More Fieldwalking at Clarabad Farm, Paxton

A small team went into the field today, to carry on walking the fields at Clarabad Farm between Paxton and Hutton in the Scottish Borders. The field is not especially productive, but it has nevertheless afforded us with at least a dozen lithic finds and some fragments of clay pipes that span the period from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Much of the lithic material is produced in flint, however, there is a background of chert waste. It is curious to note that there are large blocks of unworked chert in this field, suggesting that we are quite close to a primary outcrop of this material here; more importantly, though, is that it underscores that the region is not impoverished with respect to chert and that the material could easily be collected from the fields and presumably also from the valley through which the River Whiteadder flows.

We are working on a revised schedule of events, which will be posted here as soon as it has been confirmed. Our intention, if this is acceptable to the farmer at Chesterfield Farm, is to bring in a mechanical excavator to strip the part of the site where the main body of the features have emerged. In the trench nearest to the hard-standing where we park our vehicles, there is a feature that may represent a round house. The best way to investigate this feature is by exposing as much of the immediate region as possible and this is best achieved by a machine stripping the topsoil. A similar approach might assist us in understanding the extent and the nature of the features that have appeared in the trench where Hilary and John have been excavating.