Wrawby Local History Group Archaeology Project

After our book was published for the Millennium, Wrawby Local History Group looked for a new project to take the group forward. Although a very small group, we were lucky enough to have amongst our number, a member who has a roman site on his land and a suggestion was put forward to investigate this site further. This was a completely different direction for us, as previous activities had always been centred around desktop research gathered from Lincoln Archives, Libraries, Newspapers and local contributors relating mostly to 18th and 19th Century Wrawby. More recently though, we have researched village life in the early 20th Century up to the beginning of the second World War, a project still awaiting completion.

One of our group had previously done some field walking, most of us were complete novices but eager to try something new, so we initially agreed to field walk the site. Enthusiasm then took over as we found a great deal of roman tile and our archaeology project was born.

Scunthorpe Museum have been a great support to us throughout, in these early days they organised an identification workshop for us run by Kevin LeahyWrawby Roman coin to give us some training in identifying the sort of items we might find on such a site. They also provided equipment and experienced manpower for our first field walk.

We continued with annual field walks over the next few years, usually in September working around harvest and crop planting. Obviously as we walked more, we became more experienced "getting our eye in" and quantities of mainly Roman greyware were found and also smaller amounts of other pottery - as well as lots of tile. As time went on we found lovely rims, handles and larger pieces of cooking pots, jugs and the like, usually in greyware. The site GPSwas proving quite rich in finds and we obtained help from metal detectorists to search for metal finds. After our first couple of field walks we used a hand held GPS to log our finds. Staff at the museum then kindly used their resources to plot what we had found against a plan of the site showing us diagrammatically where the concentrations were, differentiating between pottery, metal, coins etc.

Our curiosity grew as to the origins of the site, who had lived there? was it military or domestic? Added to this, aerial photographs showed definite "rings" in the fields indicating earlier, Image: Wrawby aerial photographpossible iron age structures also. An ambitious idea to do an archaeological dig on the site was suggested although we realised funding would be a great problem but a little research revealed the hope that Heritage Lottery funding may be available. This funding was applied for and the arduous task of filling in the application form, constructing budgets, getting quotes was undertaken by hardworking and dedicated members of the group. Imagine our delight when in August, 2006, we were notified of our successful bid and the dream of geophysical survey and a dig on our now very familiar site looked like becoming a reality, suddenly we were playing "Time Team" for real.

The new phase of our project stared with a field walk that September. One of the main criteria of the lottery funding, was involvement of the Image: Lottery fundedcommunity. To this end we advertised our activities regularly through the Village Community News and organised two evenings in the village hall in September and November 2006, for anyone who was interested in the project. On the first evening, we "pot washed" or washed some of the finds picked up on the field walk. We had all ages join us but the enthusiasm, energy and desire to learn about the Romans by the younger children was the highlight of the night.

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