That’s a wrap! Thank you to all of our wonderful volunteers who assisted our three-week excavation of the linear earthwork in Newtown park.
You can read all about the Newtown project here, but to sum up, this year’s excavation has confirmed the construction ditch for the bank measures at least 2m deep and exceeds 8m wide – we still haven’t found the outer edge, but we suspect it may lie somewhere beneath the model railway.
Today the upstanding bank is around 8m wide and 1.8m high although it was probably once a lot higher as our excavation revealed that substantial construction material had slipped back down into the ditch over time. It may be that in the 18th and 19th centuries the embankment was landscaped and deliberately reduced in size as there is certainly evidence for this during the Victorian (mid-19th century). Based on these dimensions, and a small amount of medieval pottery recovered from the lower deposits of the ditch, our feelings at the moment are that the bank appears to be part of the defences of Newtown and is likely to be medieval in origin, possibly dating from 13/14th century. Hopefully, charcoal samples we took for radiocarbon analysis will establish the construction date of the bank.
As we embark on all things post-excavation – here are a few highlights of the excavation.
