Monument record MDO2594 - Prehistoric enclosure on Croft's Down, Sydling St Nicholas

A sub-circular banked feature is visible as an indistinct and faint earthwork on a 1945 aerial photograph. It may be the prehistoric enclosure recorded at this location and was digitally plotted during the Dorset Upper Frome AIM project.

To the north-east of the nucleus of the earthwork on Crofts Down (ST 60 SW 26) there are faint traces of what may have been a ringwork with surrounding bank, 36 feet in internal diameter. <1>

ST 632016 The enclosures on The Crofts Down tend to be irregular in size. There are three probable and other possible settlements represented by oval or circular enclosures, 70 ft to 90 ft in diameter. <2>

ST 63210168 The ringwork was recorded by the OS field investigator in 1955 as a depression, 13.0 m internal diameter and 0.4 m deep, surrounded by a bank 4.0 m wide and 0.6m high save on the N where it was poor. A gap in the E side could have been modern mutilation or an entrance. Possibly a hut circle. Since 1955 ploughing has smoothed and reduced the feature, the bank is now 0.3 m high and the depression, now 0.2 m deep, gives it a shallow almost pond-like appearance. The other enclosures recorded by the RCHM(2), apparently from air photographs (a), have been destroyed by ploughing since 1947 and cannot now be identified. Surveyed at 1:2500. <3>

A sub-circular banked feature is visible as an indistinct and faint earthwork on a 1945 aerial photograph <4>. The feature's external diameter measures approximately 24m, internal diameter 13m, and is open on its east side. It may be the prehistoric enclosure recorded at this location and was digitally plotted during the Dorset upper Frome AIM project. The feature is no longer visible on Google Earth imagery.

<1> Royal Commission on Historical Monuments England, 1952, An Inventory of Historical Monuments in the County of Dorset, Volume I (West), 234 (Monograph). SDO97.

d(20) Earthworks, on Croft's Down at the S.W. end of the ridge between the 600 and 700 ft. contours, consist of a series of irregular banks and scarps forming cultivations of the Celtic type, with two well-defined hollow-ways running to the S.W. and S.; the latter however stops against a modern field-boundary. To the N.E. of the nucleus of the earthwork are faint traces of what may have been a ringwork with surrounding bank of 36 ft. internal diam.

<2> Royal Commission on Historic Monuments, RCHM Ms File (unpublished revision of Dorset 1), 21.9.76 (Unpublished document). SDO17382.

<2.1> Royal Air Force, 11-APR-1947, RAF/CPE/UK/1974 2380 (Aerial Photograph). SDO18905.

<3> Attrill, N J, Field Investigators Comments NJA, F1 NJA 01-OCT-76 (Unpublished document). SDO14743.

<4> Royal Air Force, 15-APR-45, RAF/106G/LA/218 FP 1038 (Aerial Photograph). SDO17063.

<5> National Record of the Historic Environment, 199247 (Digital archive). SDO14739.

Record last edited

Nov 25 2022 12:08PM