a very busy week!

Last week (27th-31st October), the Trust was very busy with fieldwork projects. These included our continuing excavation at Brightlingsea quarry, and the monitoring of soil-stripping at Birch quarry ahead of excavation of features. We also undertook soil-stripping, the machine-excavation of a trench and the excavation of features at St Helena School in Colchester and the machine-excavation of evaluation trenches at a site near Great Bentley. We are engaged in two long, on-going watching briefs, at Greyfriars and at Castle Park in Colchester. We were so busy that even Trust senior archaeologist Howard Brooks had to go out and monitor some soil-stripping! We are also waiting to start two other fieldwork projects in Colchester, so we are wondering if Trust director Philip himself will venture out on site, as well…

At Brightlingsea, last week, we uncovered pit complexes and ditches, including a large ditch. This is a multi-period site, with features of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and prehistoric date which represent centuries of agricultural activity here and, we now think, the remains of a small Anglo-Saxon settlement.

As well as all our fieldwork projects last week, work continued here at Roman Circus House on the writing of desk-based assessments and reports on fieldwork. Our teams of archaeology and renovation volunteers were also hard at work, as always; last week, processing the finds from our current fieldwork projects and renovating the former NAAFI kitchen in Roman Circus House.

On Friday, one of the Trust’s Trustees brought in some archaeology books and archaeological finds which belonged to Len Leach, a keen amateur archaeologist and long-standing member of the Friends of CAT, and Trust volunteer, who had also worked in the 1950s on excavations at St Albans. Len, sadly, died a few years ago. The Trustee had been asked to find a good home for some of Len’s precious archaeological possessions and kindly offered a selection of them to the Trust. The gift includes some Roman pottery fragments from St Albans and some very early and extremely interesting flints from Kent.

The image shows some of Len’s prehistoric flints from Kent. [Image to follow.]

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