Test Pit 3

Test Pit 3. Oaken, 10 Church Close (HXN 063)

Property description and location

Oaken is one of a series of 20th century bungalows lying to the east of the parish church and to the north of Green Street and west of Fisher's Lane. Church Close is shown by Skynner, the Tithe map and 1st Ed OS as open fields (named in the apportionment as 'Upper Church Close', in use as pasture, and owned by Sir Edward Kerrison). Previous monitoring of groundworks at the adjacent property in 2008 had not identified any archaeological deposits (Everett 2008).

Test Pit description

The test pit was placed in an area of flat grass lawn 12m to the east of the house. This showed a thin topsoil overlying a thick deposit of dense mid brown silt/loam with flints, Context 1, which in turn lay above the natural clay subsoil at a depth of c.0.7m.

Test Pit finds summary

By far the greatest quantity of medieval pottery seen during the test pitting project was recovered from Test Pit 3. The group consisted of forty-one sherds from the five lowest spits. Seven of these sherds are hand-made Early medieval wares (EMW) dating to the 11th-12th centuries. The remainder of the medieval pottery is made up of medieval coarsewares (MCW) dating to the late 12th-14th centuries. A sherd of LMT (15th-16th centuries) was present in Spit 3 and the top two spits contained pottery dating to the Victorian period or later. Some early post-medieval ceramic building material and fired clay was also recovered.

Test Pit Discussion

The main deposit within the pit, Context 1, was relatively clean and homogenous, with very little modern or post-medieval material, confirming its apparent historic land-use as arable land prior to the creation of Church Close. The quantity of medieval pottery indicates probable occupation in the immediate area from the early medieval period, unsurprising bearing in mind the close proximity of the church but, as previous work in the garden has been blank, it is possible that much of the pottery, particularly the smaller sherds, could have arrived on site from elsewhere via manuring practices etc.