EDO4101 - Land Adjacent to Bridport Road, Dorchester; evaluation 1995

Wessex Archaeology carried out an archaeological evaluation on land adjacent to Bridport Road, Dorchester, Dorset. This comprised the machine excavation and recording of three trenches, each 30m long and 1.5m wide, totalling 135 square metres (2.7% sample of the proposed development area). Two trenches were positioned within the footprint of the proposed building and the other along the line of a proposed access road to the SW. Previous land use on the site had been permanent pasture. All trenches revealed a similar stratigraphic sequence consisting of topsoil varying in thickness from 0.3m-0.4m, above a thin yellowish brown silty clay subsoil (0.1m-0.15m thick), which overlay an undisturbed clay with flint or Plateau Drift deposit. No archaeological features or deposits were recorded in any of the three trenches investigated. Archaeological remains recovered during the evaluation were restricted to a modest collection of worked flint of prehistoric date recovered from the topsoil and subsoil.