Bridge Farm Excavations 2024

A hectic last year in Trench 7 with the excavation of the timber-lined well plus a new trench next year.

Trench 7, opened in 2018, will be closed this year having offered a very complex, multiphase archaeology that took 6 years to fully investigate.

It has been another finds-rich season, especially in pottery; with whole pots, fine ware dishes, cups and beakers, samian mortaria and bases with maker’s marks. Other finds include: a diamond-shaped, bronze plate pin; a Hadrian coin with the first personification of Britannia, 30% of a turquoise glass dish, a shard of snake thread glass, and a lot more.

Located over the centre of the settlement, Trench 7 surprisingly proliferated with large and often very deep pits, as well as several rows of postholes, including the rectangular alignment of a building.

The features suggested industry whilst the finds showed a buoyant consumer community.

But as always, the best was saved till last, with a waterlogged timber-framed well found deep below a later Roman-period pit.  Investigation required a massive effort, hand-digging a series of 0.5m steps and shoring the section of the upper pit to give safe access. It took the full six weeks and a lot of hard work by students, volunteers, and supervisors, and the constant use of submersible pumps, to expose the square timber frame, remove some sample timbers and wet float the grey clay from the interior for organic finds. These included several leather shoe fragments, a wooden knife handle and a birch wood stake complete with bark and some animal bones, including several dog bones.  

But where to go next year? Resistivity surveying over the winter will cement our ideas for a trench for the 2025 and following seasons. And now we know!  Trench 8 has been opened at the eastern entrance to the enclosure and surface indications looking good.