BURNT ROW COPSE: AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION:

INITIAL RESEARCH

My first contact with the site came through a chance meeting with Mr Patrick Perks who, with a team of enthusiastic helpers, has put together the whole community project of which this investigation is only a small part. I quickly became very curious about the project and realised that the first step was to try and find map evidence of the site. Hopefully historic maps might suggest past usage of the site or any buildings that might once have been present.

Antiquated maps of the Billingshurst area do exist (see appendix 1 of all those I have managed to collect) although for the purposes of identifying such a small and relatively unimportant site all but the more modern are useless. All maps prior to those that might be described as ‘Ordnance Survey quality’ show little in the way of detail and whilst they offer a degree of accuracy that must have represented a break through on their publication their somewhat stylised format do not aspire to the accuracy needed to locate our site.

Not until the nineteenth century maps do we find clear inclusion of the site and certainly its size and shape has altered little since those times. For a short spell I spent rather fruitless efforts convinced that the site was marked as ‘Three Houses’ on the maps and on my first visit to the copse could not quite believe that so many dwellings could have been forced on to such a small site.

Thankfully, after a visit to a specialist map shop in Guilford and with the help of a ‘Global Positioning Device’ it became very clear that the site is actually labelled as ‘Weavers Cottage’ on the 1895 map.

This progress did not however give the answers to the conundrum which has been the focus of our investigation ever since. The dwelling named “Weavers Cottage” is clear to see on a number of maps ranging across most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sometimes it is labelled sometimes just an image of the building is marked on the map, but present it clearly is! By the 1947 map however the dwelling has disappeared and on all maps dating after that the site is presented by the ordnance survey as being empty of any building.

There is also a well on the site and this has proven to be an extremely useful fixed bench mark for all subsequent survey work regarding the site. The well appears on all the maps that are of the modern type and the image of the building moves not a jot in its relationship with this feature. It might be, of course, that many of the maps derive from and merely copy an earlier map and may not be accurate, this, however may never be known.

This then has been the object of our investigation ever since, to find evidence of the building on this site, both physical and academic and to try and postulate as to its fate.

The inclusion of the label ‘Burnt Row’ may suggest a convenient end for our dwelling but very clearly on the 1909 map, ‘Weavers Cottage’ appears with the label ‘Burnt Row’ adjacent and with ‘Three Houses slightly to the south. If Burnt Row does point to some historic inferno that led to the demolition of a building it is unlikely that the cottage would still be included.