The line is aiming roughly towards the village centre, almost on the line of Church Lane, although there is nothing to suggest that it is part of the medieval and modern lane. To the south and east of the enclosure, there are yet more ring ditches.
Copyright Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews
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Bronze Age remains in Norton village Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews B.A (NHDC Archaeology Officer) One of the surprises of the excavation carried out in the summer of 2007 was the discovery of a small Bronze Age pit underneath the wall of the late seventeenth-century barn. It contained only three objects: a broken whetstone, used for sharpening metal tools, a linen rubber, used for softening the fibres when making linen cloth, and a piece of flint débitage, a chip struck from a core during the creation of tools but not itself a tool. The finds give valuable dating evidence, as linen was introduced during the Neolithic (c 4000 - 2500 BC), metal tools around 2500 BC and flint fell out of regular use around 1400 BC. This perhaps puts our pit somewhere in the period 2500 - 1400 BC, during the earlier Bronze Age. Bronze Age remains - other than burials - are uncommon in Britain and often appear to occur in isolation. At Baldock, for instance, a number of Bronze Age pits have been found with little evidence for associated settlement or burial. In Norton, by contrast, there is an important settlement site of the third millennium BC at Blackhorse Road, excavated by John Moss-Eccardt of Letchworth Museum between 1957 and 1974. More features were found during Gil Burleigh's excavations nearby at Green Lane in 1988, now beneath Kristiansand Way. Might our pit be an outlier of this site? This is unlikely. For a start, the Blackhorse Road occupation is almost a kilometre away. Settlements of this date were simply not that big. Even more importantly, we know that there were burial mounds between Church Field and Blackhorse Road. Such mounds were usually found towards the edges of settlements and their associated fields, where they seem to have acted as symbols of ownership. This suggests that the Church Field pit was associated with a settlement somewhere closer to the village centre. It is now important to look at the evidence from the field south of Church Field, where aerial photographs have long shown the ditches surrounding destroyed burial mounds and where a geophysical survey carried out by GeoQuest Associates in 1996 confirmed these ditches and revealed others. More than that, the double ring lay at the centre of a roughly square ditched enclosure, with the north-north-western side open. In the south-eastern corner of the enclosure there is a single ring ditch. Beyond this, to the north-north-west, is a pair of ditches that appear to define a trackway, with a series of enclosures attached to the north-eastern side.
There is a large double-ring towards the centre of the field, which has been thought to be a burial mound of two separate phases, the larger ring showing that n originally small mound was subsequently enlarged. Between the concentric rings is an area of high resistance, suggesting to the geophysicists that there had been a 'kerb' of stones around the earlier, smaller barrow. Kerbed barrows are uncommon in eastern England, being a phenomenon more of the north and west. Copyright GeoQuest Associates 1996
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