Site Event/Activity record ESF20865 - Evaluation, Land South of railway line, Westerfield Road, Ipswich

395 trenches, individually unmapped in event layer, georeferenced .jpg available. The results of a 5% archaeological evaluation on a 43.4-hectare site on land south of the railway line and west of Westerfield Road, Ipswich, Suffolk (NGR TM 166 468) can be summarised as follows: Loose Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age flints may indicate some activity here in those periods. Two groups of parallel Middle Iron Age ditches (spaced 4-5m apart) formed arable field patterns in two areas. Two groups of Iron Age pottery and two curvilinear gullies (buildings?) indicate contemporary settlements. Weaving is indicated by loom-weight fragments. Roman sherds in field ditches indicate a continuity of a small part of the Iron Age field system into the early Roman period. Roman pottery and ditches may mark indicate a small settlement. Fragments of roof tile and a tessera show that there was a high-status Roman building somewhere in the vicinity (beyond this site). There was no evidence of Anglo-Saxon period activity. Two areas of medieval ditches in broadly in the same locations as the Iron Age ditches show medieval arable here. Associated settlements (low-status rural?) are indicated by pits and ditches. The principal post-medieval and modern remains were a small enclosure with a small brick building, and field ditches (some shown on the OS as late as 1904, but since removed). Other remains consisted of 500m of WWII anti-tank trap and a gun pit, a waste pit associated with the former and adjacent 19th-century brickworks.