{"id":13703,"date":"2026-05-01T17:21:28","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T16:21:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/?p=13703"},"modified":"2026-05-14T08:58:51","modified_gmt":"2026-05-14T07:58:51","slug":"wickham-house-2026-day-15-blog-30th-april","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/2026\/05\/wickham-house-2026-day-15-blog-30th-april\/","title":{"rendered":"Wickham House 2026 \u2013 Day #15 Blog (30th April)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Part of a series of bulletins from the\u00a0BAS excavations at Wickham House<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow the project on our\u00a0YouTube channel<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attendees:<\/strong> Kate, Claire, Julian, James P, Ben C, Geoff, Philip, Phil C, Martin, Stewart, Jill, John H, Phil C, Tim L, Doug, Nigel B and Keith <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are now 1\/3 of the way through this season\u2019s excavation, and looking back we have already made a huge amount of progress. This has been partly due to the excellent weather, which has so far given us a 100% days of good weather for planned survey days \u2013 long may it continue! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Trench 15 Martin, Claire, Geoff, Stewart, Phil C, John and Nigel B continued to clean back the surfaces to the northeast of where the lane intersects the Roman road. Having reached the archaeological horizon for most of this area, Roman period finds of pottery and CBM quickly began to emerge together with nails and a few pieces of glass. Work will continue next week to better define the surface of the lane, the surface of the fill of the lane ditch, the occupation surfaces \u2013 and the southwest corner of the building identified in 2025 a few meters to the northeast.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 1. Martin, Claire, John and Phil C cleaning a cobbled surface in Trench 15<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In Trench 16 some great progress was made by James P, Tim L, Kate and Ben. Having established yesterday that the masonry feature was most likely a flue \u2013 probably of a corn drier, Kate continued to clean up the pit at the southwest end of the flue into which the flue had collapsed leaving a deposit of chalk\/flint. Meanwhile James cleaned up the section through the flue opened in 2025 to remove the block sample shown in Figure 3 which clearly shows the collapsed mortar upper surface of the flue onto the bed of ash lying beneath. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 2 Kate and James P carefully exploring the furnace pit and collapsed flue section of the corn drier<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Figure 3. Block sample taken from the collapsed flue section<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

At the north end of the Trench 16, Tim was focusing on defining the possible beam slot on the same alignment as the flue to assess whether this was part of the corn drier built on top of the flue, or whether this feature was part of an unrelated building. The north end of the flue does not appear to have the commonly seen \u201cT shape\u201d of many Roman period corn drier flues, so Ben was exploring a possible return to the southeast to assess whether this flue has the \u201cU shaped\u201d morphology\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 4. Cleaned half section of the corn drier furnace pit<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n
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Figure 5. Tim L carefully excavating a possible beam slot to the north of the flue<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In Trench 17, having lifted the deposit of flints to reveal a midden deposit beneath, Julian continued with a sondage to establish how far below the surface of the midden natural can be found and to establish whether the anomalies seen on the Ground Penetrating Radar at a depth of 0.80m to 1.00m could be located. So far the bottom of the midden has not been located, but continued to reveal many items of pottery dating to the 2nd<\/sup>-3rd<\/sup> centuries AD, animal bone and slag.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 6. Julian in his \u201coffice\u201d in Trench 17\u2026<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

It was the final day of the geophysics survey for this summer season at Wickham House, but Philip will continue working behind the scenes to process the huge amount of data that has been collected by \u201cteam geophys\u201d and identifying further targets for us to investigate as we close in on our research objectives. The final day collected a highly respectable 14 grid squares, and the draft results are shown below in Figure 7.  Once again, the geophys surveys have proved invaluable in homing us in straight onto interesting archaeology \u2013 and it will be interesting to reflect on the additional benefits that Ground Penetrating Radar might add to the BAS geophys armoury moving forward\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n

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Figure 7. The earth resistance survey image along Ermin Street.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Part of a series of bulletins from the\u00a0BAS excavations at Wickham House Follow the project on our\u00a0YouTube channel Attendees: Kate, Claire, Julian, James P, Ben C, Geoff, Philip, Phil C, Martin, Stewart, Jill, John H, Phil C, Tim L, Doug, Nigel B and Keith  We are now 1\/3 of the way through this season\u2019s excavation, … Continue reading Wickham House 2026 \u2013 Day #15 Blog (30th April)<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-upcoming-event"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13703"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13796,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13703\/revisions\/13796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.berksarch.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}