This digital archive includes images and site record data from an archaeological project. In March 2020, Oxford Archaeology (OA) was commissioned by the Westmorland Dales Landscape Partnership to undertake a programme of community archaeological excavation on Little Asby Common, Cumbria over two seasons of fieldwork. The work, Little Asby Through the Keyhole, was funded by a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and aimed to provide training for volunteers in excavation techniques, promote knowledge of local landscape history and to gain a wider academic understanding of one of the more significant upland landscapes in the North West.

The project's first season was undertaken in September 2021 and entailed keyhole evaluation trenches across undated settlement and field system monuments. The second season of work, which was informed by the first, took place from the 3rd to the 18th of September 2022 focusing upon the site of a rectangular structure on Grange Scar that survives as an earthwork and associated three-sided enclosure wall. A total of seven trenches was excavated across the rectangular structure and wider enclosure, identifying evidence of land use from the prehistoric to the post-medieval period. Clearance activity in the form of charcoal dating from the early Neolithic was identified from environmental samples and a fragment of a type VI Langdale axe, typically associated with forest clearance during the period, was recovered from a deposit beneath the enclosure wall. The same deposit provided evidence for clearance episodes dating to the Iron Age, and residual lithic material indicated land use and wider trade networks with the east and west of the country. As suspected, the excavations conclusively demonstrated that the enclosure wall pre-dated the rectangular building, and although a precise date for the enclosure was not established, radiocarbon dating of material from a deposit below it determined it to be of Iron Age or later date.

Excavation of the building revealed a rectangular structure, with low rubble foundations set directly upon the limestone pavement that probably provided the footing for a turf wall, under a turf and heather roof. The building had a probable entrance to the centre of its northern wall and, internally, a cross-wall divided the building into two cells, connected by an internal doorway at its northern end. Perhaps due to the limited depth of soil cover no further deposits or features were identified from the interior of the building and dating evidence was extremely limited. A charred wheat grain retrieved from beneath the eastern wall of the structure provides an earliest possible date of the early thirteenth century and pottery dating to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries was retrieved from the topsoil and from the deposit beneath it. However, the general absence of finds makes it more plausible the structure belongs to the medieval period, considered largely aceramic in the region.