Thorrington, Essex (NGR TM 099196)
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The village of Thorrington is today arranged in mostly ribbon form along three roads which intersect to form a sinuous approximately equilateral 1km triangle, at approximately 27m OD. The medieval church lies adjacent to Thorrington Hall to the south east of the village but these are isolated from the present village by more than 500m. The first edition Ordnance Survey map shows much of the present settlement to be of recent origin, with Thorrington in the 19th century comprising a dozen or so scattered farms and a few small isolated clusters of cottages.
Local Information Websites
2006
Eight test pits were excavated during the 2006 HEFA. Roman pottery was revealed in just one of these (TTN/06/1), adjacent to the church. None of the pits produced any post-Roman material pre-dating the 12th century, but three (TTN/06/1, 5, and 8) contained pottery of 12th to 14th century date. The location of these in the north-west, centre and south-east of the present large, straggling settlement could possibly suggest that the settlement pattern at this time was highly dispersed as a series of scattered nodes, each perhaps no more than a single farm. Only Gold Farm (TTN/06/1 and 7) produced any finds of 15th to 16th century date, which might possibly suggest that not all of these nodes were continuously occupied throughout the medieval period. In contrast, every single on of the excavated pits contained pottery dating to the mid 16th to late 18th century.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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2007
Ten test pits were excavated during the 2007 HEFA at Thorrington, bringing the total over 2006-7 to 18. Over these two years, two pits (TTN/06/6 and TTN/07/6) have produced grog-tempered pottery dating to between 50BC and 100AD. In both cases, these included a large sherd (27g and 28g) in the lowest contexts, which were otherwise undisturbed and appear to represent intact levels of this date. That both these pits lie relatively close together in similar locations is interesting, as it hints at the survival of a late prehistoric and/or early Roman ground surface on the edge of a presently wooded area to the south of the area currently under investigation. No evidence dating to the period between the 2nd and 12th centuries was recovered from any of the 2007 test pits, reflecting a similar absence of evidence for the Anglo-Saxon period from Thorrington in 2006. Evidence for the 13th- early16th centuries was only a little more plentiful, with only three pits (TTN07/2, TTN07/4 and TTN07/6) producing any ceramic material of this date, none of which yielded more than three sherds. This apparently dispersed settlement appears on current evidence to be very thinly occupied until the later post-medieval period.
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Pottery Report |
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Test Pit Location Map |
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Photographs: To view photographs from your field academy, type the following address into the address bar at the top of your browser window: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/aca/******/ (Replace '******' with the unique six-character code you were given for your site during the field academy. Important Note: Make sure you write your code in capital letters. And don't forget the forward slash at the end of the address!). |
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Pottery Distribution Map |