Our current project involves the search for a moated hall which was destroyed around the middle of the 18th century. After carrying out a 60 by 60 metre geophys survey and digging 10 exploratory test pits in the area where we thought the hall lay, we were having little success. While we'd found some prehistoric flint waste, some medieval pot and a few pre-industrial era roof tiles we had no sign of the building. We therefore decided to go over our map research again from scratch.
Give that we only had a somewhat skewed photograph of the only map that shows the old building, matching up features with the present day landscape was something of a challenge. This time, two members independently carried out the work and both came to the same conclusion: that the old hall was about 20 metres outside out search area!
As soon as we put in a test pit in this new area we could tell it was different as we came down onto a creamy sandy layer rather than the usual degraded sandstone and clay interface. Extension of the test pit into a trench soon revealed what appears to be a foundation trench consisting of stones, tile, slag and possibly broken fragments of worked stone set in a clay matrix within a metre wide cut as shown in the photo above. Better yet, as we uncovered this structure we found half a dozen pieces of pot, all of which are earlier than 1700. Hopefully following the feature will lead us to discover more about this intriguing site.