Following a cliff collapse at Middle Cliff, Speeton, towards the south end of Filey Bay in March 2023, some timber posts were revealed. These aroused some interest on social media, and were identified by a Society member as the remains of a mid-19th century coprolite mine.

A narrow bed of coprolite (about 12cms) outcrops at Speeton and for a short period in the mid 19th century this was worked by driving adits into the cliff. Coprolite is highly phosphatic and was an important resource in the production of early chemical fertilisers.

The Society decided to do a rapid recording of the remains which were likely to be lost due to further cliff erosion. There were four, possibly five pit props and one horizontal member. These were geo-located using, drawn, conventionally photographed and also 3D photographed. The horizontal member which had a turn in it appeared to be a re-used timber, from a ship possibly a second or third futtock making up one of the ribs of a ship’s hull. Any hopes of recovering this timber for further analysis were dashed when a further cliff collapse obliterated these remains

Further monitoring was carried out and in November 2023 another cliff collapse revealed a further four pit props which were also geo-located and photographed. These have also largely disappeared due to cliff collapse.

Gillingwood Hall, near Richmond in North Yorkshire, was a fine Jacobean mansion built by the Whartons, a gentry family who bought the manor in 1609. The original manor house burned down in 1750 and was replaced by a farmhouse. This report presents the results of an investigation of these buildings and their garden landscape which several members of the Society have been assistng with. For the first time, a rare example of an early seventeenth-century terraced garden, contemporary with the Jacobean house, has been recognised. A trial excavation undertaken in conjunction with the Society has located one outside wall of the early mansion and proved the existence of a previously unsuspected basement.

Prior to 2023, the Society focussed its researches at Brompton on an area called Castle Hill where survey and excavation work over a number of years located several buildings and the perimeter wall of a medieval manor house. In July 2023 the Society undertook a series of garden digs to investigate the development of the village (report forthcoming). This was followed in October by the investigation of part of a cropmark site to the east of Brompton previously reported on by English Heritage. Three trenches were opened across across two ditches at the north-west extremity of a probable Roman settlement. The purpose of the excavation was to determine the nature and level of survival of the archaeological remains indicated by the cropmarks. The two ditches were aligned co-axially with one trench exposing the right-angle corner of an inner ditch while 16m to the north, the other two trenches examined different sections of an outer ditch. Both ditches had been backfilled rapidly resulting in a very uniform fill devoid of artefacts apart from one fragment of Roman roof tile and one sherd of pottery. Animal bone was also recovered, but the paucity of finds suggests that the area was very much on the periphery of the settlement. The excavation determined that in this area the settlement remains have been degraded by ploughing with only features cut into the natural likely to have survived

This report presents the results of an analytical earthwork survey undertaken at Aldby Park, Buttercrambe, North Yorkshire between December 2021 and January 2023. Previously, in 2021, the two authors surveyed an undocumented motte and bailey castle in part of the gardens at Aldby Park. This report follows on from that earlier survey by delivering the first detailed account of earthwork remains across the remainder of the park. These include part of a deserted medieval settlement towards the centre of the park connected with a market area and earthworks belonging to the shrunken village of Buttercrambe to the south. The site of a probable medieval manor house was surveyed to the north of the present house while immediately beyond it an extensive, and well-preserved medieval field system of ridge and furrow was recorded. The survey also added detail to features connected with the designed landscape of the park dating to the 18th and 19th centuries.

In February 2022 the owner of 100 Castle Road contacted the Society and draw our attention to the presence of a stone structure found within the ground floor during building works. The owner thought that the structure may be a fragment of the town wall. However, as the course of the Newborough defences in the vicinity of the site is well known to be on the opposite side of Castle Road, evidence being in both the surviving fragment of wall in the nearby car park and early mapping, it was clear that the structure could not be the town wall. However, it did appear, very unusually, to be a lime kiln within a building which is of interest so carried out investigations and survey. The Limekiln is probably late 18th century but in the early 19th century, after it had gone out of use a building was erected in front of it the kiln face being kept as a retaining wall.

We carried out 3D imagery and some of this showing the limekiln detail can be viewed at

https://poly.cam/capture/952B124B-35EE-42C9-8FF2-A6F4401A3D0F

Move your cursor over the image to rotate it.

Thorn Park Farm is several miles inland from Scarborough in the valley between Raincliffe Woods and Suffield Moor and south of the artificial drain called the Sea Cut that flows between the river Derwent and the coast at Scalby Beck.

With the encouragement and support of the farmer the Society excavated at the farm in 2022 to investigate two sites previously recorded from aerial photographs by Historic England. The project aimed to add to our understanding the landscape history of the area following an archaeological survey of the adjacent woods completed in 2018.

The first site investigated in April 2022 appears on aerial photographs as a parallel pair of ditches extending down the valley for 560m, possibly indicating the line of a former track. A previous geophysical survey by the Society located the two ditches on the ground and a 1m wide trench was excavated across each ditch. The width of the two ditches appeared upon excavation to be far greater than necessary to define the sides of a track. It is therefore possible that the feature could have begun as a double-ditch boundary, possibly of prehistoric date. This idea may gain support after a sample of the ditch fill has been radiocarbon dated.

The second site excavated in October 2022 appears on aerial photographs as a square enclosure about 25m across. The excavation discovered that the perimeter ditch is quite narrow with steep sides and a flat bottom and therefore may be a palisade trench as it is too narrow to have formed a practical defence or even to have confined livestock. No archaeological remains survived within the enclosure because of later ploughing.

