Iron Age enclosure in Lexden

In May, Chris Lister of the Trust carried out an archaeological evaluation at ‘Playgolf’, Westhouse Farm in Colchester, ahead of the construction of new facilities. The site is 2.5km to the north-west of Colchester, in the Lexden area, and lies to the west of Moat Farm Dyke, which is part of the extensive and complex earthwork defensive system of Camulodunum (pre-Roman Colchester). The site lies within an enclosure known from cropmarks and believed to date to the Early Iron Age.

One of the trial-trenches located the western side of the enclosure, producing pottery sherds and finds dated to the Bronze Age and Iron Age. Roman activity, in the form of a field boundary, was also recorded on the site. The enclosure was represented by a substantial ditch, approximately 3.5m wide by 1.15m deep, aligned north-east to south-west. This had two distinct fills: an upper fill of sandy silt, approximately 300mm thick at its deepest, which covered most of the width of the ditch but did not meet the edges, and a homogeneous lower fill of silty sand and gravel. Both fills contained charcoal flecking throughout, but the lower fill had a much higher inclusion of stones. Finds recovered from the upper fill included pottery sherds dated to the Late Bronze Age or Iron Age, a worked flint flake and a burnt flint. Finds from the lower fill included pottery sherds ranging in date from the Early Iron Age through to the Late Iron Age, fragments of fired clay, several flint flakes and a burnt flint.

In 1952, Lieutenant-Colonel R J Appleby cut an exploratory trench across the cropmark in the field immediately east of Westhouse Farm and located the enclosure ditch, which was recorded as 16 feet (4.9m) wide and 4 feet (1.2m) deep, containing pottery ‘thought to be Bronze Age’. Philip Crummy has dated the pottery (now lost) to between the 8th century and c 50 BC, with the earthwork itself dating to the Early or Middle Iron Age (CAR 11). Between 1999 and 2002, the Trust carried out several investigations here which confirmed the enclosure as late prehistoric in date with archaeological deposits determined to be approximately 300mm below modern ground-level (CAT Reports 47, 59, 167, 182).

Read more at http://cat.essex.ac.uk/reports/CAT-report-0647.pdf

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