George W. G. Allen

• Allen, G.W.G., 'Discovery from the Air', posthumously published in J.S.P Bradford and O.S.G. Crawford, ed., Aerial Archaeology Vol 10 (1984)

• Illustration — Major George W. G. Allen’s 1935 aerial photograph of Maiden Castle, one of the largest hillforts in Europe. In 1929 Allen learned to fly and purchased a red De Havilland Puss Moth, which he named Maid of the Mist, the first privately owned aeroplane in Oxford, which he kept at his own airfield at Clifton Hampden. Piloting his aircraft and using a hand‐made camera, he made aerial pictures mostly taken between 1933 and 1938 of known, and previously unknown, unrecorded archaeological sites. He took about 2000 photographs, mostly oblique, taken from an altitude of only 300–450 metres, a contribution that enabled interpretation by O. G. S. Crawford of archaeological sites in Wiltshire, Hampshire, Kent, Somerset, Hertfordshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Lincolnshire, but most especially in Oxfordshire. His success in detecting such sites as the Icknield Way was due to his observation and recording of what was revealed by relief in raking light and as the change in seasons and rainfall patterns altered vegetation cover, which was often densest where covered-over excavations had held moisture. In 1936 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries.