The talk consisted of two halves:-
- Searching for the Roman Stane Street throught Ewell, by Alan Hall
- The Roman site at Flexford, by David Calow

Stane Street

Stane Street once ran from Chichester to Southwark; parts went out of use and some parts remained. Alan decided to look for some ‘missing’ bits between Leatherhead and Epsom/Ewell.
It’s not really known exactly why Stane Street was built, but if the Romans first landed in fact near Chichester, probably at the invitation of some local British Chieftains, they may have wished to ‘seed’ Romanisation in this part of the country, and besides building the prestigious Fishbourne Palace, decided to make a major road to London. Bits of the road show up in the landscape in various guises: it runs along a terrace cut into the hillside; along a causeway; and appears as a bridle way.

Although a standard trench size for this sort of work is 30 metres long and one metre deep the team decided this was too much and dug 1½ metre test pits which could be joined up if necessary.
But first they did research using air photographs, linear alignments on maps and evidence from previous excavations and publications. Archaeologists working for the Ordnance Survey had found some of the road; one excavator, using an air photograph, had dug and extended the line in the photo; and Lady Hanworth, a former Chairman of Surrey Arch.Soc., dug in advance of the M25 and found part of the road. In her trench there were plough marks, and Vitruvius says the Romans used to do this to level off the land for road making.

There were no roadside ditches here, but Roman roads did not always have them. The standard width of a Roman road was 6 metres (20 pedes).

Various digs, which had uncovered bits of the road, had taken place previously in the Epsom and Ewell area, one being behind St Martin’s Church, north of Woodcote Park. The Group hired one of the allotments nearby for a month and a lot of flints came out. Projecting the line down into Ewell, the direction seemed to change slightly at each high point (perhaps due to a slight error being made between high points). And it diverts around the large pool at Ewell, perhaps indicating a shrine. Knocking on one door and asking if they could dig in the garden, they got permission and found metalling, and in a garden on the Staneway Estate they also found flint metalling. So they are pretty certain of the line of the road here, and have now published their work. At the end of this part of the talk, one of the many questions was: how did the Roman engineers know where to go after starting out from Chichester? Alan replied that the road runs more or less straight from Chichester to London Bridge, and this is probably not coincidence! Perhaps they made use of high points.

Flexford

David Calow followed with an account of an extremely intriguing site which they came across when looking for an east-west Roman road from London to Winchester. They dug at Flexford near Farnham - a farmer had noticed something interesting in his fields and invited them to have a look. This was an area where Iron Age land use had been discovered plus a temple (Wanborough, where thousands of Iron Age coins had been discovered and unfortunately looted), and there were villas, cremations and traces of Romano-British settlements.

The area seems to have ‘livened up’ in the first century but petered out in the fourth; Wanborough temple, in use till around 350AD, started off round and later became square. There was an Hundred boundary between Woking and Godalming. So it was an ancient area.

Alice Holt (Roman) pottery was coming up in molehills. The Group used their newly-acquired magnetometer, downloading the results into a computer, and put in some trenches. The area had not been deeply ploughed so they found undamaged features such as a hearth with a complete pot, and ditches containing Romano-British pottery in large pieces. And there were signs of industrial activity: kiln waste, traces of metal working and charcoal, part of a forge with hammerscale. The farmer had gone over some of his land with a metal detector and in just one small hole found a great deal of different kinds of material: pottery, lead alloy, slag, some rare evidence of pewter making, rare late Samian ware, parts of a glass bowl and a copper alloy bowl with rivet repairs. What sort of place was this: a farm? A villa? Did these people live in flimsy buildings - there was a flint floor of a probable timber-framed building – or perhaps move around the country? The site was out of use by 350AD, not cultivated till the Norman period and the existing hedges and ditches do not date before the medieval period. And no major road was found.

Yvonne Masson