It's that time of year when the weather is getting a bit warmer and it is time for me to wander once more into the green fields of England, with a machine that goes beep, to find the lost wossnames of times past. It isn't just my own Roman period projects that I work on though, I also do work for various local societies, as many don't have their own geophysics equipment. Here's a selection of projects that I've been involved with recently.
The Pepperpot, Brighton
At the end of Tower Road, Brighton, there is a tower (no surprise there) which apparently used to house pumping equipment for a well that supplied the Attree Villa and estate. There was apparently a water tank and an underground tunnel under what is now the road, and Brighton and Hove Archaeological Society along with the Friends of the Pepperpot asked me to take a look with my radar. There were signs of rubble in the area where the water tank would have been, and very vague signs of the tunnel, but the results weren't all that clear. You can see the full report here.
The interpretation of the GPR survey over an old map of the area around the Pepperpot
Butts Brow Neolithic Enclosure, Eastbourne
Though mostly filled with a combination of car park and a clump of trees, there is a second neolithic enclosure above Willingdon, Eastbourne (the first being the more well known Combe Hill causewayed enclosure). After a season of excavation targetting the surviving sections of bank and ditch by the Eastbourne Natural History and Archaeology Society, I was asked to see if I could find them some internal features to dig up. It's rather difficult to see cuts in chalk with radar, especially with modern tracks and bands of natural flint around, but the ditch was slightly visible as a negative feature cutting through the flint layers. It's the dark band in the image below. The contrast between the ditch and surrounding chalk was very slight though, so smaller internal features were not visible. You can see the full report here and you can see a video of the results here. Details of a dig this summer will be published here at some point.
The neolithic ditch cutting through a band of natural flint
Southborough Post Mill
Just over the border into Kent this time, the Southborough and High Brooms Amateur Archaeological Society asked me to look at a platform in the woods of Southborough Common, the site of a post mill. Geophysics surveys in woodlands are never easy, and while the woods had been cleared, some trees remained. Both earth resistance and magnetometry were used, the results of which are in the channel merge image below. The magnetometry didn't show much apart from a big chunk of metal and some surrounding (no longer visible) fencing, the earth resistance showed a high resistance area on the east side of the platform, which may have been the site of the mill. You can see the full report here.
Earth resistance in green and magnetometry in red.
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