Air Reconnaissance in Northern France

Abstract

During the last two decades discoveries of buried features of archaeological and historical interest have been widespread in south-east England, on many different soils supporting varying vegetation, the gravel terraces of the principal rivers and the chalk country yielding most information. Not the least productive area is the Isle of Thanet, where such ground as is free from the spreading housing estates of coastal resorts displays, for example, groups of ring-ditches of Bronze Age barrows, enclosures of the Iron Age, Roman villae, and even practice-trenches of the 1914-18 war. If discoveries of such variety and number could be made in Thanet, what of the other side of the Channel, where extensive tracts of chalk country are crossed by valleys with wide plains of alluvial gravel? Occasional discoveries made by members of French flying-clubs, for example, by M. Roger Agache in the Somme valley, had by 1961 shown that ‘crop-marks’ were to be seen; indeed it would be very surprising if they were not.

But to undertake abroad a programme of air photography involving widely ranging flights, planned for research, is not quite so simple a matter as in Britain. Maintenance requirements appropriate to aircraft operating abroad impose limitations on the work, while above all there is need to obtain permission for such photography from the responsible authorities. It was largely owing to the continued support of M. Seyrig and Professor Will that such permission was granted at all, and grateful thanks are due to them, to the Direction de l’Architecture of the French Ministry of State, under whose auspices the work was carried out, and to the British Academy, which made a grant towards the cost of the operation.