Latest News
LATEST NEWS
2024 Public Open Day
Saturday 13th July
Over 400 visitors attended the Open Day
The weather stayed fine and Barcombe Mills Road was open. We were a bit overwhelmed by the numbers and kept very busy trying to get everyone taken around the site and finds.
We provided a slide show of the well as it was not visible as back underwater.
Sorry if you had to wait. Thank for you all for your patience and your donations
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If you wish to be emailed on CAP updates
Email information@culverproject.co.uk
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Looking to the future & rising costs
Costs of running the annual excavations at Bridge Farm have risen greatly over recent years.
lf this website has raised your interest in the project and you feel you would like to help by making a donation please email join@culverproject.co.uk for detail
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Click Instagram for photo updates of this
year's dig and finds
Click for power point on a general look back
over 10 years of investigation at Bridge Farm
Culver Project
Bridge Farm Excavations 2024
A hectic last year in Trench 7 with the excavation of the timber-lined well plus a new trench next year.
Trench 7, opened in 2018, will be closed this year having offered a very complex, multiphase archaeology that took 6 years to fully investigate.
It has been another finds-rich season, especially in pottery; with whole pots, fine ware dishes, cups and beakers, samian mortaria and bases with maker’s marks. Other finds include: a diamond-shaped, bronze plate pin; a Hadrian coin with the first personification of Britannia, 30% of a turquoise glass dish, a shard of snake thread glass, and a lot more.
Located over the centre of the settlement, Trench 7 surprisingly proliferated with large and often very deep pits, as well as several rows of postholes, including the rectangular alignment of a building.
The features suggested industry whilst the finds showed a buoyant consumer community.
But as always, the best was saved till last, with a waterlogged timber-framed well found deep below a later Roman-period pit. Investigation required a massive effort, hand-digging a series of 0.5m steps and shoring the section of the upper pit to give safe access. It took the full six weeks and a lot of hard work by students, volunteers, and supervisors, and the constant use of submersible pumps, to expose the square timber frame, remove some sample timbers and wet float the grey clay from the interior for organic finds. These included several leather shoe fragments, a wooden knife handle and a birch wood stake complete with bark and some animal bones, including several dog bones.
But where to go next year? Resistivity surveying over the winter will cement our ideas for a trench for the 2025 and following seasons.