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Bronze Age Bradley Fen 2000 - 800 BC

Bradley Fen is situated on the western edge of a small fen island near Peterborough known as Whittlesey. The island formed the eastern edge of a large embayment known as the Flag Fen Basin which during the Bronze Age was a small inlet on the very edge of the Cambridgeshire fen. The basin gets its name from the Flag Fen post alignment, a Bronze Age timber barrier that stretched between Whittlesey and Fengate, Peterborough. Excavations at Fengate in the 70's and 80's by Francis Pryor found the western edge of the basin to be enclosed by Bronze Age field systems. More recently excavations at King's Dyke West, a site situated immediately to the east of Bradley Fen, located an Early Bronze Age monument complex and several Late Bronze Age round houses.
A plan of Bronze Age Bradley Fen illustrates a neat and neighbourly arrangement of houses, fields and watering holes spread evenly along the eastern edge of the Flag Fen embayment.

The houses were round and without exception had doorways facing towards the east and away from the edge of the embayment. The fieldsystem was made up of small rectangular fields bounded by ditches and banks. Its principle boundary stretched out along the edge of the island delineating the division between the dry terrace and the 'wet' basin.

Strips of fields extended off of the principle boundary at forty-five degrees, whereas smaller westerly extensions reached out into the basin at right angles. Situated beyond the principle boundary but within the scope of the small field extensions were a series of large watering holes. These had been made big enough take cattle into at times when the water table was low. Each watering hole was encircled by compacted gravel surfaces which had been put down to consolidate the surrounding soil. Large mounds of burnt stone and flint covered the ground to the southern side of the watering holes and obscured small groups of pits and postholes. In between the watering holes, burnt mounds and ditches, were metalwork deposits including a single hoard of twenty weapons. Pits and postholes associated with the terrace settlement were found to contain both articulated and disarticulated human bones. A pit was also found at the site that contained a burial of an aurochs, the ancestor of modern cattle.