In the late 2000s, the development of the country’s biggest glasshouse complex by Fresca Group Ltd at Monkton Road Farm on Isle of Thanet led to one of the largest open area excavations ever conducted in Kent. The development covered 90 hectares (about 220 acres) of previously open agricultural land, including the building of seven industrial scale greenhouses, a packhouse, a research and education centre and associated roads, drainage and other infrastructure, and considerable remodelling of the existing landscape, through cut and fill works to create the eight flat platforms. Kent County Council Heritage Group stipulated that those areas about to be reduced should be subjected to comprehensive archaeological investigation.

This lavishly illustrated and approachable book presents a description of the superb archaeology uncovered as a result, 6000 years of farming, everyday life and ritual, from some of the earliest farmers in the British Isles, to Copper and Bronze Age burials and monuments, prehistoric and Romano-British landscapes, Anglo-Saxons and hitherto completely unknown agglomeration of medieval settlement covering the entire site, complete with mysterious underground chambers. These buildings and farmsteads fell out of use and disappeared from memory hundreds of years before the hilltop agrarian site came to be characterised by lonely seamarks to guide post-medieval mariners, and finally the location of occasional Second World War installations.