SNN112192 - A Roman farmstead and Anglo-Saxon cemetery at Glapthorn Road, Oundle

Excavation in advance of new houses on land to the rear of the George Inn, Glapthorn Road, Oundle examined Iron Age and Roman settlement and an Anglo-Saxon cemetery. A few dispersed pits are dated to the late Bronze Age/early Iron Age. A roundhouse ring ditch marks the origin of a late Iron Age/early Roman settlement of the mid-first century AD. By the early second century a system of ditched enclosures had been created. In the early third century there was an expansion of settlement, including the provision of a trackway, with modification of the system continuing through the fourth century. In the earlier phases the domestic focus may have lain in an adjacent area to the west, probably surrounded by a timber palisade at one stage, but this focus only became clearly evident in the late-third century when a walled rectilinear enclosure was created. This indicates that the settlement was flourishing and wealthy, perhaps then comprising a small stone villa, but the principal house lay beyond the excavated area. The domestic compound opened to the east into two ditched enclosures, which in the fourth century contained a T-shaped corn drier and other ovens/hearths, as an area involved in farming the attached estate. A small Anglo-Saxon cemetery, containing ten inhumation burials, occupied part of a former Roman enclosure. Radiocarbon dating and the artefact assemblages date the cemetery to between the mid-sixth and mid-seventh centuries AD. Furrows of the medieval ridge and furrow field system, and a series of recent land drains, ran across the site.