Trench 25: the car park trench

Jul 1
3 min read

WARNING: the following article contains images and text related to human remains

Last year, we opened a new trench in the carpark, Trench 25, which contained far more than we had bargained for. In this new blog, we discuss what we found during the season and the plan for exciting further work in the upcoming season.

Geophysical survey and subsequent excavations by SHARP between 2007 and 2013 confirmed the presence of a large, planned village, arranged around a grid with plots defined by east-west and north-south aligned ditches, dating from the eighth to tenth centuries AD. The geophysical survey suggests that these ditches peter out to the east, where there is a large natural depression, consisting of a post-glacial gully running to the bottom of the valley north of the site. Trench 24 is currently examining the malt house complex located further up the slope, but apart from a few test pits dug 20 years ago, we didn’t know much about this area.

The primary aim of this trench was to investigate whether the extent of the early medieval settlement had been reached – perhaps the ditches seen running towards the depression drained into a historic stream within this channel – or do they continue and are simply masked by the later colluvial material which has brought down the hill by a mix of rain wash and gravity over the intervening centuries to infill the channel? If so, the settlement could potentially be bigger than previously thought.

Trench 1, excavated as part of the initial phase of the settlement project in 2007, was intended to be re-excavated as part of Trench 25 but had been incorrectly plotted on the main trench location plans, so was only clipped in the north-western corner. Work by the Norfolk Archaeological Unit in 1991 also encountered Anglo-Saxon occupational deposits and undated ditches and gullies, so we had some idea of what we’d expect to encounter under the large build-up of soil.

The first feature encountered within our trench, however, was not part of the early medieval occupation of Sedgeford, but was a spread of chalk rubble overlain by crushed chalk to create a smoother trackway. Historic map analysis suggested it led towards a known quarry pit, but the track itself is not on early maps of the area, so it had likely fallen out of use by the time accurate surveying of the area was conducted in the late 1800s. The trackway was probably late medieval or post-medieval in date, as there was a large amount of different colluvial material between it and a context found below which contained artefacts dating to the early medieval period. These artefacts consisted of smaller oyster shell and animal bone fragments, and some pottery sherds, suggesting the glacial valley was deeper 1200 years ago but was gradually filled in by material washing down from the settlement area above. The plough soil above also contained a decorated pin dating to the 1600s, suggesting a potential end date for the trackway, although between its loss and our discovery had probably been substantially moved by the plough and mixed by roots or animal burrowing.

Throughout the season, large quantities of iron objects were recovered from the trench, almost all found by hardworking Hugo: Most were nails, but there were horseshoe fragments around the trackway, potentially having been lost by a horse on the track itself. Other finds included a fragment of a probable sickle blade from within the waste material from the settlement above, providing evidence for agricultural activities associated with the occupation of the area.

A major discovery, found beneath the layer containing the Anglo-Saxon artefacts during the last week, was a prehistoric crouched burial, discussed in more detail in another of our upcoming blogs. The small number of features we had encountered beneath the colluvium were being excavated and recorded prior to the trench being backfilled at the end of the season, with a plan to return next summer to continue to identify and record occupation activity within the glacial gully, when one of those features turned out to be a pit containing a skeleton. As this was discovered only three days before the end of the season, the decision was taken to record its location and cover to protect it before the trench was backfilled the following week. Two other crouched burials are known from the immediate area – a late neolithic/early bronze age burial found 70m away to the west, and a mid-iron age burial only 30m to the west - so combined with the major Iron Age ritual site in the field to the north, underneath the later Anglo-Saxon cemetery, this represents a potentially significant discovery.