Alfred's Castle

The  excavations at Alfred's Castle were part of the  'Hill Forts of the Ridgeway' Project undertaken by the Department of Archaeology and the Centre for Continuing Education of Oxford University who carry out research and train student archaeologists.

We heard that although 99% of training excavations are boring, this one had again yielded interesting results. The position of the first trench was intended to find out more about the Romano-British building discovered earlier. It appears to be a single corridor type villa with extensions, the last of which was in the period of 3rd to 4th Century AD. Some walls appear to have fallen down and been shored up by a buttress made of local stone to stop further collapse. The new extensions were probably Romano-British, with painted plaster walls, but little luxurious jewellery and no hypocaust, which probably means they were less affluent inhabitants than the original owner.

In another trench the corner of a dry stone wall they found was probably Roman in origin as Romano-British people tended to use mortar and build curved walls rather than square corners. A quantity of animal bones was found in its vicinity, all had been butchered, so perhaps this had been a kitchen. Beneath this Romano-British extension early iron age artefacts were found, a crucible with some copper still left in it and a skeleton of a very young lamb.

A double row of stake holes had been found adjacent to another puzzling large pit. This pit had an unusual shape, the top being a bigger radius, more like a cone than a cylinder with straight sides. It had been left open to weathering, and was first thought to have been a flint mine, but about 3 metres down the pit had a flat bottom which is not deep enough for a flint mine. The pit had been filled with chalky material, unlike the more usual dark soil found in storage pits. Amongst the chalk were some entire legs of beef, some with the hoof still attached. One theory is that inhabitants buried enough household effects and stores of food in the hidden pit to enable them to restart their lives after the house had been destroyed by marauding bands.

A further trench investigated the construction of the inner rampart wall to try to locate the original entrance. Large sarsens had been placed on top of a mound which had later been reinforced with large posts. The area would have been thickly wooded in the iron age, so large trees were available nearby. There was also a trench to locate the outer ditch which stretches some 100 metres across the adjacent wheat field. This was also found to be a 3 metre deep ditch. Thermo-luminescence had been used to date artefacts found in the ditch wall. At one point it was overlaid by an iron-age cut which may have had a palisade.

Some 'artists-in-residence' had been taking plaster casts of this trench because they are hoping to re-create this early landscape. They are trying to find a connection between themselves and the people who built both this ditch and the ring barrow visible in aerial photographs of the area.

This is the last year of excavation at Alfred's Castle, soon after our visit the excavations were carefully covered and the topsoil and grass replaced. Several years of analysis and report writing remain to be done on this project.

Reports of work in previous years, 1995 White Horse Hill, 1996 and 1997 Segsbury Camp, and 1998 Alfred's Castle can be found on the Internet at http://www.arch.ox.ac.uk/research/research_projects/ridgeway