The prehistory of the Stringmans Farm area

Description: The next in the series of online talks hosted by the KAS, with Keith Parfitt. Eight years of KAS survey and excavation work has identified a number of significant prehistoric sites, mostly of Neolithic-Bronze Age date, in the vicinity of Stringmans Farm, Lees Court Estate. The present talk outlines these discoveries and briefly consider their significance for Kentish prehistory.

Transcript: In that case, I think uh we will get started. So, good evening everyone. Uh welcome one and all to this delightfully sunny evening. We've almost managed a whole year of exclusive online talks for the Kent Archaeological Society now. Um almost all of which are accessible online as well. So, you can get them all on our YouTube channel if you've missed any. So, go back and check them out. We've got some I mean we've had some fantastic speakers over the years, so there's plenty on there to watch. and 11 months. So, uh we're almost at our first birthday. So, maybe next month we'll have bit of a party. What do you reckon? Um every month's a party with us, right? So, all good. It's wonderful to greet you all though. Thank you again. If I could just ask that you make sure your cameras and your microphones are turned off for us. Um as you may well be aware, it is digging season for us. So, we've been mega busy at the society. We've got two digs running at the moment. One at Front Brents in Favversham where we're welcoming folks to the delights of archaeology and community engagement and and historical research through the excavation of a row of demolished Victorian buildings perfectly situated next to a pub which is always good. And uh our signature excavations of course at Leate with some astonishing discoveries already uh which we will hear more about shortly. So, we hope to avoid any technical issues, but please do bear with us. If there's any problems, Jacob will expertly guide us through. As always, if you're not a member of the society, please do think about joining us. It works out about £330 a month. And for that, you'll receive a copy of our yearly journal, Archaeologia Cancer, full of the most current historical and archaeological research in the county. Um, you'll also have exclusive access to our bannual magazine, regular newsletters, our collections, conferences, and selected events. Opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects. Um, and you will allow us to keep putting out wonderful content like these free talks, outreach in schools, community groups, seminars, um, bringing the benefit of Kent Heritage to us all. So do check the website for details on how you can become a member or just how you can get involved. Housekeeping uh we'll look through this shall we? Okay. So the the talk will last about an hour after which time uh we can have time for questions if you have any. Please keep yourself on mute and with your cameras off throughout so that we can hear our speaker clearly. During the question and answer, you can either use the raise hand feature and we will unmute you when it's your turn to ask the question personally or if you prefer you can type your question in the chat box and I will read it out uh for our speaker. I hope it goes without saying but please be courteous and polite to our speaker and to each other. We will be recording the session and it may be posted to our video channels in the future, but no personal data will be shared. And if you ask a question, but would prefer it not to be published, just send us an email saying so and we'll make sure it's not included. So on to our speaker. We are absolutely delighted to welcome Keith Parett with us here tonight. Keith has been excavating Kent for over half a century and uh he knows as much if not more of the incredible history of our county than almost anyone in the world. He obtained an honors degree in archaeology at University College Cardiff and worked with the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit from the late 70s into the 90s after which he worked for Canterbury Archaeological Trust until fairly recently um relatively I suppose. He uh he's also worked on I mean he's worked on so many nationally important sites including the Dova bronze age boat Roman villa Brooklyn Anglo-Saxon cemetery and many many more. Keith leads the Dover Archaeological Group as director of excavations and has been an integral part of our society since joining in the early 80s. And it's with Kath that Keith has acted as director of excavations on a number of sites, most importantly for us tonight at least court estate. I first met Keith uh when he was receiving an award at the Society of Antiquaries in London and I sheepishly approached him and Tina to introduce myself as a fresh eager student. wanting to hear his all his knowledge on Iron Age landscapes of the southeast. And uh they didn't she me away. They uh they were really happy to humor my ramblings and even invited me to their incredible well the incredible site at East Bay to hunt out cornstones at low tide. So um yeah, that was amazing. Uh I've learned a lot from them and I've had the great pleasure of working closely with them on this incredible landscape. So I can't wait to hear more about the bigger picture today. So Keith, without any further ado, it is over to you. Thank you very much. Okay. Well, hopefully you can all hear me and see the pictures. Um, so it's not a particularly exciting uh title. The prehistory of the Stringman's Farm area that battles me. Um, it sort of describes what I'm going to talk about probably rather than inspires very much. Um, Stringman's Farm is a late medieval building. There's a picture of it there in the corner. Continuous jetted structure with later additions. And the archaeology we're going to talk about is on the lands associated with Stringman's farm. And you can see there's one site in excavation there. There's another one up there. Another one over there. One over the road. So the parish of Battlesmere then it's south of Favversham and west of Canterbury fairly high up on the uh North Downs. There's a little plan showing the outline of the parish and there is Stringman's farm over on the eastern side. Now the parish of Battlesmere um has long been dominated by the estate associated with the Sons family and it's at their invitation, Lady Sons. It's at their invitation that we're working on the site and have been for a good few years. Um there's a rather fine um picture of 1790 of the son's uh mansion at least court and the estate extending away from it. It's fairly imaginative I think and we couldn't really decide where we were digging but it's not on the main estate. It's somewhere in the somewhere in on the horizon there in amongst the trees possib possibly over this side of um the view as we as as we're looking at it there but I think it's a fairly stylized thing. Don't think it's uh can be taken too literally. So um we picked an area to work on around Stringman's farm and that was largely fortuitous we happened on that point. Um the reason being we knew of various things in the area and we we followed up on those and the first thing we did was to just look at the uh county sites and monuments record to see what was going on in the area. So here's Stringman's farm in yellow and it appears there's quite a lot going on. All the red marks being various sites of heritage interest. But when we start looking in detail at what those sites are, all the little ones like uh Greek temples there, they are listed buildings. Um there are a few medieval ones like Stringman's itself and down the road and Woods Court. Um others are post-medieval in date and um not really of normal archaeological interest as sort of a dirt archaeologist would be concerned. There's other things marked on the map. Um, this red dot here for instance, second world war bunker. Um, the one up here for instance, Victorian chalk quarry. So when we start winnowing out um the sites which are not um standard archaeological sites in terms of