Land off Bath Road, Tetbury, Gloucestershire: Archaeological Evaluation

The evaluation fieldwork comprised the excavation of five trenches, each measuring 15m in length and 1.8m in width, in the locations shown on the attached plan. The trenches were located to test geophysical anomalies and to provide a representative sample of the remainder of the site. In January 2026, Cotswold Archaeology carried out an archaeological evaluation of land off Bath Road, Tetbury, Gloucestershire. A total of five trenches were excavated. A flint blade of Mesolithic to Early Neolithic date was recovered from a pit identified in a trench excavated in the north-western part of the site. Three further, albeit artefactually sterile, pits were also identified in this trench. A series of ditches identified in trenches excavated in the north-western, south-western and eastern parts of the site correlated closely to parts of linear anomalies identified by a preceding geophysical survey. These ditches appeared to represent the southward continuation of an enclosure of probable Early Bronze Age date identified immediately to the north-east of the site during a preceding archaeological excavation. However, artefactual material recovered from these ditches during the current evaluation was limited to two flint flakes of broad prehistoric date and a fragment of fired clay. Deposits of relict ploughsoil identified in trenches excavated in the south-western part of the site, and the presence of a furrow in a trench excavated in the northern part of the site, support previous suggestions that the site lay within the agricultural hinterland of Tetbury during the medieval and post-medieval periods. A ditch identified in a trench excavated in the northern part of the site correlated closely to a former field boundary depicted on late 19th-century mapping.