NHER 65273 (Monument record) - ?Prehistoric, post-medieval to modern and undated features

November 2013. Desk-based Assessment.
Heritage Statement produced for proposed underground electrical cable connecting solar park at West Raynham Airfield to a grid connection west of Hempton.
See report (S1) for further details.
P. Watkins (HES), 2 February 2022.

July-August 2014. Watching Brief and Strip Map and Sample Excavation.
Archaeological mitigation work undertaken during installation of underground electrical cable for West Raynham Solar Park.
No archaeologically-significant features or deposits were observed during the stripping of this section of the cable route easement.
The subsequent excavation of a narrower trench for the cable itself revealed a number of features. These included two wide, shallow, intercutting, apparently linear features at the western end of the field, the latter of which produced two sherds of Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age pottery. Although recorded as ditches their broad, flat bases makes this improbable – it is more likely that they were badly truncated discrete features or natural hollows of some kind.
Three widely-dispersed ditches were also identified. Two of these features were aligned north-north-west to south-south-east, which is similar to the orientations of a number of former field boundaries depicted on the Ordnance Survey First Edition map (S2). The easternmost of these ditches was found to contain modern brick and glass and therefore must have been associated with a boundary that had been extant until relatively recently. The western ditch was undated but may have coincided with one of the boundaries depicted on (S2).
The third ditch lay at the eastern end of the field and was aligned more north-west to south-east. This feature was undated, the only finds recovered being several fragments of rabbit bone (which was potentially intrusive).
No unstratified finds were recovered.
See report (S3) for further details.
The archive associated with this work has been deposited with Norwich Castle Museum (NWHCM : 2016.203).
P. Watkins (HES), 2 February 2022.