Excavated sites and casual finds point to the existence
of a series of Anglo-Saxon settlements, dating from the mid-fifth to
mid-seventh century, along the Darent river valley, in the Cray valley
and surrounding coastlands. They form part of a larger pattern of
Anglo-Saxon settlement within the valleys of the tributaries of the
river Thames and on the Thames coastlands. In the Darent valley, in what
is now west Kent, the Saxon settlement pattern can be directly related
to the pre-existing Roman system of villa estates.
The river Darent rises in the Vale of Holmesdale, cuts
through the hard Upper Chalk of the North Downs and flows across the
London Basin to join the river Thames. For most of its length the valley
is approximately two miles wide, opening out as it merges into the
Thames coastlands. The Roman Watling Street and the ancient trackway
known as the Pilgrims’ Way provide easy access to the valley from
north and south, respectively. Saxon settlers may have travelled up
along the Thames estuary by ship into the |
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Darent
valley, where they would have found a favourable place to settle for a
people practising an agricultural/stock-rearing/fishing economy. The
chalk bed-rock of the North Downs is capped with clay-with-flints and is
heavily wooded, but along the Darent valley much of this woodland would
have been cleared by pre-Roman settlers, at latest by the estate workers
of the Romano-British villas which are particularly numerous here. The
wet but fertile soil is shallow on the valley slopes but deeper in the
valley bottom. The Darent valley, therefore, was an appealing area for
the incoming Saxons to settle from the middle of the fifth century
onwards.
A total of eighteen cemeteries, five settlements and five
casual finds belonging to the period from the mid-fifth through to the
mid-seventh century are known from the Darent and Cray valleys and
surrounding coastlands and are listed in table 1 (Fig.
1). Three |