There’s a fort at the bottom of my garden

DIGGING in the back garden became much more than a weekend pastime for Ann and John Hearle when they discovered their lawn was once the site of an Iron Age hill fort.

For the past eight years the Hearle’s garden and surrounding fields, in the village of Mellor near Stockport, has been a huge archaeological site, revealing evidence of human occupation from the Mesolithic Period (around 10,000 years ago) up to the present day with the only gap being the Dark Ages.

“At the moment there are enormous holes between the vegetable patch and the village church,” said Ann Hearle. “I’ve lived here for 22 years, and my husband for 38 years, but we didn’t notice anything until the drought of 1995, when a green line appeared.”