Archaeological Watching Brief on Land Adjacent to the Manor House, North Wingfield, Derbyshire

ARCUS were commissioned by Mr. Andrew Drury to conduct an archaeological watching brief on land to the north of the Manor House, North Wingfield, Derbyshire. The archaeological monitoring was required during groundworks in preparation for the construction of two new bungalows. A feature previously interpreted as a possible medieval moat was encountered, and sections through the fills of the feature were recorded during excavation of foundation trenches. The feature was of irregular cross-section, with a shallow U-shaped profile 7.30m wide and 1.30m deep in the western part of the site, and a broader, shallower profile 1.00m deep further to the east. The fill of this feature was a uniform loamy deposit with dumps of modern rubble throughout, and a pottery assemblage dating no earlier than the eighteenth century. It is clear that this deposit cannot represent the in situ fill of a medieval feature. If the moat is indeed a genuine medieval feature, then its fills, at least in the area covered by the watching brief, have been removed, perhaps by dredging and reinstatement of the feature. The tithe map of 1842 suggests that the feature was water-filled at the time, and it may have been reinstated as a pond or lake within the pleasure ground shown on the site during the nineteenth century. Anecdotal evidence (Hart 1981) suggests that anomalous moat fills continue to the west into the churchyard extension. Confirmation of this contention lay outside the scope of this watching brief, but if this is the case then it is possible that the feature was once more extensive, and may indeed represent part of a sub-rectangular moat of medieval date, subsequently dredged and re-used within eighteenth- or nineteenth-century gardens. The irregular profile and depth of the feature, the nature of its fill, and the complete lack of medieval material culture, may alternatively suggest that the feature is not medieval in origin, and represents a pond or lake constructed from scratch within the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century pleasure grounds. It is not possible on current evidence to decide between these two contending interpretations. Whatever the origins of the moat feature, it is clear however that no trace of a medieval fill sequence survives in the area covered by this project.