prehistoric Rome and Saxon um actually the the dot map becomes quite sparse. So our story really begins in September 2017 uh when completely independent of uh the Kent Archaeological Society uh the estate allowed uh a metal detector rally to be held on various fields on the estate and you can see there's the map with all the fields numbered that could be uh detected um by a metal detector on over a period of two days. Uh, and the Kent Archaeological Society was very kindly invited to send a team along to see what was being found and to make any notes we thought uh, relevant. So, there's the marquee just there. Look. And we turned up and very nice man said, "Yes, that's your table over there." And before we got uh unpacked and sorted out on our table, uh there was a phone call came in that way down in field 18, uh not one but two Bronze Age hordes had been discovered. So we more or less instantly, two of us at least of the four people that were there, two of us instantly went out to field 18 and sure enough, two hordes had been found. one sort of on the eastern side of the field, one on the western side of the field. So, actually in terms of recording objects at the marquee, uh Tina and myself never did any of that. We spent the weekend digging Bronze Age hordes. Um there is the plan as we uh roughed it out at the time. So the gray sites, Woods Court, medieval mana house, Fisher Street Farm, again, late medieval timber frame building, stringman's farm, late medieval timber frame building. So there are three known medieval farmsteads in the area. And out in the field here, late Bronze Age metal work horde one on the eastern side of the field and metal work horde two on the western side. And before we'd finished digging two, uh, the scattered plow scattered remains of a third one, metal hoorde three, was discovered close by, but sufficiently far away to suggest it was a third horde. All of a sudden, we had three late Bronze Age hordes, metal work hordes, in a field that wasn't otherwise known as being of any archaeological interest whatsoever. So, Horde one. There we are. There's Horde one under excavation. Now, this is before the archaeologists turned up. So, here's the the rough area the detectorrists have cleared. They've opened up a small pit here. Uh, and all sorts of stuff is starting to uh come out. What we recognized immediately were these things, which are bits of sword tape, the the holders for swords, if you like. Um and also lots of this flat plate scrap which is very typical of the willon phase of the bronze age which is around about 1100 BC or thereabouts. So we set about doing a proper archaeological dig on that. So there's Tina and myself there and another chap joined in with us with some he had some archaeological training. He joined in. There's the original pit producing all the metal work. That's uh the young lady that found the metal work. And here we are trying to get a handle on what exactly is going on. Uh by the end of the day, most people got fed up with watching us by then. But by the end of the day, the people had um left and we were able to expose this, which is a bronze age pot containing all these little bits of broken up plate scrap buried just under the plow soil. Quite clearly the plow had taken the top half of the horde off, but there's the the lower part of the horde still in situ in the ground. So that was hoorde one. We're well pleased with that. The the plate scrap hoards of the will Burton period quite rare things although we had done what done one before uh at Wardier Park in similar circumstances that were 10 years or so or more ago. So moving then to the other end of the field uh and hordes two another finder. There's horde two as we were able to clean it up. A small group of uh fragments of bun ingot in a very small pit. Um if those pieces of bronze had been flints, I think the the standard archaeological interpretation would be it was a flint pack post hole. Um what was more interesting in this hole was you can see there are other archaeological features here. There's a little pit here, another little pit there, and a shallow thing there, which we decided was modern. And you can also see incidentally, look these these score marks going through. That's the plow going through. So this field, it's plowed not particularly deep, probably not a foot or so, perhaps only 10 in, 9 10 in, but a lot of this shallowly buried archaeology is at risk from the plow. Um, and while we were doing horde two, not far away was horde three, entirely contained within the plow soil as far as we could see. Um, it looked very much as if the plow had completely taken out that horde. Um, but again, we're dealing with bunning fragments. There's about 34 I think there's a photograph of them. That's a complete bunningot from Kent. It's not from our site, but basically they're D-shaped in cross-section. So the um the curved side lies in the bottom of a bowl-shaped furnace and the flat top is where the molten metal is has just settled um in the fire as it were. So you get these very distinctive D-shaped sectioned ingots and they get broken up into fragments and then melted for recasting. Well, bronze age metal work hordes on archaeological excavations are quite rare and we don't really know why or where they were being deposited. I think most archaeologists had thought over the years that many hordes were buried by smiths uh in the middle of nowhere at paces from the near oak tree or something like that and they intended to come back and collect them later but somehow never did. So, we thought it'd be very interesting and the uh lease court estate were quite happy for us to do this to open up some archaeological excavations around the horde fine spots just to see what's going on. So, here we are in 2019. We've opened up fairly large square here with hordes two and three in the middle there. Then hoorde one is right over here there. And we've connected the two ex area excavations with what I claim to be the longest archaeological evaluation trench cut in that year. Virtually the whole length of the field as you see. And dotted along its course are all sorts of uh prehistoric features, pits mostly, post holes. And there we are on the site of hordes uh one, sorry, two and three um way back in 2018. It's a horrible subs soil on the site. It's clay with flints. So you get this thin layer of plow soil which is toribly okay to dig. Then you get down onto this clay, clay with flints, typical of the North Downs, capping the North Downs. And it is precisely what they say. It's it's a stiff clay with big flints in it. When it rains, it turns to porridge and when the sun's been out a few days, it turns to concrete. There is no easy time to dig the stuff. So, it's very much a question of just thrashing on and seeing what we could get. But sure enough, we we persevered with it and we could start picking up fairly early on these dark discolorations, circular pits, many of them filled with charcoal. There's another one there. Look. And again, there something else coming up there. We're sampling some of these pits. See what we can get out of them in terms of finds. Some are producing pottery of late Bronze Age type, roughly corresponding with the date of the horde. So we were pleased with that. And as we went along, so it became clear that in fact the the three hordes we were dealing with had been buried on a settlement site rather than some isolated spot miles from anywhere. It was actually on a settlement site. Uh there's one of the pits that we looked at. Quite a big one. You see lots of uh fired red clay in amongst that. Uh and there's Gordon just teasing out here with what turns out to be a complete pyramidal loom weight baked clay. Very distinctive late Bronze Age form. There's the the hole for the uh threads to go through. Very nice find indeed. Complete. Um and there are other bits of burnt clay there. I suspect they belong to other uh loom weights as well. So there's one complete one and probably bits of others. One of the features of the site were these extensive layers of calcin flint, burnt flint mixed up with charcoal and ash. And there's a very clear one there lying in a large pit. And just to worry, the fines processing department. There is a sample of some of the cow influence from that layer. So, it's a whole wheelbarrow full and it wasn't it wasn't all of it. And then there's a nice little finish to the dig over in Woodscourt Field. Um we found this which has really got nothing to do with the site at all. It's very clearly residual in its excavated context and it's a lower paleolithic handax of um a Shirian types a small pointed one. Uh there are several others of them known not too far away, but this is the only one we've had on our site. And there is a clear dis uh a clear correlation between clay with flinch soils and these early handax discoveries. So I'm I'm sure there are others to be had in the vicinity, but that's the only one we've got to date. to a nice little find but not really anything to do with the the main site which is late Bronze Age somewhere between 1100 and 800 BC Keith, I'm so sorry. We're having just a brief technical hiccup there. Jacob just messaged me. Just bear with us 10 seconds. Um, okay. I'm so sorry. It will be straight back in where you left off. I'm really sorry about that, buddy. We didn't miss anything. It was just um hear in the background. Okay, I think we're back on. Sorry about that. No, no, that's fine. No problem at all. As long as we can all hear each other, we're fine. So, I was just talking about the uh Paleolithic handax. Um it's in the order of a quarter of a million years old or so. So well well before anything else going on in the area. Um before we move on I just wanted to look at where uh the Lecort late Bronze Age hordes and the settlement associated with them uh is situated. So here's a map of Kent, Bronze Age Kent, showing the distribution of hordes, the black squares and single Bronze Age metal work finds in the green. And as you can see, it's mostly coastal and also down the river valleys, particularly concentrated around the Canterbury and the Wand some Channel than it there. And here we are right out in the downs really away from where most other bronze late Bronze Age finds have uh been made. And I think that's telling us that late Bronze Age man is not just concentrated around the the shores of Kent. They are starting to drive in land onto the higher land, the less fertile land in many ways. And they're up there as well. Well, while we were working in Woodsc Courtfield, the estate drew our attention to an interesting lump on the other side of the road. Um, and we went and had a look at it and uh, we thought it very much looked like a Bronze Age round barrerow. So, the estate cleared it of trees for us and we had a good look at it and there it is. There we are scouring the surface of this mound. It's situated in a small wood called Holly Grove. not otherwise known, not marked on any ordinance survey map, uh not known to the estate beyond a lump in the corner of the wood, but as we scoured the surface, we picked up about 100 prehistoric struck flints. Uh and then last year, uh we actually got round to cutting a trench across the edge of the structure. So the mound is mostly on that right hand side. There's just the edge of the mound. And we just wanted to do enough to prove that indeed it was a Bronze Age round barrerow. And we did that by cutting a fairly narrow trench here to pick up the enclosing ditch around the base of the mound. There's a section of it quite difficult to make it out because we kept the the trench was very narrow. Um standing bronze age round barrerows in Kent are quite rare. Many have been plowed out over the centuries. Many many hundreds have been plowed out. There aren't that many standing ones. So we were quite keen if that was a surviving Bronze Age round barrow that we should leave it largely intact for the future. Hence the fairly limited excavation. There's the section we were able to produce. So the Barrerow mound immediately adjacent to the mound. uh an enclosing ditch which actually produced prehistoric flint work in the base and then there was this big chalky expanse here which was either slump off the side of the barrerow mound or maybe they've enlarged the mound over the existing ditch. What was particularly interesting after all that had happened, uh, soil washed down from slightly further up the field and all this hill wash up to a meter thick accumulated over what effectively was the tail of the mound on the uphill side. When we dug those hill wash layers, we found they contained quite a lot of late Bronze Age pottery. And we're just wondering if that's where the area comes under the plow, same time as they're living on the other side of the road, burying their hordes. Are they plowing on this side of the road, which of course the road's not there in those times as far as we know. Are they plowing that the soil is moving down the slope and accumulating against a pre-existing barrerow mound? Typically, Bronze Age barrerows are early Bronze Age or middle Bronze Age date. They do a few in the late Bronze Age, not many. So, I'm guessing this mound is is indeed a Bronze Age burial mound. And it predates the settlement on the other side of the road. So, there's a little plan just showing the the standing barrel as we think it is in the corner of Holly Grove. Um, we then moved I'm jumping about in years a bit because it makes a bit more sense to do it in the order I'm doing. Um, we did some field walking in the adjacent field next to the barrerow and picked up quite a reasonable scatter of prehistoric flint work all across this area and subsequently we are doing precisely that. Subsequent geopysics at the junction of our two transct here produced a rather fine ring ditch there. So this is almost certainly the remains of another um round barrerow. We thought at that stage bronze age and that meant we now had two. One preserved in the wood and not plowed. The second one out in the plowed field and pretty much leveled apart from the surviving ditch below ground level. And that is fairly standard. so many of these um ancient former bar burial mounds in Kent. The mound has gone. It's been plowed flat and we've lost them. And then there could be up to 2,000 of these leveled ones in Kent. Now, every time Google Earth puts up a new satellite image, so more appear. And the KS website does actually uh have a map on there that shows a lot of them plotted out if you want to go and check at that at any stage. 2003 then we decided we needed to open up some fairly large areas on the site. So there's the Holly Grove mound look in the wood and the little crosses. There's the circular ring ditch we picked up on the geophysics. And the geohysics also picked up a second ditched enclosure here. Slightly more awkward to get at it because the actual hedge between the upper and the lower field runs right through the middle of it. But we did nevertheless get some interesting information. There is the the southern ring ditch uh which Richard Taylor largely oversaw the excavation and very clear it's got a big ditch. A lot of these flints in the bottom of the ditch are prehistoric waste flint chipping struck flints. So there's obviously a major prehistoric enclosure there. Uh and then at the other end of the field uh this enclosure was right nicely positioned in the middle of the field so we could open up a big square all around it and this was uh done using machine provided by the estate. Uh the driver was Ken, very useful chap to know, very helpful. And he stripped this huge area about uh 30 mters or so square down to the chalk. And we can already see at surface level this great big ring ditch going around um the chalk. Absolutely no suggestion of any central mound surviving. Um I think there was one originally, but I think it's been plowed flat over the many, many centuries. And there's Stringman's farm in the background. There's a drone view of it. So, we can see very clearly