Scottish Power Renewables Site 31, Waldringfield, Suffolk. Post-Excavation Assessment and Updated Project Design

Between 6th and 14th December 2017, Archaeological Solutions Ltd (AS) carried out an archaeological excavation at Site 31 (WLD 070, to the immediate northwest of Waldringfield, Suffolk. The excavation of Site 31 encountered a re-cut north-south ditch dating to the Late Bronze Age/early Iron Age. At the north end of Site 30, the probable earlier of the two ditches appear to have included a c.4-5m gap, around which the alignment rotates slightly; moving from north to south, the NNW-SSE alignment rotates slightly to the south. The presumed later, recut of this ditched boundary closed off this gap. This ditch line is mirrored in a pair of adjacent ditches c.150m to the east in Site 30 (WLD 069), and again c.300m to the east in Site 29C (MRM 173). Together, these regularly spaced boundaries are part of an expansive formal field system visible in cropmarks (MRM 015) extending at least 1km to the north from Site 31. Also found at Site 31 were a small number of dispersed pits and possible postholes containing late Bronze Age/early Iron Age pottery; no discernible patterns or concentrations of the discrete features were evident, and it is unclear how this domestic activity relates chronologically to the two long ditches. The only other dated archaeological features at Site 31 were a series of east-west ditches and fence-line in the north of the site. Although devoid of datable finds, these features correlate with modern ditched hedgerows and fence lines on the edge of the farm adjacent to the east of Site 31. An undated ditch on the same east-west alignment in the south the site can also be assigned to this modern phase.