A battlefield hit by HS2 – and planning rules | Letter
The article discusses the damage caused by the construction of the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway project to the nationally important registered battlefield of Edgcote, which was the site of a battle during the Wars of the Roses in 1469. The contractor for HS2 stripped 30cm of topsoil from an area equivalent to 16 football pitches to allow for the storage of hundreds of thousands of tons of earth dug along the route. This topsoil layer contains important archaeological evidence from the battle, and the article argues that the geophysical survey method used by the contractor was not sufficient to detect the small artifacts typically found on a medieval battlefield. The article suggests that a systematic metal-detecting survey would have been a more appropriate method to preserve the archaeological heritage of the site.
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