ABINGDON ARCHAEOLOGICAL GEOPHYSICS

STADHAMPTON

Oxfordshire

Here we carried out a survey for the Oxfordshire Buildings Trust. Initially we did some test 30mx 30m grids to see whether this site of a country house, demolished in the nineteenth century, was likely to have remains detectable to geophysics.

The first picture is the magnetometery  which has an iron pipe to the north east and some areas of high anomalies to the south west - these could have been the remains of the house as its surviving outbuildings are brick built.

We then carried out resistivity on the south west grid. This shows that the picture is more complex than the magnetometery alone would have led us to believe. There are high resistance, (light colour on picture), linear features which could be buildings or garden layout paths etc.

The conclusion was that there were buried features here and that, whilst magnetometery could help see which walls were brick, the best method for these remains would be resistivity (although both would be better).

Later we were asked to carry out a resistivity survey with the results shown below:-

Here the resistivity plot has been overlain on the Google maps satellite image of the area. Light colours are high resistance and dark lower resistance.

It appears to show a building with ranges on three sides of a square and garden features to its south. English Heritage also carried out a landscape survey of the area but they consider the building only consisted of a single range - the southern one.