Bedfordshire begins with the sedimented memory of coccoliths, deep layers of soft bodies forming chalk under water, ready to be transformed into a landscape of white lines and steep escarpments.
Today the county is landlocked, but its story starts 70 million years ago when the area was covered by a warm shallow sea, teeming with life. The tropical waters were home to microscopic algae known as coccoliths, as they died, they fell to the bottom of the sea and their skeletons formed a deep layer of sediment on the sea floor. In time this turned to chalk, a very pure form of limestone with no trace of sand or mud.
When the Ice Age arrived, around 2.6 million years ago, the sea levels fell, and glacial erosion shaped the landscape into rounded hills, dry valleys and chalk ridges. The chalk landscapes of the Chilterns dominate the south of Bedfordshire, including the dramatic chalk ridge, wildflower rich meadows and fragments of ancient beech woods.
People have lived on, worked with, and crossed the chalk for thousands of years. Prehistoric sites include the Five Knolls Barrow Cemetery on Dunstable Downs. Barrows are burial mounds constructed in chalk over individual burials with later burials (usually cremations) dug into the outside of the mounds. Excavations in the 1850s and 1920s showed that the cemetery dates to the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age periods (3,000-1,200 BC). Sharpenhoe Clappers was home to an Iron Age Hill Fort (800 BC – 43 AD), part of a series of defensive sites along the chalk ridge.
The thinness of the chalky soil would come to frustrate farmers, but the soft stone would be light enough to build church vaults and be carved into fonts.
Landscapes across Bedfordshire were similarly shaped by marine life, from the oolitic limestone of the north to the Oxford Clay region. The seas were filled with sea urchins, corals, sponges, sea urchins, oysters, ammonites, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.
The underwater world of coccoliths and other marine creatures formed the Bedfordshire landscapes we see today, setting in place the geology which would determine how generations of people would live, what they would farm, where they would site monasteries, what building materials they would use and what kinds of work they would do.
Read the introduction to this series here:
