Open area excavation on 14.45ha of land at Cambridge Road, Bedford was
carried out in 2004-5 in advance of development. A background scatter of
Early Neolithic flint, including a Langdale stone axe, may be related to
the nearby presence of the Cardington causewayed enclosure. Two Early
Bronze Age ring ditches sat on a low lying gravel ridge between the
River Great Ouse and the Elstow Brook. A causewayed ring ditch, 30m in
diameter, had a broad entrance to the southwest, where a shallow length
of ditch either silted or had been filled in. Adjacent to the shallow
ditch was a pit containing three crouched burials, probably in an
oak-lined chamber, radiocarbon dated to the early Middle Bronze Age. A
nearby small round barrow enclosed a deep central grave containing the
crouched burial of a woman, probably within an oak-lined chamber. An
L-shaped ditch to the east, radiocarbon dated to the Middle to Late
Bronze transition, may have been the final feature of the monument
group. It parallels the addition of L-shaped ditches/pit alignments at
other contemporary ring ditch monuments. Shallow linear ditches formed a
land boundary extending north and south from the Bronze Age ring ditch,
and other contemporary ditches were remnants of a rectilinear field
system, contemporary with a scatter of irregular pits and a waterhole.
This phase came to an end at the Late Bronze Age/ Early Iron Age
transition, when a large assemblage of decorated pottery was dumped in
the final fills of the waterhole. By the Middle Iron Age there was a new
linear boundary, comprising three near parallel ditches, aligned
north-south; a rectangular enclosure and a complex of intercut pits. The
pottery assemblage was sparse, but the upper fills of both the deepest
linear boundary ditch and the pit complex contained some Roman pottery.
To the south-east an extensive Romano-British ladder settlement is dated
to the 1st to 4th centuries AD. Only the northern fringe lay within the
excavated area, comprising successive boundary ditches, along with pits,
a stone-lined well, an inhumation burial and animal burials. In the
early Anglo-Saxon period (5th-6th centuries AD), there was a loose
cluster of three sunken featured buildings with another to the south. In
the middle Saxon period (8th-9th centuries AD) a small rectangular
mausoleum contained a single inhumation burial, with a second inhumation
to the immediate west. Subsequent land use comprised truncated furrows
of the medieval ridge and furrow field cultivation and post-medieval
quarry pits.
