Series: Hollinrake Archaeology Cooperative unpublished report series

An archaeological watching brief was undertaken during ground works adjacent to Cleeve Abbey while repairs to water pipes were carried out.

A Watching Brief carried out at 2 High St. Ilchester in respect of a planning application for the enhancement of the entrance facilities at a small dog grooming business.

To monitor the stripping of topsoil prior to creating an area of hard-standing.

Four machine-cut open areas of c.10m x 20m and two small test pits were monitored & surveyed with a drone and by the site surveyor. Features were initially half-sectioned and their profiles illustrated. Features were later fully excavated for finds and samples. Drone photographs were taken of areas and individual features throughout the project and used to create site plans. The north and eastern portion of a second, ruined Romano-British stone building was uncovered on the site, lying around 20m to the east of the Romano-British barn which was the subject of the 2017 excavation. The two buildings were parallel, and appeared to have corresponding dimensions at ca.8m wide x 16m long, although the build quality of the herringbone coursed masonry, and state of preservation of the building excavated in 2020 was inferior to the building excavated in 2017. The remnants of a well-constructed, originally culverted, stone lined drain crossed through the excavation area between the two stone buildings on the same orientation, which had been purposefully, partially demolished, probably during either the late or sub-Roman period. Romano-British activity on this part of the site appeared to have been primarily agricultural. Only six Roman coins were recovered, and fragments of jewellery from the period were only collected in a couple of instances. The Romano-British pottery assemblage was characterised by Black Burnished Wares, and finer wares such as Samian Ware were only encountered in rare instances. Pits and postholes from the period tended to be clustered around the two stone buildings, with the reduced base of a midden lying equidistant between them. The eastern terminus of a shallow boundary ditch which spanned the LIA to RB periods was also excavated. At present only 8 pits and 5 postholes have been securely dated to the Romano-British period from initial pottery analysis. These features represent around 10% of the total features excavated during the project. The excavation results indicate that an Iron Age settlement was well established on the site prior to the Roman invasion. Portions of three separate eaves drip gullies extended into the archaeological dig areas. One infant and one adult inhumation were exhumed, which are currently believed to date to between 1st century BCE - 1st century CE. The majority of the Iron Age features consisted of two substantial storage pits, a further 46 pits and 65 postholes. Tens of kilograms of Iron Age pottery have been collected from the site, which are likely to comprise a valuable archaeological resource for the region. The isolated discovery of 32 sherds from a Neolithic Grooved Ware vessel, weighing slightly less than 1kg, within a small pit, has raised the prospect that the site might have been subject to a greater intensity of activity than previously conceived, during the centuries prior to the 1st millennium BCE. The Neolithic and Bronze Age periods are otherwise represented by the deposition of flint flakes, and tools including scrapers, leaf shaped arrowheads and blades, which were commonly encountered throughout the dig, but not in abundant quantities.