From 2004-6 the Archaeology Service worked with a local group exploring the archaeology and heritage of Sheinton, Shropshire.
Sheinton is a small village about 14km southeast of Shrewsbury. The village is sited on a river terrace overlooking the River Severn to the north. There has been a settlement at Sheinton since late Saxon times at least, and because of the lack of large-scale modern housing development, there is a strong probability that the archaeology of the early settlement here is well-preserved. Outside the bounds of the modern village, cropmark evidence and find-spots of artefacts have provided evidence for human activity and settlement in the prehistoric and Roman periods.
We looked at two sites close to the village. The first site lay a few hundred metres to the north of the village and was marked by a cropmark first seen on aerial photographs taken several decades ago. The second site was in a field on the edge of the modern village, close to the church, where metal detectorists had recently found several objects of Roman date.
The local community group (the Sheinton Heritage Group) with help from the Archaeology Service has carried out a programme of fieldwalking, geophysical survey, and trial excavation on the two sites. The cropmark feature at the first site was confirmed as a substantial ditch which had silted up in the early Roman period. The feature is believed to represent part of a ditch surrounding an Iron Age or Romano-British farmstead. In the other field the geophysical survey indicated the presence of a couple of features which predated the historic field pattern. Excavations to investigate one of these features, which lay close to the edge of the modern village, recovered a significant quantity of well-preserved Romano-British pottery (mainly of 3rd/4th century date), suggesting occupation in this period close to the modern settlement.
The Sheinton Heritage Project has been funded by the Local Heritage Initiative.