Watching Brief at Land at NGR 276915 94920, Lewdon Cross, Cheriton Bishop, Devon

The application proposes the construction of an agricultural storage building for the secure storage of land maintenance and agricultural equipment. It was proposed to be located on the lowest part of Site, just off the public highway between the villages of Cheriton Bishop and Yeoford. The building will also provide shelter for a small number of sheep, as well as a dry storage area for their fodder. An access track has also been included within the proposal. This application has been recommended for archaeological input by DCC HET, following the revised siting of the proposed agricultural storage building. While the re-location has avoided direct impact on the known double-ditched prehistoric or Romano-British enclosure, the building remains within an area of archaeological potential. Groundworks associated with the construction, particularly excavations for foundations, have the potential to expose or destroy buried archaeological or artefactual remains. Therefore, DCC HET has advised that the impact of the proposed development should be mitigated through a programme of archaeological work designed to investigate, record, and analyse any archaeological evidence that may be encountered. The topsoil (between 0.12m and 0.15m thickness throughout) and subsequent underlying subsoil (between 0.17m and 0.24m thickness throughout) was removed by a mechanical excavator using a toothless grading bucket under constant archaeological supervision during the excavation of the footprint for the proposed structure. The underlying natural substrate consisted of a light grey to light yellow clay with geological variations of degraded shillit and veins of bedrock. No features, deposits or artefacts of archaeological interest were observed. The only features noted consisted of three east to west aligned plough scars and two northeast to southwest aligned markings. All of these markings were entirely enclosed within the area of archaeological monitoring and recording. Considering the field had been subject to regular ploughing in the modern era, it was considered that these features were all modern. The only possible noticeable impact upon the natural substrate is modern agricultural activity. As the presence of plough scarring is limited, it is unlikely that the ploughing and other agricultural activity would have contributed to eradicating/truncating away any underlying archaeological features. There is no evidence of any obvious terracing or artificial make-up of the landscape, which would have contributed to destroying any surviving archaeology. As such, it is unlikely any underlying archaeology would have been impacted by modern agricultural activity. Across the Site, there was no artefactual evidence from the topsoil or subsoil layers to suggest activity predating the modern era. Twinned with the aforementioned limited impact upon the natural substrate, this absence of archaeological activity suggests that the Site does not contain evidence of archaeological significance or is archaeologically or historically associated with the neighbouring prehistoric/Romano British settlement to the northeast. The Site rather likely formed part of the agricultural hinterland of the landscape.