal for January,
1933. This fragment dates from the close of the Neolithic
period, that is, shortly before 1800 B.C.
Unlike the users of Windmill Hill ware (the other main
division of British Neolithic pottery), who lived on open hill-tops
in defended communities, the people who used this Peterborough
pottery lived in undefended settlements in river valleys, and
the rivers seem to have been the main channels by which the
culture was diffused through the British Isles from Denmark
and the Baltic. The field at Twitty Fee is only some two
miles from the river Chelmer, which discharges into the sea in
the Blackwater estuary; and this was doubtless one of the
estuaries up which the people of this culture entered England
from overseas.
The finding of this piece of pottery was specially interesting