SWX8533 - Aerial Photographic Assessment. Bournemouth Park & Ride Scheme

This assessment of aerial photographs was undertaken by Chris Cox MA MIFA at CgMs Consulting under commission from the Trust for Wessex Archaeology (the client). The assessment was commissioned and completed in June 2001. The object of the assessment was to identify and provide detailed and accurate mapping of archaeological features which were visible on specified aerial photographs within the archaeological study area at the site of the proposed Bournemouth Park and Ride Scheme. The site is bisected by the modern A338 road and comprises agricultural land with hedged boundaries and internal hedged lanes. Vertical aerial photographs taken between 1946 and 1969 were examined at the English Heritage National Monuments Record. These photographs showed: • Evidence for a series of extensive buried cut features over the site. These features comprise sinuous and curvilinear ditched enclosures, linear ditches, small sub-circular enclosures and numerous pits. They show as positive marks in a growing cereal crop which has responded to the greater moisture content of the buried ditches on this occasion. • These features are likely to represent the remains of a former settlement or farmstead with extensive domestic or stock-penning enclosures and areas of disposal or storage pits. The site may date to the Iron Age or Romano-British period, although this date is at present completely conjectural and assigned on morphological grounds only. • Other light-toned linear and perpendicularly aligned linear features are indicative of modern ploughing patterns. Further pits may be seen outside the immediate study area and are indicated on Figure 1. • It is likely that further archaeological evidence, which is not visible on air photos, will be present within the study area, and that features revealed via geophysical survey or excavation will be more complex and extensive than revealed initially by the aerial photographs.