Fleam Dyke
Fleam Dyke is a linear earthwork between Fulbourn and Balsham in Cambridgeshire, initiated some time between AD 330 and AD 510. It is three miles long and seven metres high from ditch to bank, and its ditch faces westwards, implying invading Saxons as its architects. Later, it formed a boundary of the Anglo-Saxon administrative division of Flendish Hundred. At a prominent point, the earthwork runs beside Mutlow Hill, crowned by a 4000-year-old Bronze Age burial mound.
Description
The dyke is located near Cambridge, between Fulbourn and Balsham. It forms a barrier across an open chalkland ridge, bounded near Fulbourn by marshy fenland and near Balsham by 90-metre-high formerly wooded hills. It is three miles long and seven metres high from ditch to bank, and its ditch faces southwest. Most of the earthwork survives and a footpath leads along the crest of the bank. Possible extensions to Fleam Dyke occur at both the south and north ends, and a further part of it might exist three miles to the northwest, from Quy Fen to the River Cam at Fen Ditton.History
At Mutlow Hill the dyke runs beside a Bronze Age barrow dated to 2000 BC, which contained eight urns with cremated human remains, and which was reused in the Roman period as a shrine. The finding of a fourth-century Roman coin under the dyke established the dyke's post-Roman construction date. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Anglo-Saxon weapons and burials were found. An excavation in 1991, on occasion of widening the A11 road, established by radiocarbon dating that it had been built in several phases, the first between AD 330 and 510, and the last between AD 450 and 620. It is believed most likely to have been built by early Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century AD as a defence against Romano-British attempts to recover their territory.In later Anglo-Saxon times, the northern part of Fleam Dyke was also the boundary between Flendish and Staine Hundreds. In this period, when villages grew and parish boundaries were established, parishes in this part of the county were long and narrow stretching from the fens to the presumed Icknield Way as this gave access to wood from the uplands, thatching from the fens and fertile local soil. Thus, what is now Stow-cum-Quy was originally the northern part of the two Wilbraham villages situated near the main Fleam Dyke. The main part of Fleam Dyke today still constitutes a parish boundary.