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The present village of Methley has its origins in the medieval period. Anyone who knows the parish church of St Oswald's with its fine alabaster tombs of the Waterton and Savile families will be well aware of this.

What is perhaps less obvious is that in recent years archaeologists have revealed that the area around Methley had a complex and varied prehistory.

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Climate change
The first people to reach the Aire valley probably migrated into the region as a result of global warming which caused the great ice sheets formerly covering much of Britain to melt. This early activity is represented in the Methley area by scatters of flints dating to the Mesolithic period (Middle Stone Age, approximately 8,300-3,500 BC). About fifty pieces of flint were recovered from excavation at Willow Grove. Others have come from elsewhere on the gravel terraces. This would suggest that early people used the flat lands along the river margin to make camps as they explored the area, perhaps by boat. There is no natural source of flint in West Yorkshire. The nearest is the chalk downs of the Yorkshire Wolds. These early explorers must either have brought the flint with them from elsewhere, or have traded with people from the coast. In either case it suggests that prehistoric communities were less isolated than often is assumed to be the case. No trace of early habitation has been found.

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The Green Revolution
The Neolithic period (New Stone Age: approximately 3,500 – 2,100 BC) saw the development of farming on a scale that had never been practised in the country before. Early people had been what archaeologists call hunter-gatherers – nomadic people who hunted animals and collected fruit and other wild plants to sustain themselves. With the coming of farming, the population becomes more static and traces of their habitation and ritual monuments can sometimes be found. Farming also enables people to build up a surplus of food which can be used to feed others who are not actively engaged in its production. These surpluses enabled the Neolithic and later people of West Yorkshire to develop the large complex of ritual monuments around the henge at Ferrybridge lower down the Aire Valley.

Evidence for the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age (around 2,000 BC) settlement in the area around Methley itself is fragmentary. Only a few flint tools have been recovered through excavation and fieldwalking. However, there are tantalizing traces of the religion and ritual of these people. Archaeologists often use aerial photography to identify previously unknown sites. Sometimes buried archaeology can be seen as distinct lines of a different colour in growing crops. This can reveal the presence of buried structures or of filled-in farm ditches. Information gathered in this way has shown traces of what may be barrows (burial mounds) underneath the later Iron Age farming landscape. The mounds that once covered them have been ploughed flat but the ditches which once surrounded them can still be seen as distinct rings from the air.

An Iron Age farmstead
The traces of what might be houses in the Methley area only date back as far as the Middle Iron Age (500-300 BC). These were found by archaeologists working on a site at Moss Carr. The initial settlement seems to have been fairly small – a single circular building standing within a ditched enclosure. The structure may have been a house with wooden walls and a conical thatched roof. If that was the case, it may have been very cold in winter for archaeologists found no trace of a hearth (although it is possible that later ploughing removed any remains). The house was rebuilt several times, sometime having additional structures added.

Other structures were also built in adjacent areas. One of these at least was unlikely to have been a dwelling. As can be seen from the accompanying photograph, this feature was not a complete circle but had two arms projecting outwards. This gives the feature the impression of something similar to a very large keyhole in shape. Archaeologists are not certain what such structures are used for. It has been suggested that they might have been stock pens. Animal could have been driven in through the wide neck of the enclosure and then penned up in the circular part.

There is also some evidence for Roman activity at Moss Carr, but this is slight. Archaeologists therefore believe that there was no continuity of occupation on the site from Iron Age to Roman times.

The Romans and after
When the Romans invaded the North of Britain in the early 70s AD they must have found a landscape very much like the farming landscape of Georgian England – small farmsteads, with fields and coppices in-between. There is evidence from elsewhere in the region that these field systems expanded under Roman rule. Those who had surplus produce would find a ready market in the settlements that emerged around such Romans forts as Adel, Castleford and York.

What happened to it all? No-one really knows. Victorian authors thought that the whole of the empire was plunged into barbarism when Roman rule collapsed. This is why they named the period The Dark Ages. Many modern historians think that when the economic infrastructure collapsed everything just slowly ground to a halt.

When the Anglo-Saxon settlers arrived in the Aire valley in the 7th century AD they again had to clear land for farming. In many cases the place-name element ley, which is found in places such as Headingley, Armley and Burley, is derived from an Old English (the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons) word for 'forest clearing'.

Its frequency in the area shows how much land had to be cleared before crops could be grown. The ley element in the name Methley is derived from a different root. The name means 'land surrounded by water and reflects its situation at the junction of the Aire and the Calder.

Though perhaps even at Methley the founders of the new village had to start from scratch.

* There's lot more information about local places on the WYAAS website at: www.archaeology.wyjs.org.uk
Have a look today. You never know what you might find.