Country diary: A blank, unsettling place where even death has been erased | Amy-Jane Beer

Wetwang, East Yorkshire: Around this site of an iron age cemetery, the rats cluck and pheasants take flight in neurotic clattersIt's late and cold, but I'm passing a place long on my wishlist and convince myself there's just enough daylight to go and see it. Wetwang Slack is famous for a huge iron age cemetery, used before Roman occupation. While the spectacular chariot burials nearby captured most headlines, most here in the valley bottom were more modest graves. The shallowest were lost to centuries of ploughing, but deeper ones were preserved until the 1970s, when planned gravel works prompted mass excavation and exhumation.Cartographically, the slack is a non-feature in an otherwise rolling landscape: the OS 1:25,000 shows several fields containing nothing but white space. Even so, I'm not at all prepared for the blankness of the place. The ground is indeed white, more chalk and shattered flint than earth, with winter wheat struggling out of drilled rows. A colossal new barn looks more like a distribution centre. Continue reading...