NHER 66899 (Monument record) - ?Bronze Age, Late Saxon and undated remains

December 2022. Trial Trenching.
Evaluation of proposed development site.
The five trenches excavated all revealed archaeologically-significant remains, although the majority of the ditches and discrete features recorded produced little or no dating evidence.
Potentially the earliest feature was a small pit or post-hole that contained two handmade grog-tempered pottery sherds of probable Bronze Age date.
An irregular hollow interpreted as either a large pit or a group of intercutting north-to-south aligned ditches was the only other feature to produce reasonable dating evidence – being found to contain 10 sherds of Late Saxon pottery. The fill of this feature also contained fragments of animal bone and a number of mussel shells but a sample taken from this deposit but little else in the way of plant macrofossils apart from charcoal and a small number of indeterminate cereal grains.
The ditches recorded displayed a variety of alignments, suggesting multiple phases of activity are probably represented. It is notable that a number were aligned either east-north-east to west-south-west or north-north-east to south-south-west, as this suggests they were potentially associated with the extensive Saxon to medieval field system recorded during excavations to the north (which was shown to have probable Roman origins – see NHER 32791). Unfortunately the only find recovered from the features excavated at this location was an undiagnostic pottery sherd of Roman or Late Saxon date.
A number of probable pits and post-holes were also recorded, none of which produced any dating evidence.
See report (S1) for further details.
P. Watkins (HES), 16 May 2023.