NHER 31199 (Monument record) - Cropmarks and ditches of a possible causeway or boundary

1946. RAF aerial photograph.
Causeway.

1971. Ordnance Survey aerial photograph.
Causeway.

1995.
Ditched causeway, 15m wide (centre ditch - centre ditch) and 0.5m high in grassland to northwest of farm buildings. East part is best preserved, much less obvious ditches to west. Features extends as crop mark in arable to west, where it turns to south and reduces to a single drain. Slight undulations but not convincing.
B. Cushion (NLA) March 1995.

February 2008. Norfolk NMP
Parallel curvilinear cropmarks defining a boundary or trackway of possible medieval date are visible on aerial photographs (S1-S4). Two parallel ditches are present defining a roughly L-shaped curvilinear course. At their western end the ditches are visible as soilmarks measuring up to 11m wide and spaced 12m apart. They continue to the east as narrower earthwork ditches. These two ditches appear to continue to the east of Station Road, passing to the north of Middleton Towers, where they are recorded as part of HER 3395. Viewed together, these cropmarks and earthworks appear to form the corner of a large double ditched enclosure around the northwest side of Middleton Towers (NHER 3393).
These parallel ditches have previously been interpreted as defining a causeway presumably associated with a road. However, there is no firm evidence to support a road on this course. A 1550 map (S4) shows a curving dyke with common land located on both sides on approximately the same course as the double ditches to the west of Station Road. It is not clear from the map whether this is the same feature or not. A further possible interpretation of the ditches is that they formed the boundary of an unlocated medieval deer park that is recorded at Middleton in a 1369 Inquisition Post-Mortem (S5). However, the presence of common land on both sides of the ditch shown on the 1550 map make this less likely, assuming that the cropmarks do relate to the feature shown on the map.
J. Albone (NMP), 05 February 2008