NHER 30182 (Monument record) - Post-medieval and undated ditches

October 1993. Fieldwalking.
Finder reports evidence of east to west road across site. Not on (S1).
See NHER 30183 for details of artefacts recovered.
W. Milligan (NCM) 2 November 1993. Amended by P. Watkins (HES), 24 August 2020.

July 2018. Trial Trenching. Extended to whole field [1].
Evaluation of proposed development site.
The twenty trenches excavated revealed a number of ditches and a single possible post-hole. The majority of the ditches were of probable late post-medieval date, corresponding with field boundaries marked on either the 1838 Acle Tithe map or the late 19th-century 1st Edition Ordnance Survey map. Finds were however limited to single fragments of clay tobacco pipe stem and animal bone. The ditches that cannot be related to mapped boundaries include several features that appear to have had different alignments to those of the post-medieval features and were therefore potentially associated with earlier phases of activity.
A thick clayey silt alluvial deposit was observed in the easternmost trenches. In the north-east corner of the site this presumably natural deposit was overlain by heavy, diesel-contaminated silt deposits containing modern organic material thought to represent material dredged from a nearby stream.
No evidence was uncovered for the ‘road’ that had been observed in 1993. It should however be noted that two of the former field boundary ditches exposed were east-to-west aligned features that ran the full length of the site. Could crop or soil marks associated with these parallel (but not contemporary) boundaries have been mistaken for traces of a former road?
See report (S2) for further details.
The archive associated with this work has probably been deposited with Norwich Castle Museum (NWHCM : 2018.147) [2].
P. Watkins (HES), 24 August 2020.

November 2021. Broads Hidden Heritage: Aerial Perspectives.
Cropmarks visible in this field on Google Earth aerial photographs from 2006 (S3) could relate to some of the features noted above but could instead be the product of recent agricultural activity.
S. Tremlett (Norfolk County Council, Historic Environment Service), 24 November 2021.