End of season report - October 2009

End of Season Report October 2009
2009, FSARG’s fifth year of operation, has been extremely busy and productive. At the time of writing, the last field walking target has just been met and the last excavation project is about to be put to bed for the winter, so this is the right time to give you a brief update. For reasons explained below, complete reporting will be somewhat later than has formerly been the case on this website. Understanding Ospringe 2009 saw the second year of Understanding Ospringe, building on the lessons from the georesistivity surveys, house survey, field walking and eleven keyhole excavations in 2008. Attention focused mainly on the streamside road, Water Lane, as this seemed the most promising location for prehistoric settlement. Attention was, however, also given to the eastern end of the village and the site of the Hospital of St Mary to try and find out more about the early medieval village (AD1050-1234) and check the orientation of the Hospital buildings. The field season consisted of two weeks in April, nine days at the end of May and two weeks in the second half of July, with field walking in October. Twenty eight individuals have been active in the field this year. a) Water Lane Georesistivity surveys were carried out for the recreation ground of Ospringe Junior School and the strip leading westwards from the school on the allotments site. Although both areas showed marked variations in resistivity, no obvious archaeological features emerged so these areas were not investigated further, for the time being. A third survey took place on the site of Brook Cottages, now demolished, on the east side of the valley opposite the Church.
Keyhole excavations took place at four locations along the west side of Water Lane (Ks 60, 61, 54, 64). Of these, K61 was particularly productive, yielding a flint manufacturing assemblage dated provisionally to the Bronze Age.

Meticulous excavation in the re-opened K61	Worked flint from one context of K61
First excavated in April, K61 was reopened in the summer and excavated using three dimensional plotting for every prehistoric item. At the time of writing, nearly two thousand items of flint have been plotted in this way, most of them prehistoric worked flint. K61 is shortly to be covered up for the winter and will be returned to in April 2010, after analysis of the finds so far. Keyholes 60 and 54 also produced prehistoric material. K64, on the verge of an open field just to the north of the Church was less productive.
Larger scale excavation took place at the Bier House site, close to Ospringe Church (K65, 66). The Bier House is a 19^th century building, but lies on the site of a spring, now dry. We hoped that the spring and stream bed might contain evidence of prehistoric activity. This, sadly, was not the case although an unfamiliar type of stone tool was found in the field layer. These will be looked at closely in November by our visiting expert.

Our largest trench so far OA65
Although the Brook Cottages site was surveyed, time constraints meant that it was not investigated further in 2009. The Ospringe Church Remember When weekend in July, however, gave an opportunity to see photographs of these early houses and also the privilege of talking to two ladies who had lived in the cottage as girls. This will be fully written up over the winter.
b) Eastern end of Ospringe village The plan of a local resident to put in a soakaway gave us an unusual opportunity to excavate a five metre trench at right angles to the line of the A2 (commonly thought to follow the line of Roman Watling Street).
	This trench, K63, was very productive, although not for the early medieval. Large quantities of unabraded medieval pottery were found, sufficient to require a detailed catalogue. Another find, close to the rear of the house and about 20 metres south of the A2, was a flint feature which looks very much like the southern edge of Watling Street. The findings of this trench will require a lot of attention over the next few months.
The five metre trench K63
c) Hospital of St Mary of Ospringe Desk top study of maps of previous excavations on the site of St Marys (otherwise known as the Maison Dieu) had shown severe difficulties in reconciling the orientation of the buildings shown in the different projects. We felt we needed to expose a small section of wall ourselves to help sort this out. The area covered by the garden and car park of the Ship Inn had not been previously examined, so a geo resistivity survey was carried out in the garden area.
	The results of this were used to sink a two by one metre trench (K62) in the South West corner of the garden which succeeded in exposing a section of wall, flanked to the south by a cobbled surface and to the north by a mortared floor. The orientation of the wall matched that of the former church, excavated by KARU in 1988, and differed from walls shown in the DoE 1977 excavation report. A detailed account of this will follow, and be accompanied by the 2009 Maison Dieu lecture which identified further anomalies in the record.
A wall of the Hospital of St Mary K62

K62 ready for an Open Day
Other projects The most important other task has been to resolve the difficulty in transferring our kind of archaeological findings to the HER. We are already very familiar with SMR entries, a group of us having helped with the ‘cleanup’ of local records ready for the transformation into the Kent HER. At the time of writing, seven entries for the Hunt the Saxons project are at the last stage of preparation. Each one will involve a group of test pits and will be referenced by a pdf document. It is hoped that these will be with the HER staff by mid November. This ensures the long term archiving of our findings, often a problem with work done by voluntary groups. Schedule for online reports Early December 2009: Keyholes 60, 61, 54, 64, and possibly 65/66. Early April 2010: Keyholes 62 and Keyhole/ trench 63 Interim reports on 2009: April 2010 Open Area 61 (enlarged K61): on completion of excavation Dr Pat Reid, Honorary Archaeologist for the Faversham Society, Director FSARG October 19^th 2009