Survey and trial excavations at ‘Ronaldsway Village’
Date(s): 1992
Creator(s): Centre for Manx Studies
Administration / Biographical History: During the summer of 1992, the main runway of the airport was closed for resurfacing. This offered an opportunity to re-examine the ‘Ronaldsway Village’ site (SC290685) which had been previously excavated between 1936 and 1940.
The project design had three principle aims; to relocate the site and plot its extent; to access the depth and nature of any surviving archaeological deposits; and if possible to recover stratified artefacts and environmental evidence to help elucidate its phasing and development. The project was divided into four main parts; a flux gradiometer survey, a resistivity survey, trial excavations and a levelling survey.
The trial excavations took place between the 20th and the 31st July and were led by D. A. Higgins. Both the flux gradiometer survey and the resistivity meter survey failed to locate any related structural anomalies. The excavations took the form of two trenches: Trench 1992-109 and Trench 1992-110. Both displayed a broadly similar sequence of deposits and despite encountering a large stone packed defensive ditch, it was discovered that modern levelling had cut right down into the natural with only small quantities of undisturbed deposits surviving. The levelling survey determined the height of the site to be 9m above sea level with the base of the small ditches at 8.7m. From this it was concluded that since 1868 a total of 1.8m of archaeological deposits had been lost and that it was highly unlikely that any significant archaeological features survived in this part of the airfield. It was suggested that any further work at the airport should focus on establishing its pre-airfield topography in order to identify areas where archaeological or environmental remains may survive.
People:
D. A. Higgins, P. J. Davey, J. J. Woodcock, R. Wright, N. C. Johnson, A. Johnson,
Excavation team: C. Bryan, R. Comber, R. Farrer, H. Godwin, J. Mirdamadi, J. Podbereski, E. Southall, P. R. Tomlinson.
Ronaldsway staff: P. Pain (director), I. Moffett (operations manager).
Language: English
Collection: Manuscript Archive
Level: SERIES
ID number: MS 14146/21
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