Last updated: 14th June 2008 (R.Tabor)

Geophysical survey has formed the backbone of the project from an early stage. By 1996 it had become part of the project’s strategy that there should be total gradiometry (a form of magnetometry) coverage if all sample areas and that remains the case.

Some of the results have been spectacular because of particular individual features  revealed but of the greatest important has been the revelation of bounded systems of land-use which reach back to the Early Bronze Age. Many illustrations are published in Cadbury Castle: The hillfort and its landscapes.

This remarkable survey was carried from 1992 to 1996 and formed the basis of the pilot study which determined the project’s long term strategy. The 18ha field included an Early Bronze Age parallel linear field system, pre-dating at least one barrow; a Middle Bronze Age metalworking enclosure; an elaborate long term Iron Age field system; an extensive Middle to Late Iron Age pit group and associated enclosure; a later first century AD farmstead and a Romano-British field system with associated stone founded buildings.

Sheep Slait is a 20ha tongue of land separated on all sides but a narrow neck by steep-sided narrow V-shaped valleys. Gradiometry showed traces of barrows and a later Bronze Age field system. The latter was associated with a 50m diameter ringwork, over 120km from the nearest example, itself an outlier of a group in the Thames Valley and close to the south east and east coast. The centre of the ringwork was re-used during the Iron Age.

The apparently ancient boundaries of modern Woolston Manor Farm were enough for then project director, Richard Tabor, to revise his sampling strategy, employing a policy of total coverage of the farm. The evidence from gradiometry,  test pits and a small excavation showed that the present farm buildings are adjacent to, and probably over, the core habitative settlement area at the centre of a field system established in the later Iron Age and still influencing the modern land-holding and its internal division. That system respected a previously unknown hilltop enclosure, itself preceded by an Early and revised Middle Bronze Age linear field system overlooking it from the north.

Fuller accounts and interpretations of the survey work appear in Cadbury Castle: The hillfort and Landscapes. Full academic reports is in preparation..

Fieldwork