The group of medieval pottery described in this paper was found at Lesnes Abbey in June 1959, when the smaller of two stone-lined pits added against the west end of the Reredorter was cleared. The pit measured 8 ft. by 5 ft. internally, and was about 10 ft. deep. The greater part of the filling, about 7 ft. in depth, consisted of chalk and stone rubble, fragments of sandy mortar, a few pieces of worked stone, and broken roofing tiles. Below this filling was a layer of dark soil, about 2 ft. in depth, at the bottom of the pit. All the pottery was found in the layer of dark soil; there is thus no doubt that it is contemporary, and was absolutely sealed by several feet of building debris. I am indebted to the officers of the Historic Buildings Section of the London County Council for these details, and for permission to examine the pottery and prepare this report for publication.

Circumstances of discovery. In August 1959 workmen laying a drain on the north side of the cattle-market (the Smithfield) at Welshpool, Montgomeryshire, discovered a number of Roman objects. The most striking were taken home, and the rest were left on the trench-side, where they served as targets for children throwing stones. That the find ever came to notice is due entirely to Mr. G. H. Shepherd, a tutor at Kingston-upon-Hull, whose home is near Oswestry. On being shown one of the articles, Mr. Shepherd immediately went to Welshpool, persuaded the workmen to hand over to him what they had, and searched through the filling of the trench, since completed, discovering some massive ironwork in situ. After furnishing the local authority (as land-owner) with a list of the articles, Mr. Shepherd then took all the portable items into his custody, and later showed one of them to Mr. J. Bartlett, F.S.A., Director of the Hull Museums, who kindly informed the Department of Archaeology of the National Museum of Wales. Finally, after representations had been made by the Museum, the Borough Council most generously agreed in March 1960 to deposit the material in the National Museum of Wales for three years.

The linear dyke known as Dray's Ditches, about half a mile long, runs at right angles to the Icknield Way, whose modern track approaches it near its mid-point. The name ‘Dray's Ditche’ first appears on a map engraved by Thomas Jeffrys in 1765, and its course is marked, between Great Bramingham and the Old Bedford Road, on a map of 1774. In 1540 Leland wrote that ‘in the hye way I saw hard on eche syde 3 longe trenches, as they had been for Men of warre’. Davies referred to a ‘treble row of ditches, which run in a straight line from Bramingham to Warden Hill, where they run aslant up the hill’; whilst Beldam described ‘several trenches called Gray's Dykes which run down in irregular lines of two ditches between three banks, from a tumulus on the Warden Hills, a little to the south of the Icenhilde Road, and traverse it exactly at its junction with the old Luton and Bedford Road, but now disappearing in the cultivated fields on the opposite side of the road’. A subsidiary earthwork which runs along the western foot of Galley Hill for about half a mile, enclosing a flat area of some hundred acres, has also been described as part of this system. This earthwork, however, was considered by Crawford, in 1934, to be ‘merely an old enclosure around an arable field’, and excavation has proved his view correct.

Bronze Age and Iron Age burials are occasionally surrounded by ditches which are, in origin at any rate, functional in that they serve as quarries for the material used in the mound. Such ditches may also have had some ritual significance, particularly those which are covered by the body of the mound. Further proof that they were not always functional is given by barrows whose ditches form a square, which is obviously not the easiest way to make a quarry for a circular barrow. Square-ditched barrows must be carefully distinguished from barrows within secondary square inclosures connected with plantations or land inclosure; however, there is a considerable number whose squared ditches are clearly original, and these can be shown to be a feature of the La Tène culture.

One of the most spectacular sections of the great mound, which embodies the rampart and town wall of Roman Cirencester, is visible in the grounds of St. Mary's Abbey Estate (pl. XIX). The exploitation of this area of the estate for building, bordering upon the London Road and Grove Lane, required excavation on as large a scale as possible, since the total area involved was about 11 acres. Accordingly, excavation took place during March and April 1960 for a period of seven weeks. It was, however, obviously impossible to trench the whole area with the available resources, and it was decided to concentrate upon a detailed study of the town defences, which, with the exception of a single section cut in 1952 by Miss M. Rennie in the Watermoor Recreation Ground at the south-east corner of the town, had not hitherto been systematically examined. This policy implied that any buildings in the immediate vicinity of the Wall would be left unexplored; but it was vindicated by a resistivity survey made by Mr. Anthony Clark, F.S.A., after the excavations had finished, which recorded only one stone building in the whole area. The walls of this building are only a few inches below the surface, and are being uncovered and planned by Mr. Peter Broxton, so that not all is lost.

The sixth season at Verulamium lasted a period of five weeks from 20th July to 24th August 1960. As the last full season of the current programme, it was designed to test one or two specific questions and to complete work already begun. Trenches were cut in insulae XIX and XXVIII in an attempt to define the south-east and south-west sides respectively of the suspected Claudian fort, but met with no success. In insula XIV a small area still outstanding was excavated down to the level of the Antonine fire: in insula XXI further work was done on building 2, to complete the plan and to salvage some painted wall plaster still remaining. In insula XXVII the stoke-hole, added perhaps as late as the early fifth century to building 2, room 15, was examined and trenches were cut to trace the further course of the fifth-century pipe-line. The main task for 1960, however, was to test the results of the proton-magnetometer survey carried out in 1959, by cutting sections across the line thus suggested for the ‘1955 Ditch’. This was done at two points, the first in insula VIII and the second just south-west of insula V, and the existence of the earthwork on the course predicted was confirmed. Later in the autumn the north-west side of the enclosure was defined by a further magnetic survey by Dr. M. J. Aitken.