Monument record 7983 - Historic Hedgerow Boundary Excavated at Lea Manor Farm

<1> Professor Emeritus Nick Higham, 2013, Lea Manor Farm, Aldford: Report on Archaeological Investigation associated with the Re-development of Lea Manor Farm (2013) (Client Report). SCH7869.

In 2013 an evaluation trench was excavated across the line of an historic hedgerow boundary in advance of development at Lea Manor Farm. The boundary comprised a bank and ditch with a hedgerow running along the south-western edge of the ditch. Large stumps implied that the hedge had been planted in the nineteenth century. The bank appeared to be of two phases, with the later phase, no earlier than the second half of the twentieth century, mostly comprising clay, dumped on the north-eastern edge of an earlier, wider, shallow bank. Given that ridge and furrow was existed adjacent and parallel to the hedge bank in 1947 it is possible that this field boundary originated as the outside ridge of the field lying to the north east.

Initially the furrow to the south west of the hedge served as a ditch. However, efforts to improve the drainage of land to the south west involved the laying of drains to run off water to the Aldford Brook. Numerous pipe fragments in the bank imply that this was initially achieved by the use of pipes trenched in along the furrow south west of the hedge. Eventually a deep ditch was cut into natural clay, material from which was dumped behind the hedge, thus creating the later bank. This final phase occurred after the switch to plastic field drains in the later twentieth century. The result was a deep, steep-sided ditch with running water in the bottom, the base of which was 220 cm below the top of the bank. Both the ditch and clay bank are, therefore, very recent features, even though the line which they mark has been a significant boundary for 500-1,000 years.