the ring ditch going round a big blob here. We think it's probably a Roman quarry pit cutting it. Um, and really when it first got uh exposed, we instantly picked up on these greenish pitlike features contained within the enclosed area, but also outside. and they look really quite interesting. We thought originally we looked at them and in fact they're entirely natural. The green is caused by um bed uh material derived from the formation which has lost here. It was originally sealing the chalk. It's gone now. But just these they're effectively natural hollows filled with these clay natural clay deposits. Um just really the last remnant. um they look good on on the pictures, but they're not actually of any archaeological significance at all. We wrote to the geological survey about it, said we've got these uh interesting pits, and they said, "Well, yeah, that's what we'd expect you to get." So, they didn't seem over bothered about it. Um so, we thought, well, let's push on them then with the the archaeology. So, very clearly there's the ditch going round and we've got all the diggers spread round. Just giving some idea of the circumference of the thing and it's quite big. It's it's about 20 meters across roughly. So there we are. Now we've talked about these green blobs. You see they're quite irregular in outline when you look. But hiding amongst them there are a few archaeological features. Particular one here and one here. Now, in a typical Bronze Age round barrow, you would expect to find central burials, and the center of our circle is just about there. So, it seemed fairly clear to us these two oval pits that we could see, not filled with green clay, but more chalky material here. There's one of the green pits look quite different to the the fill here. quite clearly as far as we could see we had two a pair if you like of graves that should have contained a bronze age crouch inhumation like that one that wasn't found at le court that's actually one way down at St Margaret's but that's what should have been in that pit or so we thought but as ever in archaeology things never go the way you expect so as we started clearing these these pits. We noticed in the middle there was this very clear outline of dark decayed organic soil and in amongst it lots of flints which weren't really present around the outside. Um there didn't seem much doubt this dark organic material. This was a decayed post, decayed wooden post. And fairly certainly the flints have been packed around that post to set it firmly into the ground. And all of it set into this big oval construction pit. Um there is the two of them dug out. They were both the same. They both had this D-shaped um central post pit. Not a suggestion of a burial in either one, but in the center of the mound is just about there, right where the marangian rod is. That's the middle of the mound. So, we say we should have had two uh bronze age crouching hummations, and we didn't. Um, which stumped us for a bit. Um, we did make the observation if you struck a line through the center of that pit, through the middle of that pit, it hit the ditch at that point there where there was a post hole right on the lip of the ditch. The only post hole that we had in the excavation. Putting it all together, we thought what we were looking at was a pair of D-shaped tree trunks. Other words, one tree trunk slit down the middle and half put in a pit on each side. Um and that apparently made some sort of central timber structure presumably to contain a burial. Uh and that burial itself had been um destroyed by plowing. That's a reconstruction of something like that um found on a continental site. But I thought the the layout of the thing I think there's your your central upright. you have some sort of cross member across the top then some some sort of side structure like that and presumably you put the body inside. Um we unfortunately have lost that. I think we probably lost a foot off the top of the chalk surface there. So all the workings we've actually lost to the plow probably centuries ago. But I think that's what we were dealing with. And that's not what you'd expect to find in a standard Bronze Age round barrel. There's a little plan just trying to pull all that together. So there's a an imaginary line of sight struck through the two central pits and you can see it is quite central. Strike a line through and it hits feature 18 the post hole. When we come to look the ring ditch itself is not particularly circular. It's a bit oval in shape. You could almost argue that from there round to here, it's taking on more of a a subs square outline rather than a a pure circle. Usually Bronze Age uh round barrerows are enclosed by a quite neatly circular ditch. That doesn't seem to be the case here. It's a bit more irregular. And so we turn to digging out the ditch. And my word, what a whopper it turned out to be. So here's the gang. And I have to say everyone worked very hard on doing this. There's that post hole. Look, just on the edge of the ditch. But there we are. We're getting towards meter and a half deep. Soil coming up all the time. Mostly natural silts. And every so often we'd find a prehistoric flint. So I say well done to the team for thrashing all that that out. Um there's me and Richard doing a bit of surveying. Um last year we went back and did some more excavation of the ditches. Um and that really confirmed what we thought we could see in the first year in smaller trenches. The ditch itself was not dug as a continuous even profiled ditch was actually made up of a series of circular pits. You can see quite clearly one there and there, another one there. And very clearly on this one, you can see, look, there's a little ridge of undug chalk between the pit here and the pit there. So it looks very much as if the pit a series of pits uh was dug and then as the final piece of the ditch digging act the the bulks of undug chalk between the individual pits were banged through to make a continuous ditch but with a fairly irregular profile and not really a nice even uh form at all. And you can see how the ditch has silted up over the centuries. First with coarse chalk rubble weathered straight from the sides, then finer chalk rubbles and eventually clays filling the final hollow. So the ranging rod indicates we're talking about 1 meter and a bit one meter. So it's best part of 2 m is actually just over 2 m deep that ditch which we thought was getting a bit excessive. Most people only have a ditch a meter deep at most. This was getting a bit out of hand, but we did it and there was some interesting stuff. Um, there's a plan of trench six, which was our longest trench. Um, with all the contours draw drawn on it. This is David Brown. We've been working with Paul Samuel Armor trying to produce this contoured uh image. It's not been that easy because we didn't do it on site. they've been working with the previous records. But I think for present purposes, you can see quite clearly how there are pits here. There's one there. Look, one there, a third one there, a fourth one there, a fifth one there, sixth one there, and then a very marked step down to another one there. So, it's very much a question of joining up an individual pits rather than digging a continuous ditch. So, that's David's efforts. Um, he's still working on it with Paul, trying to refine that. But that serves its purpose tonight, just to get that idea that we're dealing with a ditch that is not a continuous excavation. And you'll have heard David previously perhaps talking about his uh drone surveying on archaeological sites. So, he's been practicing with us and getting some quite good results. I think in certain places on the bottom of the ditch we found these scatters of prehistoric struck flints. So there's one batch. Look, couple of hundred struck flints. Nothing worked. It's very much a question of napping waste being left in the bottom of the ditch. I think there's two options here. Either somebody has been making a flint tool somewhere