Normally kept hidden by lush grasses and crops, old and prehistoric features are making themselves known as a result of the heatwave through imprints on fields and lawns, some for the first time in known memory.
The BBC writes:
It’s hard to see these features from the ground – but with the rise of drones for aerial photography, they can be captured where they may have remained unidentified in previous heatwaves. The marks are revealed when grass or crops on top of wood or stone still in the ground flourish or deteriorate at different rates to surrounding material in the unusually hot weather.
In County Meath, Ireland, one aerial photographer made a discovery that turned out to be far more significant than he initially realised. Anthony Murphy, 44, captured pictures of a henge, using his drone in Newgrange. And when he noticed the ‘amazing detail’, he ‘giggled with excitement, expecting someone to pinch and wake me up’…
Meanwhile, in Clumber Park, in Nottinghamshire, a large estate owned by the National Trust, a spectacular ghost of a building is emerging. The building that once stood on these imprints is Clumber House – a grand 18th-Century mansion demolished in 1938 after a series of fires and economic downturn. Rooms and corridors became visible as stone foundations left in the ground heated up more quickly than surrounding material, scorching the soil above to a lighter shade, according to Ben Mason at the National Trust.
Although the mansion itself is not a new discovery, a previously unknown sundial in front of the lawn has been identified…
In Gawthorpe Hall, Lancashire, the dry weather has brought back a Victorian garden, even if it is now a mere shadow of its former self.
