Surrey Archaeological Society

A watching brief was maintained by C Currie of CKC Archaeology on repair work to this lock on the Godalming Navigation, for the National Trust. Early, possibly original, brickwork was revealed around the gates of the lock. The southern cill was of brick with stone blocks on the outward edge, possibly to act as protection; the northern cill was of wood, covered by modern concrete. The lock chamber itself is now concrete, but was originally of timber. (330)

Evaluation by R Poulton of SCAU, for SCC, on land to be developed into a park and ride carpark. The work revealed undisturbed soils overlying ancient alluvium over natural gravels. The only features revealed were two recent ditches.

Evaluation by SutAS, for Amec Developments Ltd, in advance of redevelopment for offices. The site was found to have remained little used until the modern period; presumably because it was too low lying, and therefore wet, to be anything other than marginal land.

Excavation by R Poulton of SCAU, for the House of Fraser, revealed no significant finds or features.

Survey carried out by SIHG at the request of Guildford Museum prior to demolition of the structure. The store was built at the beginning of World War II for emergency food storage. A freezer wind tunnel later installed at the site was used to simulate flight into supercooled liquid droplets and ice crystals, and aircraft tested in this way included the Airbus and Concorde.

Resistivity survey following on from fieldwalking in 1997 located several linear features, and two small trenches were excavated by H Davies and J English and the GfdAG to investigate their nature. The features proved to be three ditches, seemingly parallel, and a small extension to one of the trenches located a short length of probable wall footing of large flint nodules keyed together but not mortared and cut into the ditch siltings.

A watching brief maintained by R Poulton and S Hind of SCAU, for Richard Cook Ltd, on the redevelopment of this 19th century mill site for offices, revealed no evidence for earlier mills; the area was found to have been fairly extensively disturbed as a result of 19th and 20th century works. However, palaeo-environmental analysis of sediments in former channels of the Wey, uncovered by the works, revealed evidence for increasing human activity in the vicinity from the Bronze Age onwards, with a commensurate reduction in the amount of woodland in the area.

Training excavation by S Dyer, for SyAS, on land where investigations in 1939 revealed two phases of medieval buildings and a kiln. The location of the earlier excavation as well as other features were suggested by topographical and geophysical surveys. A strong magnetic anomaly proved to be the location of the kiln recorded in 1939, and the recovery of significant quantities of brick and tile suggest that the kiln produced both these types of building material, probably in the early post-medieval period.

Survey of the archaeological and historic landscape of the Commons by C Currie of CKC Archaeology, for SCC and the Corporation of London, undertaken with reference to them being proposed as Areas of Historic Landscape Value. In the north of Ashtead Common a number of earthworks and other features surround the site of a Roman villa. The villa is a rare type of corridor villa, with considerable evidence that it adjoined a large scale tile manufactory. Extensive areas of quarries and spoil heaps demonstrate the extent of industrial activity on the site in the Roman period.