In June 2021 an excavation took place to investigate a mound at Sawmill Bank Foot on the edge of Raincliffe Woods, Scarborough. The site was investigated as part of the Society's research into the evidence for iron working in the woods as surface evidence indicated the possibility this was a bloomery. The excavation uncovered a length of rough boulder wall associated with a shallow depression. Carbon 14 dating of a deposit of charcoal at the base of the depression next to the wall gave a middle Bronze Age date indicating that the feature is a rare survival from prehistory though its function has still to be determined. Sampling of the rest of the mound coupled with other archaeological finds indicate charcoal burning and iron working may have taken place in the vicinity but further archaeological investigations are needed to establish the exact circumstances.

The 2021 excavation aimed to advance understanding of the manor house by exposing the major part of a single building indicated by earthworks and excavation evidence from 2018. The trench measuring 10m x 10m was easily the largest we had ever dug on the site and it revealed three sides of a stone-walled building from the middle ages. Measuring around 12m in length and 7m in width, the building had been roofed with stone tiles and from the thickness of the walls could easily have been two storeys high. With this height it would have been a prominent landmark standing on the south edge of the hill facing out over the Vale of Pickering. The walls had been badly robbed in places but enough survived to show the building had stone windows and architectural details picked out in fine ashlar masonry. Part of a second building was found at the north-east corner of the main building but with much narrower foundations suggesting it had a timber superstructure. The two buildings were abandoned, probably in the 14th century and allowed to partially collapse before final demolition which left an extensive spread of stone rubble over this part of the hill top.

Traces of an earlier structure on a different alignment were discovered in two places below the main medieval building, but this has yet to be firmly dated. The excavation report will be available for download when it is completed.

In April 2021 two members of the field team made a detailed survey of a garden feature in the grounds of Aldby Park, Buttercrambe in support of research into the history of the estate being undertaken by the Yorkshire Gardens Trust. The estate is the private residence of Mr and Mrs Winn-Darley whose ancestor, William Darley, moved there in 1557 from Wistow, near Selby.

Partly fringed by a wide, flat-bottomed dry ditch, the garden feature occupies the top of a steep slope overlooking the river Derwent. It is an elongated mound about 80m long with rounded peaks at either end while a series of garden terraces step down the valley side to the river below. The monument is planted with trees and ornamental bushes which largely obscure it from view and include several yews that from their girth must be a couple of hundred years old. The earthwork has been part of the gardens for nearly 400 years as it appears on the earliest map of the estate of 1633 with very much the same arrangement of paths and walkways that it has today.

The survey results indicate that the garden feature was created from the earthworks of a Norman motte and bailey castle probably in the late 16th or early 17th century when it was believed the site was the residence of King Edwin, the first christian king of Northumbria who died in battle in 633 AD. Although there is no evidence to support the link to King Edwin as first recorded by the Tudor antiquarian William Camden, it is possible that the motte incorporates the remains of a prehistoric burial mound

The field team returned to Brompton Castle Hill in September 2019 to resume its investigations into the medieval remains discovered in the first season of work the previous autumn. The 2018 excavation established that earthworks visible in a pasture field on the west side of Castle Hill preserve the remains of a medieval structure towards its south side and a massive stone wall on the western side overlooking the village. The 2019 excavation advanced understanding by revealing a further section of the stone wall south-east of the 2018 trench and several buildings towards the centre of the site. It now appears very likely that the remains belong to an important medieval residence, most likely a manor house set apart from the rest of the village behind its own enclosure wall. The pottery from both the 2018 and 2019 excavations shows that the site probably dates to the 13th and 14th centuries when the Vescy family held much of the village so it is possible that the excavated remains are part of a manor house belonging to the family, though it will probably never be possible to prove this association with the Vescys beyond reasonable doubt. It is also possible that the site was fortified earlier in the medieval period with the construction of an earthwork motte and bailey castle of which part of the motte is thought to survive as a mounded area among the earthworks but this has yet to be tested by excavation.

The work on Castle Hill which also involved geophysical and earthwork surveys and a dig in an adjacent garden, has done much to establish the importance of the site in the medieval period and led to some ideas of how the village developed next to it, including the identification of a possible market area under the shadow of the manor house on the hill top. The work has benefited a great deal from the interest of the villagers and the support of members of the Brompton Local History Society

Over two long weekends in the early summer of 2019 the fieldwork team worked with the English Heritage Trust to undertake a small excavation in the grounds of Scarborough Castle. The aim of the excavation was to test the idea that a large flat-topped mound in the outer bailey of the castle is a dump of spoil from an abandoned plan to construct a large playing field in 1926. The excavation determined that the mound is probably of two phases beginning with a spoil dump from the 1921-5 excavation of the Roman Signal Station which was then added to in 1926 with spoil from levelling the north end of the playing field. That this levelling work disturbed an area of prehistoric deposits is indicated by the small assemblage of Iron Age pottery recovered from the 1926 mound. Other more recent artefacts shed light on the long use of the headland for military training including a concentration of finds from the 1940s and 50s found in a pit dug into the side of the 1926 mound.

As well as the dig, the Society also arranged activities for children with the ‘mini-digs’ proving very popular and there was someone on hand at all times to talk to the visitors about what we were doing. Over the course of the six days of the dig nearly 800 people came to visit the excavation. It also featured in the local paper and radio and on the BBC Look North regional news programme