nearby and chuck their waste directly into the still open ditch or I think more likely um there's the side of the ditch that is a layer of natural flint in the side of the ditch exposed uh just in the natural chalk. There's traces of the same layer on that side. I rather think prehistoric man has sat in the bottom of that ditch, hacked out bits of flint from the side of the ditch and sat there in the bottom of the ditch out of the wind, napping the material, leaving his waist there. And unfortunately for us, taking off whatever he made in terms of axes, arrowheads, or whatever, he took those away with him just left us the waste. We found the same thing again in other parts of the ditch, not on the base, but about halfway up in the fills. So, here's one in trench 7. A great mass of natural flint nodules, but a amongst it, buckets full of prehistoric struck flint. So, again, there are episodes of napping going on in the ditch when it's half full. So, this is all good. And again, no real tools. They've made something, taken it with them, leaving us the waste. The waste itself is not particularly closely datable, which is a bit irritating. Um, but quite clear there was quite a lot going on in that ditch as it was filling up over the centuries. I think it must have taken many centuries to have filled up to the depth it had. And then finally on the southeast side, literally no more than six inches down in the upper filling the ditch, we came across this area of laid flint work. And if you look, it does look rather blacker in that area than some of the other clay patches. So something dark going on there on a layer of flints. So, as we looked a bit more closely, um, we could see a great mass of flint. Some of it was burnt, the flint, these ones in particular, was burnt. And then when we look very closely at the chalk specs between the flints, we decided it wasn't chalk. It was actually cremated bone, presumably human. So I think what we have here is one of the last acts in the filling of the ditch. A flint platform is erected on the southeastern side of the mound. And they've actually fired up um a burial, human burial for for cremation. And I think they've probably collected a lot of the bits of bone, taken them away, but they've left the the base of the flint p and a few of the crumbs in between. So that was really quite an interesting um discovery. And we've got um oak charcoal mixed amongst that and that's produced radiocarbon dates of around about 1500 BC, about the same date of do boat actually. Um so in 1500 BC the ditch which is over 2 meters deep is largely full but they're still holding cremation cremating rights there. So there's obviously quite a lot going on over a lot of years on this site. So not just another Bronze Age ring ditch. Well, we've dug loads of these Bronze Age ring ditches in Kent over the last 20 odd years, but uh Lee's Court shows a series of features which is not typical of most of them. No central burial, but we have got these two post holes apparently holding D-shaped posts, split split tree trunk if you like, supporting a central timber structure presumably for burial. Well, that instantly um reminded me of two things. Firstly, Whan Smitty down in Oxfordshire, a Neolithic long barrerow, long long barrerow built over a smaller uh long barrow in the Neolithic period. And that had precisely that. Two timber uprights, D-shaped, a split trunk in other words, and various other uh flint and assassin, I think, um features and other post holes, indicating the site of a a burial chamber sealed under the first barrerow, which itself is sealed under a later barrow. So, we didn't quite have that complexity, but our central feature had a certain resemblance to that, especially if we allow for that one being plowed flat. And at Whand Smidy, of course, the the early barrerow is hidden under the lake barrerow, so completely protected and preserved. With us, we're dealing with a a plowed field, probably plowed for many, many centuries, and we're no more than the foot down to the top of the the pits. The other thing that it reminded of of reminded us of was the Ringlemir Cove. Ringle of course you'll know as another late Neolithic stroke bronze age ceremonial site. And right at the middle of that there is this pair of L-shaped slots that seem to have supported some sort of central timber structure at some stage. So those things suggested we weren't dealing with an ordinary uh bronze age ring ditch round site. There were no obvious burials at that stage. There were however on our site evidence or was evidence for cremation in the final stages of the ring ditch filling. And the other thing that uh struck as being as being a bit odd was the um the ditch itself was not an even construction like indeed it was at uh Ringbe. It was made up of a series of interconnecting pits uh which is exactly coincidentally and not how the ditch at Stonehenge is uh formed. We've made we've dug one or two other sites in Kent and the one that I did know uh was the Monton Mount Pleasant ring ditch old Canterbury Trust dig back from the ' 90s. Um there you've got two ditches, an inner ditch and an outer ditch. The outer ditch is very much a standard even crosssectioned ditch going around, but it encloses an inner ditch, probably an earlier ditch, which is made up of all sorts of interconnecting pits and that struck as has been very much like um the Le one. Um we don't know what was in the middle of uh ring ditch 3. We got some sort of cut. Uh, and the road builders would not let us cut a little hole in there to find out if there was anything else going on in the middle. Uh, which looking back on it, considering it would have been a very minor irritation to the road builders, could have actually been a very important uh uh information, provided very important information for us. So, I'm beginning to think more and more that the the ring ditch north northwest ring ditch in uh Stringman's Field just opposite the farm is not a typical Neolith uh Bronze Age ring ditch. It's actually got Neolithic origins and we've certainly got some Neolithic pottery from the ditch. And we're waiting in many ways on the flint analysis to just tell us exactly what date the flint is suggesting because we got crates of that. So, time to move on again. What's next? There we go. So, this is where we've been today and for the last 20 odd days. Um, Battlesmere Park Wood. Lovely place to work. great oak trees there shading us from the rain and the heat. Um we started there in early May. Um but it all started off um way back last year. There's the mound that we looked at in Holly Grove showing up on this liar view. Look as a very clear circular mound on the other side of the valley completely. There's another circular mound showing. Not particularly well defined compared to that one, but suggestive there could just be yet another round barrel of some sort on the other side of the valley. What the liar doesn't bring out is the fact there's actually quite a deep dry chalkland valley running through there. So we went one rainy afternoon. We went off trying to find this barrerow in the woods. So this is Battlesmere Parkwood. It's very large and we went stomping about in the woodlands trying to work out where we were. And eventually we ran to earth the site and it's located just there by the side of a public bridal way at the point where a private woodland track branches off the main line and it's the actual mound seems to mark the junction of the two. So I think we're dealing with an early mound that the people laying out Battlesmere Park would in the mid-9th century just thought was a useful local landmark um to provide a point where they could usefully branch off with one of their rides through the wood. And you can see there's others as well. This is the 1877 ordinance survey map. It shows the paths very clearly. There's Stringman's Farm. There's Holly Grove. Nothing marked there. No tuminous or barrerow marked in the corner of the wood. Nothing at all to suggest our ring ditch