Wednesday 4 December 2024

LAHS Research Grant Funding Bradgate Park Lawn Geophysical Survey

This small grant contributed towards survey work led by Ice Age Insights

Back in March 2024, we made a small grant to the Ice Age Insights, a charity that promotes investigation of Palaeolithic archaeology and geology in the East Midlands. This was to contribute towards facility costs for the volunteers, who would undertake a Geophysical survey in the area known as Bradgate Park Lawns (SK531101 – west of Bradgate House)

We are pleased to report that we have since received the following update from them. If you feel your project could benefit from the LAHS Research Fund, please get in touch!

Bradgate Park Community Geophysics project: March – June 2024 by Ice Age Insights

When you walked through the Park from Newtown Linford this spring, you might have spotted our volunteers with tapes and geophysical survey kit. They were looking for any archaeology buried below the Lawns between the prehistoric campsite at the end of Little Matlock Gorge and the ruins of Bradgate House. Analysis of flints from the campsite has showed that the expected butchery knives are missing - maybe they were on the prehistoric hunting grounds in view of the campsite? Hence, in 2021, Bradgate Park volunteers worked with the Ice Age Journeys team to excavate test-pits to look for further prehistoric activity. Excavations can always throw up surprises, and alongside flints, we also discovered Roman + Iron Age pottery and a stone-built drain. Before we could continue our hunt for flints, we therefore needed to know if the Lawns concealed substantial Roman activity. To check this out we set out to map buried features by geophysical survey.

Luckily, we could team up with other volunteers from the Leicestershire Fieldworkers, who have a dedicated geophysics group. They set up two training sessions so that our volunteers could learn the skills required, and, in all, we conducted 13 days of survey involving 52 people (who gave 288 days of time).

We had to test both resistivity and magnetometry (red area only, see below), to see which geophysical technique worked best because the underlying geological deposits are known to be slightly magnetic. Resistivity gave the best result; it measures the electrical resistance of the soil and can detect walls, ditches, postholes, middens and trackways.

The resistivity results (marked by orange lines below) did confirm that the drain we’d discovered in our test-pits ran right across the area surveyed. It was one of many — we now know where not to test-pit for prehistoric activity! The resistivity also picked up features which continued from some slight earthworks, thought to be medieval or later, that lay mostly outside of our surveyed area. However, there are no obvious signatures of foci of Roman activity, like ditched-enclosures or pit-clusters, or identifiable buildings, recognized in our survey. We achieved 106 (20x20m) grids of resistivity results which covered 4.24 hectares.

We can now look forward to a second phase of test-pitting to complete our original survey — to hunt for the prehistoric hunters!