What began as the routine excavation of borrow-pit material, soil dug out to provide fill for the new N11 Road Scheme, turned up post-holes, stake-holes, and burnt deposits that pointed unmistakably to past human activity on the site. The awkward part is that nobody is quite sure what that activity was, or when it took place.

Testing carried out over three days in May 2002 involved four trenches with twenty branch trenches dug at right angles, using a mechanical digger fitted with a flat, toothless bucket, the kind designed to remove soil cleanly without disturbing what lies beneath. Material of probable archaeological significance turned up in three of those trenches. The most intriguing finds came from Trench 2, in the west of the site, where pottery was recovered at two points roughly 76 metres apart. That pottery may be medieval in date, but could equally be Bronze Age, and the distance between the finds suggested something more than a small, localised deposit. Possible post-pits and a linear cut elsewhere hinted at large enclosures of some kind. In the subsequent excavation phase, the evidence was more ambiguous: no structural pattern emerged from the scatter of stake-holes and burnt material, and it seems likely that later agricultural activity had truncated much of whatever was originally there. The site sits somewhere between a tantalising suggestion and an incomplete sentence, the kind of place that raises more questions than it resolves.