here. Just an open field. And the same thing here. No mound marked. It's just shown as woodland. Nothing going on apparently. So when you get something on um liar, the first thing you need to do is go out and look at it on the ground. Some people call that ground truthing which I think is an awful term so I won't use it. Anyway, we went stomping off looking into the woods in the winter and sure enough you could see that the ground level did rise a little bit in there and it sort of got lost in the brambles. So there did seem to be some sort of lump there without making very much of it. couldn't make it out for all the trees, but it did look a likely uh site for yet another one of these uh potential bronze age round barrerows. So, again, the we pointed out to the estate, and I have to say the estate workers were not particularly aware there was a mound there until we pointed it out. Um they very kindly again Ken and his machine um stripped all the vegetation off the mound except for these rather fine oak trees. There's four oak trees on there about about a century old and a couple of other big trees we've saved. But you can see very clearly there is a very well-defined mound that's that's standing on the north side looking south and that one's standing on the south side looking north. There we are. There's a loggger's there's that hollow track way as shown on the ordinance survey map. It cuts right through the top of the mound and I think it's um I think it's probably loggers track amongst other things but very clearly we are dealing with a mound and that would uh you know it's well up to uh Ssbury plane standard I think but completely unknown hidden in this large wood where people hadn't spotted it as they went along the bridal way. It is a wellused bridal way but it's um you know it's not bringing many archaeologists to the area. So quite clearly we are dealing with an ancient mound is it? Sorry. So we started off by looking at the structure of the mound and it seems to be made of these layers of flinty orangey soil. Not very clayy stuff at all. quite sort of almost sandy material and it seems to be that's what it's made of now contained within those flint layers all sorts of prehistoric flints we've got three or 400 now I suppose managed to get the tool shed up on site tea hut is up functioning well stocked brisket tin ready for tea breaks So there we are. We've just cleared a lot of this flint work. Now we can see the structure of the mound. Uh and we then arrive at a bit of bit of a dilemma because we seem to be dealing with a mound that's largely intact. So we're potentially looking at a bronze age round barrerow that survives largely intact. We've lost so many in the heavily plowed landscape of Kent to actually have a standing one. It's very much a rare survivor. So something we want to preserve like the one in Holly Grove. But how do we know it's a Bronze Age burial mound if we preserve it and don't excavate it? There was a bit of a conundrum. Um, had we been Victorian excavators in the 1850s or the 1870s, we would without a doubt have picked the middle of the mound, which is just about there, and dug a pit straight down to the middle of the uh the mound, base of the mound, and we should have found their central burial. Uh, I didn't think that was entirely the correct thing to do in this modern age. There's plenty else been destroyed, so we need to look after this one. Um, but one thing we thought we could do would be to go and pick up the what should have been the enclosing ring ditch around the outside of the the mound. So, if we go back to our thinking of the one we did in Stringman's Field, the mound has gone, but the enclosing ditch survived. So, we cut quite a sizable trench here, and we reach natural clay and natural chalk. not a suggestion of any ditch running through. So maybe we thought, well, perhaps the mound has slumped and the ditch is buried underneath the tail of the mound. So we took another 2 m chunk here. That's really as far as we dare venture into the undisturbed mound. Still no ditch. So we made an extension uh for about another 3 m out to the north and still no ditch. So the long and the short of all that is there is no ditch on the northern side of the mound. Um so one of our teams said well maybe it's actually got an entrance causeway and we've dug right through the entrance as it were not seen the ditch which is on either side. Yeah, we'd be unlucky. But certainly the Ringir ditch had a an entrance course. It wasn't particularly wide, but it had one and it was on the north side. So that maybe seemed to be um something of an idea to consider. So with that in mind, we opened up a second trench um to see what was going on on the western side of the mound. Um and we've come down onto a very clear flint layer. Again, this flint material here is definitely the tail of the mound. And then there's all more dense flint work there, which we originally thought was um some sort of laid surface, but it's only an inch down, so it can't be very old, I don't think. But the work we've done today is beginning to make us wonder whether in fact this flint is just a natural accumulation of flint lying on top of the natural clay. So, we shall in due course slice through some of that flint work and just see what's going on. Now, if we're lucky, there'll be the Bronze Age ring ditch underneath. And if we're not lucky, there won't be. I don't think there's going to be one there. I don't think that mound is made up of a ring ditch with a spoil piled into the middle. I think it's actually made up of material scraped up from the surface and piled into a heap. Uh, and it remains to be seen whether we can prove it's a Bronze Age round barrerow. I'm sure it is, but we could do with a bit more evidence. We have had some very nice flints from the site, several hundred. Um, these two just sort of took our fancy. This is part of a a Neolithic leafshaped arrowhead. very finely worked on both sides, snapped across the base, unfortunately, but it should be early Neolithic in date that was found on the mound. And this rather fine blade, you can see it's very carefully worked along that edge. Um, so I'm not sure whether we'd call that a serrated blade or some might want to call it a knife. That's for others to decide, but it's certainly a worked flint that was actually contained within the body of the mound. Now, the problem we've got with these flints, of course, is I think they are not dropped on the surface of the mound. They're scooped up from the material that was already existing in the area. So, these flints ought to predate the mound by we don't know how much. I think we can date that arrow head to the early Neolithic. So, if we are dealing with a Bronze Age mound um containing material of Neolithic date, that's no great problem. Um and so really we move to remember that picture we looked right at the beginning where seemed to be quite a lot of archaeology in the area until we looked around um the three medieval farms and removed all the modern stuff. Uh didn't seem to be much going on at all then. But this is what we've got now. So we've got our late Bronze Age horde th000 BC or so. uh paleolithic handaxs of that sort of date range immediately next door. Evidence for late Bronze Age, early Iron Age settlement in the vicinity, a second Bronze Age horde here and a third one immediately adjacent to it. Then crossing the road, we've got some sort of ditched enclosure just directly opposite Stringman's farm. We've got a Neolithic or Bronze Age barrerow preserved in the Holly Grove wood as a standing monument again. And then we've got a plowed out Neolithical Bronze Age ring ditch at the northwestern end of the field. So that's like three uh the edge of the valley comes right the way through here. And very clearly these three monuments are set right on the edge of the valley. Then when we puff down the hill and up the other side, we come up against this other mound in the wood that we're digging now, which again I think is