Untitled - Council for British Archaeology

DRAYTON
.A.watching brief.by Jeff Wallisof the Abingdon Area Archaeological.and
Historical Society. has bégun on land now being'cleared
of toPsoil for gravel extraction. Ab yet no definite settlement
features have been observed.
GLYMPTON, SlaPe Copse.
Recently part of the Copse which covered the.earthwork remains
of a Medieval farmstead examined by Peter Fasham in 1971 was cleared
and the ground tidied up by machine. In order to determine the.
amount of damage that this had infliCted on thé remains With a view
.to deterMining how they..might-best be preserved R.A Chambers undertook
the excavation of a series of nine trial trenches. These'
excavations.not only enabled the measurement of the degree of
.
machine damage.which-proved to be mainly superficial, but also
prOvided.an opportunity to produce a comprehensive earihworks-plan,
to'define the true extent of the Site and to indicate archaeologically
the period of occupation assat present the documentarievidence is
unclear.
The earthwork remains of the farmstead lie on the western side
of the Glyme Valley, on the brow of a north facing slope next to the
A34 main road. Today the site (Fig. V) is marked by a hollow track A
leading up from the valley to what appears to be a yard area B and a
cluster of earthworks adjacent to the A34 main road. Geological
opinion considers the large terrace C running north-east to south-west
across the hill slope to be natural land slip and this interpretation
was born out by trench IV. From an earlier, incomplete survey undertaken
in 1971 three buildings were identified from the earthworks at
D, E and F. By excavation building D was found to survive with up to
0.7 m of drystone wall intact in places and the base of an oven
retained at G. This building had been erected over earlier Medieval
occupation and the building had been extended at least once. The site
appears to have extended a little to the north of the hollow way A as
trial trench III provided much domestic debris from an undisturbed
Medieval soil. Although the ground surface suggested a possible
building site at H two trenches VI and VII produced structural remains.
A building at F was shown to have been built across what appears to
be a hollow way J leading into the Medieval farm and this building
was also built over earlier occupation features. The end of another
hollowed roadway K is probably of more recent date leading to a filledin
stone quarry 100 m to the south-east. The deeply pronounced west
end of hollow way J is probably the result of a trial pit as part of
the later stone quarrying. Although trench III provided much
domestic debris a geophysical survey of the site by magnetometer and
resistivity meter produced no evidence for occupation in the adjacent
pasture field to the north-west. The geophysical survey also
covered the earthworks and the results corresponded with that found in
the trial trenches with one anomaly, a circular patch approximately
5 m in diameter. A small trench IX dug into the centre confirmed a
deep pit, over 1.3 m deep filled with building debris and some
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