Been playing with the free terrain viewer for my region the last few weekends, mostly out of boredom, and stumbled across something interesting in the woods about two kilometers from my place. In the relief shading there's a clear rectangular enclosure with what looks like internal divisions, plus a row of smaller square shapes along an old forest path. On the ground you'd never notice any of it, the trees and leaf litter hide everything completely. I went out there anyway with my dog and a GPS app. You can just barely feel a low bank where the long side of the big rectangle runs, and one of the smaller enclosures has a slight dip in the middle. Probably nothing dramatic, but it's weird how regular the shapes are. Straight lines don't happen by accident in a forest. Checked the historical maps I could find online and there's nothing marked on any of them, no buildings, no field boundaries, nothing. My best guesses are old tree nursery plots or drainage works, but the internal subdivisions read more like building foundations to me. Fired off an email to the county heritage office with coordinates and a description, so now I wait. Honestly half the fun is just not knowing yet.
Spent Sunday poking around old hillshade data and found some earthworks I can't explain
Oct 16, 2026
Last reply: 46 seconds ago
4 Replies
I had almost the same thing happen on my side, found a set of low banks forming a big rectangle under the canopy on the LiDAR hillshade, maybe a kilometre from a footpath I'd walked dozens of times. You could walk right over it and see nothing, but on the relief image the lines jumped out like chalk marks. I did the same as you, hiked in with the dog and a phone GPS, and got my coordinates within about five metres of what I'd marked on screen.
Fun reading this, mine went a completly diferent way. I found a cluster of roundish bumps and short banks in the woods behind our old farm maybe four years back and was convinced I'd found some lost settlement. Sent it off to the regional archaeologist and waited about five months for a reply. Turned out the bumps were charcoal hearth platforms from iron smelting days, and the straight banks were just a boundary between two woodlots that changed hands in the 1800s. Not ancient, but the guy was still happy to log it because charcoal platforms are under-recorded in our county.
One thing I'd flag about your small squares with a dip in the middle: check wheather they line up with wet ground or a stream on the terrain model. Around here a hollow like that is often a marl pit or a dug pond for livestock, and the spoil heaps around the edge read as regular little blocks on a hillshade. Also worth a look at the first edition Ordnance maps if your area has them digitized, plus any 1940s aerial survey photos. I found features on the 1946 photos that never appeared on any map. Either way, emailing the heritage office was the right move even if it takes forever. Mine asked permission to do a walkover survey, and I got to tag along for a morning, which honestly beat the original discovery.
Five metres from a phone under tree canopy? That seems generous. Every time I've tried marking a spot in thick woods my phone drifts all over the place, easy ten or fifteen metres off even after standing there a while letting it settle. Worth going back and re-marking from a different angle, because if you pitch coordinates to a heritage office and they walk to the wrong hummock, they'll write the whole thing off as nothing. I learned that the hard way on a bank I swore was a wall and turned out to be a field edge two plots over.
Update: the GPS drift comment was spot on. Went back and re-marked the spot from a different angle like suggested, and my first pin was actualy about twelve metres off. Anyway the county heritage office got back to me after a few weeks. Turns out it's an old charcoal burning platform and the squares are hearth pads from a small woodland industry site, probaly 19th century. Not the nursery theory after all, but honestly still pretty satisfying.
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