West Heslerton is situated on the southern margins of the Vale of Pickering at the foot of the north-facing scarp of the Yorkshire Wolds. The present landscape is intensively farmed under a mixed agrarian regime except in those areas on the steep scarp face of the Wolds too difficult to plough, which remain under permanent pasture. There is very little woodland in the area, this being confined to pockets on the scarp face of the Wolds and planted shelter-belts both in the Vale and on the top of the Wolds. A number of distinctive geomorphological zones can be recognized, ranging from the chalk upland with dry-valleys on the Wolds proper to the lacustrine clays at the centre of the Vale of Pickering by the River Derwent. An important feature of the soils in the area is the presence of a belt of aeolian sand which follows the southern margins of the Vale between c. 35m and 45m AOD. This aeolian deposit, which appears to have become mobile by the late Mesolithic at the latest, remains mobile today, and has obscured and protected archaeological features, as has been demonstrated at the Cook's Quarry site (Powlesland et al. 1986). The medieval parish structure along the southern edge of the Vale of Pickering incorporates a balance of land across the principal zones with parishes generally extending south from the Derwent up onto the top of the Wolds. A similar picture is present on the northern side of the valley with parishes extending from the river up onto the North Yorkshire Moors; here the reduced land potential of the moorland areas is evidenced by the greater area of moorland incorporated relative to the richer environment in the valley bottom. Only one parish, Yedingham, in the centre of the valley, is confined to a single landscape zone. Yedingham was a monastic parish that controlled one of only two bridging points across the Derwent above Malton, and was at the navigable head of the river, and thus had a quite different economic base.
The parishes on the southern half of the valley extend up onto the top of the Yorkshire Wolds where upstanding earthworks, particularly the long and round barrows and linear earthworks, 'the Wold Entrenchments', provided a focus of archaeological investigation during the late nineteenth and early part of this century. The examination of these upstanding monuments has given us a biased record of past activity in the region, the bias being in favour of the Yorkshire Wolds, which remains one of the most significant sources of evidence for the later prehistory of the British Isles, second perhaps only to Wessex. A second area of bias, that should concern us more, is the paucity of evidence for settlement as opposed to burial; a problem that, however, is not exclusive to eastern Yorkshire. Prior to the start of work at West Heslerton, the Vale of Pickering remained largely as a blank on distribution maps of any period except for Star Carr and associated sites at the eastern end of the valley, and a few sites identified during mineral extraction such as the Anglian cemetery at Staxton (Brewster 1963). The general perception was that most of the valley had supported little or no activity during the prehistoric period and that only minimal activity around the margins of the valley had been present into the medieval period (Pierpoint 1981). This picture could not be further from reality.
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Last updated: Wed Apr 23 1997