| Summary: | South West Archaeology Ltd. was commissioned by the landowner to undertake an archaeological evaluation across a Scheduled Monument at Bow in Mid Devon containing a Class II Henge and a pair of Prehistoric enclosures. The programme of works was designed to record the thickness of the topsoil/subsoil, to assess the current state of the monuments in order to draw up an appropriate management strategy for the site, and to facilitate long-term monitoring of their condition.
The Class II henge was identified in 1984 and has been the subject of fieldwalking and geophysical survey; this is the first intrusive intervention to be undertaken. The evaluation fulfilled its principal objective and determined that the soils covering the site, while fairly shallow, do include the minimum sustainable buffer required to resume arable cultivation across most of the site with the exception of the north-east corner of the field. The COSMIC assessment of the field would indicate the site to be at low risk of damage, again excepting the north-east corner.
The secondary objective of the work – to use this opportunity to explore the archaeology of the site – has also been richly rewarded. The trenches exposed a large number of archaeological features, from which a limited but useful volume of stratified archaeological material was recovered. In particular, the work appears to demonstrate that the henge did not exist in isolation and that there is an intriguing post-abandonment narrative to the monument. |
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