Lord of the Manor Ramsgate
Training Excavation with University of Kent Students
By Trust for Thanet Archaeology
One hundred and sixty six years ago, three men; William Henry Rolfe, Charles Roach Smith and Thomas Wright, began an archaeological investigation at a site near Ramsgate, a hillside overlooking Pegwell Bay. In the previous year Anglo-Saxon burials and Roman finds had been made when a deep railway cutting was excavated through open chalk downland at Ozengall Down, or Osendun, a short distance north of an inn called ‘Lord of the Manor’, giving the area its popular name. Subsequently, from 1976, the site has been explored by members of Thanet’s archaeological community. A landscape has been revealed that was settled in the early prehistoric period and which continued to be a place of cultural significance into the early medieval period.
In August 2013 a training excavation led by the Trust for Thanet Archaeology, with students from the University of Kent, once again explored part of this site. The work was funded by the University of Kent as part of a programme of fieldwork training co-ordinated by Dr. Luke Lavan.
The work aimed to revisit an earlier excavation of part of an Anglo-Saxon cemetery and re-plan graves that were emptied in 1982, to check the results and review the knowledge already gained. Initial review showed that the earlier sample of the site was quite small and there was a great deal of scope to refine the plan. A preliminary magnetometry survey revealed that a composite plan of the area produced after the excavations had a serious error, placing the ring ditch around 17m too far south of its actual location. It appeared that sections were excavated through the ring ditch on a system of compass bearings rather than by considering the orientation of the features. The sections were therefore not representative of the true relationships between features, nor very useful in defining the dimensions of later features, which, it now seems, include a substantial central cut feature.
A small area of the ring ditch, which may have surrounded the central mound of a Bronze Age round barrow, was sampled, to reconsider how the ditch was filled. The team also investigated whether pits dug through the circuit in a later period could indicate the ditch’s survival in the landscape and possibly discover something about the way people who dug the pits understood the older monument.
The first of three segments excavated through the undisturbed northern area of the ring ditch eventually reached the ditch bottom, showing a symmetrical profile. In the chalky fills near the base of the ditch, part of a large cattle skull was found. The skull appears to have been tipped in with the fill and does not seem particularly significant to the interpretation of the ring ditch. However, the find does cast light on the type of animal that occupied the landscape contemporary with the ring ditch builders and that they ate, or worked.
The second and third segments confirmed the regular, wide and straight sided profile of the ditch and the flat base, perhaps one of the widest seen in similar monuments in Thanet. In the lowest fill of the third segment the sparse finds included a cattle vertebra, located at a similar level within the ditch fills as the skull found a few days before, and a struck flint, found in the primary silting right on the base of the ditch cut. The truncated crest of the southern edge of the ring ditch cut was traced to its truncation by a later feature, allowing us to reconstruct an accurate plan of the circuit under the later deposits in the final site plans.
The sheer scale of the ditches cut into the hard chalk of the hill top are impressive. Care and precision made the ring ditch, demonstrated in the uniform profile and the regular circuit; it was almost sculpted out of the chalk geology. In common with many other examples in Thanet, this ditch shows no sign of deviating from its plan where variations were encountered in bedding planes of the chalk. These substantial archaeological features are as ‘architectural’ in their design and careful construction as any standing structure. It became clear that the feature’s real location in the landscape is more significant to the physical understanding of the site.
The 1982 records suggest that the southern portion of the ring ditch had been cut away by two separate pits on the east and west sides. A more complicated picture emerged during the excavation, showing that the pits were associated with a larger cut feature.
The truncated ring ditch was traced some distance into the pit complex by removing part of the fill of a segment excavated in 1982. In doing so we encountered Twix wrappers and a six pack bag of Hula Hoops, both apparently of 1982 vintage, plus a rather stubborn sheet of polythene covering what seems to be an old kitchen door, this last apparently put in the section to ‘protect’ the archaeology!
Toward the end of the excavation we began an EDM survey of a group of graves belonging to an important early Anglo-Saxon cemetery which had been fully excavated in 1982, leaving only the empty grave cuts showing in the hard chalk geology. The small scale composite plan of the cemetery, the only record we have of the layout of the graves, has proved to have significant inaccuracies in the representation of form and distribution of the graves. Although no burials remain in place, there is much of archaeological value to gain from re-planning the graves. Already we can see that a more accurate plan will help us to determine the order of the burials.
Just before the end of the dig, we made contact with Dean Barkley, who carries out low level aerial photography using a quadcopter rigged with a digital camera. Although we faced the slight problem that our site was directly under the flight path of Manston airfield, after negotiations the control tower gave permission for a flight. The stunning images of the excavation made all the hard work to clean the site for our final photographs worthwhile and rounded off two weeks of excavation with a spectacular flourish.
For more background and information go to http://thanetarch.co.uk/journal/?cat=16