The Roman Road at Barcombe
- Rob Wallace (March 2006) 

In the summer of 2005 I was a supervisor at Barcombe Roman villa, when Chris Butler suggested that a good research project would be to look at the archaeology around the villa site. So I took the gauntlet and ran with it. Following a conversation with the farmer Mark Stroude, he informed me of a major flint scattering in Court House Field, which ran across the field and covered approximately 30 meters in width. In July 05 my colleague and friend Rhw Mitcheson and with help from fellow UCL students carried out some geophysics. It should be noted at this point that sweetcorn was growing in the field, and we were fortunate that one of area of interest was barren on sweet corn and Mark gave us permission to put a test trench in. Which Rhw supervised. The results were amazing. We had what we believed to be an unknown Roman road (I say believed because we had no dateable artefacts from the trench). The road had a metalled surface, under that was an agger and then flint foundations. Unfortunately the remainder of the width of the road lay under sweet corn. The trench was recorded and back filled.

On the 13 November I had decided to try and find the road in Pond Field, which is to north east of Court House Field. For these test trenches I had help from Chris Butler and his MSFAT team, also Bob Durrant who works at the farm, and drove the JCB for us. Our first trench went just inside Pond Field, I had roughly lined up our previous excavation in Court House field and Bob, and the JCB set to work eagerly being watched by the workforce with trowels in hand. It all looked good from the start plenty of large flints, bits of pottery, but the further we went down the less came up, we thought we had a possible ditch in the east end of the trench but this was not the case. We opened up 16 metres in all; 7 metres from the west end of the trench we did find a ditch. We left a team cleaning back whilst we took the JCB to north to the other side of the field, here we started Trench 2. We started this trench further to the east, again lots of flints coming up, we got to a depth of about 500mm and we thought we had our metalled service, the area was cleaned up and photographed and planned, we had a possible ditch at the east and west ends (although the west end turned out to be natural) the east end ditch did line up with the end of the road, and we found Roman pottery in it, also roman pottery was found in the surface of the road, including East

Sussex Ware and Samian Ware. The road was taken down another 300-400mm we was expecting to find the agger and the foundations of the road, but we found nothing just clay, so we had an emergency reinterpretation of the trench and the conclusion was that the layer of flints we had at 500mm was in fact the bottom layer of the foundations and everything else had been plough away. The land is higher in this part of the field so the road is nearer the surface in Pond Field than it is in Court House Field. The road is 8 metres wide.

Going back to Trench 1 the ditch we thought was the Roman ditch in fact turned out to be possibly late Bronze Age (a piece of pottery found in it at the bottom). Chris Butler carried out some dowsing and picked up a few possible features quite evenly spaced out (this will look good in my PhD write up) one possible hypothesis is that these could be Bronze Age field boundaries. He did the same on Trench 2, again evenly spaced apart from one which was just at the east end of our trench, so we dug it out by hand and found a modern plastic field drain (ok so it does seem to work for Chris but it certainly does not work for me, I must have too much natural magnetism). The next exciting and possibly very important feature we found in Trench 2 was a post hole at the west end of the trench right at the side of the road, this had flint packing, we half sectioned it and found  pieces of Roman pottery and the post ghost. The question on everybody’s lips was, was this a one off post hole (road sign saying London this way) or could it possibly be a structure next to the road, (I had watched a Time Team episode the week before, where at Sedgefield a Roman road was discovered and alongside the road were wooden structures (post holes) and at the back of them they discovered a pottery kiln (complete) and it has been interpreted as small industrial sites along the edge of the road to minimise transport (www.channel4.com/history/timeteam/2003_sedgefield_t.html ).

So we decided to open another trench southwest along the edge of the road to see if there were any further post holes, three metres in and yes a second post with flint packing and Roman pottery. Here is were the story so far ends; the post holes were recorded and on 10 December the test trench was back filled and then the field was ploughed, I have just started planting sweet corn in Pond Field and further investigation will have to wait until August at the earliest.

I will start new excavations at Culver Mead (the next field where I’m sure the road continues) in August this year. I will keep you posted, I would like to thank all the MSFAT members who came down and helped with the excavation especially Chris Butler, Keith Butler, Barrie Basset, Dave Cudmore, and Sue Birks, also thanks go to Mark Stroude for letting me dig up his land and for the loan of the JCB and Bob Durrant for driving the JCB. And I would also like to thank the UCL students who helped in Court House Field.