Noak Hill
Noak Hill is in a rural area of Havering. Our site has given up thousands of tile and pottery fragments.
Doing “geophys” revealed a 3m square medieval tile kiln last fired up in the late 1300s. It was quite a find.
We excavated this with Newham Museums Service, Pre-Construct Archaeology, English Heritage and the British Museum, and consulted with specialists from London Borough of Havering and Essex County Council.
We haven’t found the pottery kiln yet, but there’s probably one nearby as we’ve found over 20,000 fragments of Mill Green, a type of pottery popular in London and Essex in the late 1200s and early 1300s. A lot of the fragments had been damaged in firing. They were warped, blistered, cindered, or had overrun glaze. As a result, they were “wasters” which were thrown away and never sold.
Still in the same area, we found closely packed bones which turned out to be the dismantled and carefully buried skeleton of a donkey put there in the 1600s. Very unusual.
There was more. Further excavations found the walls of a brick house built in the 1700s with pottery and tiles everywhere . This site keeps producing which is why we continue to work here.
Other Places
We’ve also dug at Leigh Beck, Pitsea, Daws Heath, Stonebridge, Clavering and Canewdon.
At Leigh Beck, Canvey, we discovered a Roman salt-working unit. It’s easy to forget how important and valuable salt was in the past. See https://www.canveyisland.org/history-2/archaeology-on-canvey/the_vanishing_past or google RHFAG “The Vanishing Past”
At St Michael’s Church, Pitsea, we excavated and did a field survey of the churchyard. Now it’s gone apart from the tower standing high on the top of the hill.
We did the archaeological assessment for Little Havens Hospice, Daws Heath Road. There was no archaeology so Little Havens was built.
Our excavations in a 1600s cottage garden in Stonebridge, near Little Wakering, revealed small finds from the 17th to 20th centuries and a big one, the well.
At Clavering, we did a “demo dig” before the 2012 Cultural Olympiad then joined villagers in the mass excavation event which followed.
In Canewdon, we’ve dug 35 one-metre square test pits as part of a project to date the sequence of occupation within the village.