The Plough and the Origin of Strip-Lynchets

N their recent work, The Open Fields , C. S. and C. S. Orwin devote an appendix to the question of the origin of lynchets, in which they express their difficulties in accepting the current theory that narrow, step-like terraces like those at Bishopstone (Wilts.), for instance, could have been formed as a result of ploughing (PLATE I, facing p. 49). In private correspondence they assure me that these difficulties are widely shared by other agriculturalists, but at the same time they admit that they have no better explanation to offer. They point out that these terraces are found distributed mainly on the chalk of southern England, but also on various other geological formations in the Midlands, west and north, and also in southern Scotland; also that there seem to be many varieties of strip-lynchets, and that possibly one explanation may not apply to all; but while rightly distinguishing between these and the small square plots of the Celtic field-system, they are very much in error in implying that the latter are bounded only by field-banks and not by lynchets (p. 3 19).