Monument record STN 187 - Late Iron Age to Roman features and Post Medieval foundations of a former Farmhouse at Downham High Warren Lodge.

2018:As a part of the Forestry Commission’s Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) project ‘Trailing the Hidden Heritage of High Lodge’, a community fieldwork investigation was carried out with the aim of identifying the location of the former medieval Downham High Warren Lodge. The approximate location of the former warren lodge was only very broadly known and an area for investigation was chosen based upon the reasonable assumption that the post-medieval High Lodge Farm was a later development on its site. Initial examination of historic mapping, visual site survey and magnetometer and earth resistance meter survey confirmed the location and presence of surviving structural remains relating to the former farm, which had been demolished in the mid-20th century. Subsequent hand excavation of five small test pits demonstrated that the foundations of the farmhouse and a garden or yard wall survived immediately below modern ground level and corresponded directly to the historic mapping. There was no indication that the farmhouse structure incorporated, reused or was built upon the earlier medieval lodge and the finds assemblage and building debris was consistently of post-medieval date. This suggests that the lodge may lie outside of the investigation area and that the farm was a separate new development. A further three test pits unexpectedly retrieved a substantial quantity of mixed Later Iron Age/Roman material from topsoil and subsoil deposits and a surviving archaeological horizon at a depth of c.0.5m–0.6m with evidence for two probable ditches. This is the first ‘modern’ investigation in the vicinity to have identified such evidence and it is thought to be contemporary with early 20th-century records of similar deposits seen 100m–200m to the S.
Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2018. (S1, S2)