EDO6650 - Land East of 13 Winters Lane, Portesham; evaluation 2019

An evaluation carried out in October 2019 as a condition of outline planning consent for development of the site (West Dorset reference D/19/000464). Two trenches, both measuring 10m x 1.8m, were mechanically excavated across an east-west aligned linear earthwork bank considered to be a possible medieval lynchet. Trench 1 revealed no evidence for a bank, other than a localised soil accumulation. Trench 2 exposed a buried subsoil horizon beneath a clay bank. The absence of a negative lynchet from either trench indicates that the earthwork is unlikely to have been formed by cultivation, and it appears simply to be an earthen mound of an undetermined function, nature and date. No subsoil archaeological features or artefacts were present in either trench.