EDO6606 - Beauvoir Court, Cerne Abbas; evaluation 2019

Archaeological evaluation of the site of a proposed new car park and access path, as part of more extensive alterations to the building and its stable block. Two trial trenches were excavated using a 5-ton mechanical digger with toothless grading bucket. Trench 1 measured 9.75m by 1.9m and was located in the southern paddock where the proposed car park would be. Trench 2 measured 4.8m by 1.9m and was situated in a sunken paddock to the north, possibly a back-filled pond, roughly along the line of the proposed access path. Both trenches revealed a series of levelling layers and soils, containing pottery, roof slate and ceramic building material dating from medieval and post-medieval to recent date. These overlay the natural chalk in Trench 2. In Trench 1 at 0.9m depth at the southern end a roughly metalled surface likely to be the floor of an agricultural building or yard surface, was found set on reddish-brown gritty soil which itself sealed an infilled chalk-cut ditch which was possibly of broadly prehistoric date. A small section of the ditch only was examined however it was over 2m wide and 0.7m deep and was aligned ENW-WSW. It contained a single fill of pale-grey-brown humic-depleted clay-silt with chalk lumps and animal bone and one struck flint flake of broad prehistoric date.