This excavation was undertaken over a three-week period from in June and July 2025 in partnership with the Chiltern Heritage and Archaeological Partnership (CHAP) under the direction of Dr Wendy Morrison who was holding an archaeological summer school.
Lidar and aerial photographs had shown the outline and dimensions of part of a possible Roman marching camp in the corner of a field to which we now had access due to a change of ownership. This was adjacent to the larger ditch and bank enclosure within which we had undertaken geophysical surveys in 2023.
A resistivity survey undertaken at the end of May 2025 revealed strong evidence of the rectangular ditch and an unusual feature within the enclosed area which was unlikely to be the result of ploughing (see image left).
Wendy chose to excavate the ditch feature (T1) with her summer school students, while in a separate trench (T2) SOAG members tried to investigate the anomalous feature apparent in the resistivity. T2 was a 15 x 6m trench from which we removed the topsoil and then concentrated further excavation in the middle and south western areas of the trench.
July 2025 was mostly dry and very hot and with ground that was really dry, hard and full of flints, digging was a very slow and laborious process.
There appeared to be a possible flint surface across the central areas of the trench and in order to determine what might be causing the features apparent in the resistivity, we dug slots across the trench through the flinty layer and discovered potential ditches cut in to the reddish coloured natural clay. A single post hole was also revealed in the southern part of the trench.
This was an enigmatic and not very revealing site. There were very few finds of note, apart from what is thought to be a late-Medieval bronze book clasp, and a couple of pieces of apparently iron age pottery.
A working hypothesis is that there had been iron age occupation on the site prior to the Roman camp and the ditches had been filled in, either by natural processes or to level the site by Roman occupants as the camp was built.