neithical bronze age uh barrerow mound. Can't prove it yet. So from really not much prehistory at all in the Stringman's Farm area in 200 say 2016 by 2025 we've actually got a lot and I'm quite sure there's more to find. So prehistoric man is here over a long period of time. I don't think they're they're not pushing into um the high clay covered uh north downs of Kent um just daily in the sense that they come up for the day and go again. These people are moving in and colonizing this area on a permanent basis and that seems to happen uh by a th00and BC if not 2 or 3,000 years before that. So it suggests there's a lot of prehistoric people around um and they are working this land. It's not wonderful land for for ancient uh agriculture but they're using it I think probably because the better land down towards the swale estry to the north has already gone. So they're driving in land because they need to. So we've always assumed till fairly recently these highlevel downland areas weren't really colonized much before well the establishment of things these medieval farms woods courts that can be traced back to uh well into medieval times and a few saxs and land charters but we always assumed it was very much a a post Roman thing colonizing these high down areas where there's some fairly poor quality soils not so apparently in prehistoric manners has beat us to it. So all this work on the uh Lee's court estate takes uh place through the good offices of the estate and the estate of course is uh led by Lady Sons. And there she is in the hole with me. We're inspecting there the the filling of the great ditch of the the ring ditch we excavated just discussing how all this soil could have built up. And I finish with Lady Sons uh posing yet another question to me that I can't provide a an accurate answer to. But I say all this work would take place um or wouldn't take place without Lady Sons's very keen um encouragement and interest in it all. So that's where we are with the Leort uh estate prehistory side of things. There's lots more to do. the the farm itself, Spring Stringman's Farm, has another interesting story to tell. That's for other people to look into. Um, but that's that's us at the moment. So, our next big job is to try and prove this second mound in the the wood we're digging at the moment is indeed prehistoric. Right, that's it. Thank you very much. Yes, thank you so much. That was amazing. Um, you're hearing. Yes. Yeah, absolutely. It was absolutely brilliant. Sorry for the the slight technical issue in the middle there, but um yeah, that was that's incredible. We were changing the site. Anyway, yes, the string form landscape. I mean, it is an incredible archaeological region and those monuments are obviously of huge significance. So, it's great to see that story continue to evolve and I know that um for you and for everyone involved, it changes almost uh monthly, I imagine, as as you learn more and find more about it. So, indeed, and also as you try and battle the rain and the sun. I love the idea of porridge and concrete for digging there. Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky site. Um, one of the things that I that is very striking in the landscape there is uh and you couldn't really see it on on the maps as you mentioned, but it is that that valley. Um, and it is dry at the moment. Do you know if it was dry during when the monuments would have gone up there, would that have been still a dry valley or or we looking at something that was potentially wetland? at the time. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. Um, I didn't I've got a very nice slide of that showing the uh the way the the landscape uh runs and you can trace that dry valley right the way down to the the swale estie uh past Favversham and just near our site it forks into two side valleys. Um I probably should have put that one up. So I think very much ancient man is working to that landscape and you can see the valleys. Um I've taken some geological advice on the valley and the general feeling is that it would be dry in the Bronze Age. It would be a dry valley. So um apparently no water in it. So I don't think we can ever imagine a a Bronze Aed do boat style vessel paddling up from Favversham Creek right up here. It would seem to be dry throughout um in our prehistoric period right the way through it's dry but it's going to provide shelter. Uh and one of the things about some of these monuments is they sit on top of the hill and you can't always see them when you're on the top of the hill but you could if you lived in the bottom of the valley and you could look up at the ancestors buried in their mounds on top of the hill. So, I think that's something to bear in mind. And I sort of have got um sort of vague ideas about digging some sort of hole in the the bottom of the valley to see what's going on. Um but I suspect um it's going to be a hell of a long way down to get to Neolithic Bronze Age levels. And I I think now about the the thing at the bottom of Blue Bell Hill when they put the rail link through and they got uh a near rather fine Neolithic house. I think was six or seven mters down. So that's a bit that's a bit out of our league. I think we might be able to do some bore holes though. So we might get something out of it. But I think there is stuff to be had down there and I don't think it was wet. Brilliant. Um, if you do uh have questions, please just put them into the chat. We have a few already. So, I'm going to start firing these at you, Keith, if you're ready. Uh, so first up, Louise said, uh, well, first off, last interesting last last year ditch but no Barrow mounds, and this year no ditch, but baram mounds. Um, but then and then she asked wondering yesterday, is there anything on the other side of the valley on the badmir sides? on the other side of the other valley. Yeah, it's Well, we've not found anything, but uh given that we had nothing when we started there, we got so much now. I'm quite sure there's other stuff to find, we've just got to track it down. Okay, cool. Um Nicholas New has asked, "Moving forward a millennium or so, what about Battlemere Castle?" Uh well, yes indeed. It seems from the documentary work, we've got a team looking at the documents. Uh, Battlemere Castle does indeed seem to be a quite important place and I guess it's quite big. Um, and there is scope for possibly doing some archaeological investigation there, but that will be a whole new uh project maybe dealing with medieval documents, landscapes, um, so on and so forth. And I think a tenant farmer there rather than directly with the estate. Um, so completely different project, certainly doable in archaeological terms, but very different to what we've been doing to date, but could could be done. All we need is a voluntary team, somewhere to lead it, and um somewhere to dig. We've got a few pointers apparently. So, I'm sure there's something to be had there. Thank you. Um when when do we have any evidence of when the area the landscape started being farmed? I mean is there evidence of bronze age farming there? Um and when was the most intensive farming which might have destroyed all those monuments? Do we know anything about that? Not really. I mean it seems like the the tithe map is saying there's a fair bit of agriculture going on there. I think the steep valley sides are wooded now and I think they might have been a lot in the past as well. So I my feeling is that probably prehistoric man was farming that area up to a point but that might be pasture or woodland management perhaps rather than necessarily plowing it. Having said that there are some reasonable chunks of land you could um you could um plow. So you could I think you can make out quite a nice uh um you you if you if you did a bit of mixed farming with animals and um bit of with trees varying types and bit of plowing few animals you could probably make out a reasonable living up there I think. So I think prehistoric man is up there not visiting on a casual basis but actually