The mysterious landscapes of heat scorched Britain

The past few months in the British Isles have been turbulent ones. Key ministers have resigned from a government that is always seemingly on the brink of collapse. Brexit negotiations with the European Union have stalled. And for much of summer, the whole country has baked beneath the kind of heat wave that hasn’t been seen for decades. The heat has changed the landscape. For weeks, Britain has seemed like another place, its parched fields more suited to southern Italy. Wildfires have burned in the moors around Manchester; roads in Wales have melted. The effects of the drought can be seen in satellite images, which show the green hills and rolling fields of the British countryside now scorched the color of lion fur. The drought has had another surprising effect: All over the country, ghosts have been rising up out of the earth. In the fields of England, Wales and Ireland, the lost lines of houses and settlements, barrows and henges, the street plans of ancient towns from Roman times to the Paleolithic and the Middle Ages — everywhere the past is returning, written on the landscape. These phenomena are known as cropmarks. They are caused by variations in how different depths of soil hold water, and are a result of the presence of ancient architecture and earthworks. Where an ancient wall lies buried, water is channeled away, so the grass gets less water. Ancient ditches, by contrast, create areas of deeper soil that hold water more effectively, giving the grass a deeper green. Scarcity heightens differences: During a drought, the effect of cropmarks deepens until they become parch marks. The phenomenon is unmistakable: Wherever ancient people built their houses, penned their animals or boundaried their land, stark lines and patterns of green grass now stand out in fields of tawny hay. Archaeologists have long recognized the potential uses of cropmarks in reading the shape of the ancient landscape. One of the earliest written references to them was in 1789 by the naturalist Gilbert White. White drew inspiration from the locals in the swampy Hampshire fens, who used moisture on the landscape to help them locate buried bog oak — partly fossilized trees — which could be used for fuel. Could such marks, White wrote, also be used to aid in “the discovery of old obliterated drains and wells about houses; and in Roman stations and camps lead to the finding of pavements, baths and graves, and other hidden relics of curious antiquity?” Since White’s first musings, the use of cropmarks among professionals has developed to incorporate modern technologies like infrared and thermal imaging from the air. This year, however, the combination of exceptional visibility — the parch marks have been at their most prominent since the drought of 1976 — the proliferation of small drones that allow for amateur aerial photography and social media, which allows such images to spread, has meant that the phenomenon has captured the imagination of the general public like never before. Researchers from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales set off a flurry of media attention in July when they released aerial photos showing cropmarks etched into the drought-ridden Welsh landscape. Surveying people’s responses on social media shows the variety of readings of these strange hieroglyphs. Some people saw omens of impending doom, connections with the increasingly apocalyptic feel of the current news cycle: Brexit, the rise of the far right, the changing global climate. “The ancient ones have come!” one user commented in Lovecraftian pastiche. “On their lips a single phrase, an ill wind rustling through a field of wheat. ... ‘Brexit means Brexit but it still means Brexit.’” Others read a strange kind of hope. These lines and rings showed the landscape to be a palimpsest, the page of a book written and erased and rewritten over and over, a mess of crosshatches and scribbles. These signs remind us of the complexity of the landscape we inhabit and the overlaying nature of history. The field that slopes down to the river behind the shipping depot might look like an untouched strip of land, but it was something else once — a church, a mill, the encampment of a Roman legion — and before that, it was something else again, a clutter of roundhouses where people dug for peat and lived in fear of terrifying gods. In times of turmoil, it has always given us an eerie hope to know that others have come before us, that they disappeared and that the world kept going without them. While the number of reemerging ancient settlements has caught the public’s attention, other more modern relics of British history are also returning from oblivion. In Lancashire’s Gawthorpe Hall, gardeners were astonished to see the geometric patterns of the old ornamental gardens resurface, the land still remembering the patterns taught to it by its Victorian gardener, Sir Charles Barry, long after his death. Britain’s wartime past has reemerged, too, evoking a time when Britain’s fate was tied inextricably to that of the European continent. Near Lasham in Hampshire, taxiways and runways from a World War II airfield suddenly reappeared in the fields that had been returned to farmland 50 years before. In places the inscriptions on the landscape are literal. Fires in the Republic of Ireland’s County Wicklow exposed a text sign written into the landscape in whitewash, reading “Eire,” the Irish word for Ireland. More than 80 of these signs were written along the Irish coast during World War II, signaling to Allied and German aircraft that they were flying over neutral territory and should not drop their bombs by mistake. The ruin, the philosopher Max Pensky writes, “is rune: a cipher or mark.” Its “enigmatic character qualifies it both for occult significance and as a sign of the constant threat of an insignificant social world threatened at all moments with the omnipresence of guaranteed oblivion.” This oblivion has felt closer than ever over the past few years, and this perhaps explains how firmly this year’s cropmarks have taken hold of people’s imaginations. A repeated comparison I saw people draw was to the landscape as a starved body, how in the later stages of scurvy old scars on the body are said to reopen. It’s a painful fact to remember: Our wounds are never fully healed. It forces us to reimagine, in a country and world increasingly divided, healing as an ongoing effort, a holding together that the body enacts only while it’s strong enough. The apparition of these traces has caused the same questions to be asked over and over: What do these strange signs mean? Are they signs of hope or omens of doom? Are they ruins or runes? When we’re gone, how will the land remember us? If these ghosts in the grass have the answers to our questions, they are not telling us. They sit in mute witness as we try to understand, waiting to disappear again with the coming of the rain.