Part of a series of bulletins from the BAS excavations at Wickham HouseFollow the project on our YouTube channel
Attendees: Stuart, Julian, Lindsey, Paula, Chloe, Jill, Malcolm, John H, Geoff, Philip, Millie, Thalia, and Keith
In Trench 15 it is looking like the fill of the Roman road ditch with large flints/building rubble underlies the entire length of the intersection of the area where the lane joins the road from the north. This rubble is covered by a thin layer of gravel. This suggests that the lane was constructed in the 4th century AD as in 2025 a coin of Magentius (AD351-351) was found beneath this rubble fill. This prompted a change in strategy, so Paula, Millie and Malcolm moved to the north end of the Trench 15 to clean up the cobbled surface, record it and get ready to excavate a slot across it to evaluate how the southern end of the lane relates to the slot across the lane excavated in 2025. Good progress was made, but there is still plenty to do later in the week as seen in Figure 1.
In Trench 16 the focus for today was to define the northern end of the masonry wall discovered in week #1 which was undertaken by Lindsey, Geoff and John H whilst Stuart completed the recording of contexts excavated to date in this trench. Good progress was made in the defining and cleaning this feature as well as finds of glass from a storage bottle, a small fragment of glass from a fine vessel, pottery and a small piece of wall plaster. However it is still not clear whether this a a ‘return’ of the wall heading to the southeast or just the ‘end’ of the substantial masonry structure to the south of Trench 16. Figure 2 shows the progress made by the end of the day, but again more work is needed to before a comprehensive interpretation can be made.
Trench 17 again got off to an exciting start with Thalia discovering a Roman coin as seen in Figure 4. Early comparisons suggest that this coin is a copper-alloy numus showing an “Emperor standing with globe’ (SPES REI PUBLICE) on the reverse which probably dates to the mid-4th Century AD. The focus in Trench 17 was cleaning the surface of flint/sarsen rubble ready for recording, which also revealed an area rich in pottery and bone deposits in the west of the trench.
To the southeast of the excavation site, the earth resistance geophysics survey continued with Philip, Jill, Chloe and John H. The results from today’s work reveals further details of the roadside building identified last week on the north side of the Roman road. Work will continue to complete this survey grid during by the end of this week.
