More Work on the Iron Age Industrial Site at Chapel Farm, Lenham Heath

This site is one that Lenham Archaeological Society has been working on for about four years. The oval enclosure ditch, some 150m x 300m, has two gateways, east and west, and is visible on the Windows Live website, an image taken in 1999. This particular year showed the site well as the photos were taken in early July when the barley gave a good crop mark.

The site is under cultivation so we invariably have a short window of opportunity from the end of July till the beginning of September. Continuing the work reported in our Journal Vol.1 of Discovering Ancient Lenham, we returned to this site in August 2007 to section the enclosure ditch again and to find out more about this site.

We used the KAS resistivity machine to good effect and our results matched the aerial image exactly. Dark areas were ditches or soft ground.

We decided to section across the ditch to the north of the site and across the northern arm of the west gate.

The results of our northern section showed a flat bottomed ditch (Fécamp style), typical of c.50BC (diagram below). We also encountered two sets of post holes with hard cemented sand around them, suggesting that there was a boarded defence on the inside bank.

A Severus Alexander AD222, silver denarius fell out of the section at a depth of 1.2m. There was another 50cm of striated ditch fill beneath it. That area of the IA ditch therefore, could have been filling up slowly throughout the Roman occupation.

When we sectioned the ditch across the west gate terminal we encountered a layer of iron slag, spread by the plough, which appeared to be a Roman track crossing the whole site. The ditch area closest to this roadway was shored up with a large amount of slag. Again, the ditch had a flat bottom.

The interesting pottery found in the 2007 dig is mostly Late Iron Age. Two pots have highly burnished roulette design around the shoulder and are very finely thrown (only 2mm thick). They are a type of fine ware, Gallo-Belgic, that we believe was imported before the conquest. This might fit with the dating of the Late Iron Age 1a Ebnobroach also found on site (see Arch Cant 1988). In the gate terminal ditch we found half of a large sandy ware pot (27cm high) that appears to be Late IA. It is unusual in having a rounded base.

Lesley Feakes

Pat Norris in the trench - the Severus Alexander coin came out at a level with her knees.

Diagram of the ditch section