York Historic Environment Record

NMR Information: Measured Survey (GIS location based on information from NMR but may be arbitrary) The RCHME undertook this survey in order to archaeologically study wapentake centres, the meeting places of the administrative units of the Danelaw, by tracing the probable origins, decline and early abandonment of one wapentake centre in the North Riding, Bolesford or Bulford as it gradually became known. The intention being to set it in its contemporary historical and geographical context, through an assessment of the documented history of the placename, and a consideration of the archaeological features visible as cropmarks. The area covers 9km2 in the parishes of Sheriff Hutton and Lillings Ambo and lies mainly on blown sand and alluvial deposits in the flood plain of the River Foss. The documentary research examined original documents relating to the area held by the following institutions; the Public Record Office; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Borthwick Institute, York; the British Library. London; the Henry Huntington Library, St Marino, Passadena, USA; West Yorkshire Record Office, Sheepscar Leeds; York City Library (Local History Section). The air photograph element of the project produced a sketch plot at 1:10560 scale of all Prehistoric, Roman and Medieval cropmarks and a plot, based on a computer-aided plane transformation using the Aerial programme, at 1:2,500 of a known Roman site (SE 66 SW 6), near Lilling Green Farm. The sketch plot is accurate to within 5-15m as laid out in the guidelines for the National Mapping Programme and the control points for the site at Lilling Green had errors of <2m and a similar accuracy is expected for the archaeological features. No attempt was made to plot the marl pits and the Foss Navigation which survive as cropmarks and earthworks and are major landscape features in this area. The archive consists of a number of plans and a report (Collection UID 918847). The results of the project were published; Swan, V.G., Jones, E.A. and Grady, D. 1993 "Bolesford, North Riding of Yorkshire: a Lost Wapentake Centre and its Landscape", Landscape History, 15 (1993), pp. 13-28.