Test Pit 10: The Lumpy Bumpy Field (The Mere)

Test Pit 10 was excavated in The Mere to investigate one of the most intriguing visual earthworks in the village landscape: two prominent, parallel linear features running across the ground. Significantly, these “lumps and bumps” cut straight through existing field boundaries, indicating that they predate the current hedgerow system.

To determine whether these features were man-made or natural, we previously turned to geophysics. While a 2013 magnetometry survey showed no magnetic signatures of interest, our resistivity survey in April of this year told a different story—revealing distinct bands of high resistance directly beneath the surface along these parallel lines, suggesting packed stone, hardstanding, or buried structural foundations.

By placing Test Pit 10 directly over one of these high-resistance anomalies, our aim was to ground-truth the geophysics, examine the subsurface composition of the feature, and help solve the mystery of what these prominent earthworks originally represented.