SNN114187 - Vine Cottage, 62 Stoke Road, Ashton, Northamptonshire: Archaeological Investigation, April 2022

In March & April 2021 archaeological monitoring was carried out by Souterrain during groundwork for a new dwelling and garage at Ashton, a village and civil parish in the south of the county of Northamptonshire. The building plot lies on the western periphery of the village adjacent to the parish boundary. Based on the historic origins of Ashton and occasional archaeological discoveries, the site was considered to have potential for buried remains pertaining to its medieval to post-medieval settlement, and before it, to the Romano-British rural landscape. Foundation trenching provided a representative sample of the site’s stratigraphy, the ground having previously suffered extensive modification in the modern period to site stables and equestrian areas. Modern made-ground overlay a truncated layer of topsoil, which in turn, directly overlay geological stratum. There were no archaeological features and the buried soil was devoid of artefacts. The absence of anthropogenic-derived subsoil suggested that the land was uncultivated throughout the medieval and post-medieval periods. But other than this it was not possible to draw meaningful conclusions with regard to historic or earlier land-use in the area of development. The report places the Application Site and property into its archaeological and historic context and provides an illustrative, photographic and descriptive account of the work