The map teaches you the shapes
When I started going to the places on the map I didn't know what I was looking at half the time. A bank in a field. A few stones. A bump.
But after ten or twenty of them, you learn the shapes. Your eye gets trained without you trying.
What to look for
A round bank in a field, often with bushes or trees growing on it: a ring fort.
A lone thorn tree nobody has cut, in the middle of a field that's been ploughed for generations.
A low round mound that's too neat to be natural: a burial mound.
Stones standing upright that are too regular to be an accident. A wall or a road that bends around nothing. A corner of a field that's always been left alone.
Then you see the ones nobody marked
The official lists are good, but they don't have everything. Plenty of these were never recorded, or were recorded so long ago that nobody has looked since.
Once your eye is trained, you start spotting them from the car. In fields you've driven past your whole life.
The one beside my house
There's one right beside my house. It's on no list I can find. I'm 100% sure it's a fort or a monument of some sort: it has every marking of one.
I'd driven past it for years and never seen it. Now I can't not see it.
Start with the marked ones
Open the map where you live and go and see three or four of the places on it. Look closely at the shape of each one.
Then watch the fields on the way home. And if you find one that isn't on the map, tell me. That's how it gets better.
