SNN105332 - Mill Wood, Fineshade, Northamptonshire: Geophysical Survey

The study area lies within Mill Wood, Fineshade. Mill Wood, which is part of the Northants Forest District, is situated to the east of the A43 road between the towns of Croby and Stamford. The majority of the land that was assessed in this pilot survey was relatively flat, although Area I, which was the most westerly, sloped significantly. The soils at the site have a high clay content and are likely to be either of the Denchworth or Evesham 1 association. The underlying geology is presumed to be Jurassic/Cretaceous clay and/or limestone. There are a number of excellent summaries of the archaeology of the region surrounding Fineshade. One of the most recent and comprehensive, formed part of the analysis of the Ancient Woodland Project Archaeological Surveys. Within Mill Wood itself evidence has been found for woodland boundaries, two areas of ridge and furrow farming and three distinct sites. Directly to the west of the wood lies Fineshade Abbey which provides evidence for iron making from the Roman period onwards. The broad aim of this pilot project was to assess the extent to which geophysical techniques might be used to locate buried archaeology in the ancient woodland holding of Forest Enterprise’s Northants Forest District. Mill Wood was chosen as the study area as there is a variety of ground cover, some pockets of archaeology are known within the wood and other sites or features were thought likely to be found within its limits. Geophysical techniques have been successful in locating both known and unknown elements of buried archaeology in four areas of woodland surveyed in this pilot study. The work involved scanning the whole of each area using magnetometers and then undertaking detailed survey with the same instrument as well as collecting closely spaced magnetic susceptibility measurements. One area of the known, but ‘lost’, industrial activity was mapped in Area I, while a new site was found in Area A. The latter may indicate the position of a charcoal-burning area. Elsewhere the scanned anomalies were either associated with isolated archaeological type responses or were ferrous in nature; ferrous, in this context usually indicates relatively modern intervention. It is suggested from this work that magnetic techniques can have a role in the location of sites within woodlands and should be considered in the future management of the archaeological resource within Mill Wood and related areas of forest.