living up there. Okay. Yeah. and and then I presume it was much later um intensive farming which would have destroyed the the big ring ditch. Yeah, that's right. I wonder actually whether it goes in phases and when there's lots of people about there's lots of pressure on the land people start farming that area and then when there's not so many people about they fall back from that not so good area and farm the better land and then the population grows again they maybe come back. So, it's almost like a an eb and flow of the tide sort of thing entirely um based on just how many people there are and how much pressure on the land there is. And we know in the Bronze Age there was a lot of areas like Dartmore being cultivated. So, there seems to be a lot of people about then and I think perhaps the same in the medieval period up to a point. Oh. Um, Steve Goden has asked, "Would there likely be similar activity in other valleys similar to this one on the norths? I'm thinking of the Eastling area a few miles west of here." Yeah, I think it becomes very obvious from what we've done that there was no archaeology known in the area, prehistoric archaeology known in the area. Um, and then we put some archaeologists on the ground. They started grubbing about and they found archaeology. So the issue is not that there's no archaeology. There's no archaeologist been there to look. And I'm quite sure if you want to take a block of land somewhere in Eastling, drop 20 archaeologists into it for a couple of three years, you will start finding archaeology. I'm not volunteering for that, but I guarantee you if a group doesn't go does go and do that, they will get some decent finds, I'm sure, because a lot of these woodlands in Kent, they're not being they haven't been searched in the past. They've been sort of gone round, as it were, and I think the stuff is in there. Yeah. And that's a great thing, you know, that it hasn't been destroyed, but after so much of the rest of the country has been so intensively uh damaged and demolished. So, it's great that we do have some remaining uh monuments hidden away. Indeed. I I did a quick um check the other day. Apparently, there's about 11% of Kent is woodland. Um and we we as archaeologists I think tended to not go into the woods. I think perhaps we should. So, I got a feeling there's a lot of lot of stuff skullking about in there. Um we haven't got to deal with the plowed out stuff. It's actually still standing. So, there could yet be all sorts of interesting things to find. Yeah, I think we're still scared of what's hiding in there, lurking in out of here. Um, Nicholas asked, "So, the Battlemere Park wood one is definitely not a long barrow." It's not a long barrow. We We thought when we first saw it that it did look like a long barrerow, but in fact, when we got to look at it closely with all the brambles off it, we could see it's a circle. Um, it's been chopped about a bit by the bridal way and that other path going through it. That's what foxed us a bit in the first place making it look long. It's not long. It's round. It's about 100 ft 30 m in diameter. So, it's quite a big thing. It's about 30 m across and up to 2 m high if you stand on the downhill side and look up at it. It's quite a sizable beast. Cool. Um we've got lots of messages of thanks and uh people saying that it is a fascinating presentation and um saying how wonderful it's been and uh so and it has. Absolutely. So um Louise says Jim Bradshaw springs to mind over finding barrows in woodland. Um, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, Jim long gone now, I'm afraid. An old KS member. Um, worked for the uh the forestry commission. So, he spent a lot of time in woods and he used to find all sorts of prehistoric barrerows, long barrerows and round barrerows in woods, not because they were difficult to find, but because no archaeologist ever been there before. So Jim is very much um at the forefront of um woodland archaeology in this part of Kent. He lived very close by actually. I'm sure he would have loved to have heard what we were finding at Lee's Court. So finally we um we are you know welcoming people to come and and help you excavate out there. Can you tell us how long you're you're going to be out there finishing off in the woods? Um, we are due to finish at the end of June, but it's a bit open-ended. Um, unlike previous years where we needed to move on because the um the farm needed to plow the field and plant something, here we're quietly up in the wood, not really in anyone's way. So, we we haven't got an end date. Um, so it' be very much how long it takes to get to a point where I think we want to stop. Um, we shan be going to excavate the whole of the Barry mound for certain, but we might yet find a ditch in trench two. I was planning to do a trench three and some other soil test pit. So there's there's enough to do for a couple three more weeks. So if anyone who hasn't been before wants to come and join us, then please do. We it's very nicely sheltered up there. It's actually quite a nice place altogether. The biscuit tin is well stocked, although I think the fig rolls have run out now, but there's there's plenty else. So, anyone fancies it. What I would say is the official car park is just under half a mile away from the site. So, it's a fair puff there and back and you got to go downhill along flat then uphill either way. Um, so it's quite a puff up there and I'm afraid even if you do puff there and back, you still only get 7,000 steps, not your required 10. We may get a discount after after a few months, but there we go. So, as I say, it's a bit of a puff up there, but we're happy to see anyone who wants to come meet in the car park at 10:00 and we'll take it from there. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah. um check the website for details on how to get there and uh also any more information about what you might need to bring or or any of that. So, thank you all so much for attending and thank you Keith for such a fantastic talk about the incredible archaeology of Stringland's farm. Really appreciate it. No problem. Brilliant. So, we've got loads more coming up. Please do keep an eye out for our upcoming talks. On Thursday the 25th of June, we'll hear from Jazelle Kir and her talk trapped in time, a closer look at Starcar and the not so primitive early people with some focus on our earliest Kent folks. So um on Thursday the 17th of July Isabelle Diggle the finance leazison officer for Kent will be discussing step in the right direction further discoveries of the limb lamp which Keith I know you also so this is a Roman copper alloy footshaped oil lamp the first of its kind in Britain a very very important find on Thursday the 28th of August we'll have Steven Clifton giving an update on the East Mauling healing sanctu um the brilliant stuff that Maystone area archaeological group are doing over there. And on the 18th of September, we will have the amazing professor Dan Hicks discovering uh discovering discussing his new book and the research he undertook here in Kent and along with Cass. So we have loads more in the pipeline. So keep your eyes peeled. As I mentioned earlier, if you're not a member, please do think about joining us. It works out about only £3 pound30 a month. And for that you'll get the archaeology of Caniana. Um all of the latest historical and archaeological research in the county and you'll receive our banial magazine, regular newsletters, exclusive access to our collections, conferences and selected events, opportunities to get involved in excavations and research projects and everything Kent heritage. So check out the website for more details of these talks and the wide range of other coming uh upcoming Kentbased events. And uh yeah, thank you again very much. Um it's good to see you all and we will see you all again very soon. And get yourselves down to Lee's Court Estate for some excavations if you would like. Thanks again, Keith. Um and good night everybody. Thank you.