Monument record TR 26 NE 1407 - Ring ditch (6) Monkton

One of a three Bronze Age ring ditches seen as cropmarks on aerial photographs mapped as part of the Historic England Thanet Landscape Mapping Project 2024. The site appears as an arc of ditch with a diameter of c.12m representing the northern side of a ring ditch.

Traces of round barrows and cremations associated with this group were also found during work on the A253 near Monkton. This was labelled ring ditch 6 and just over half of the ring ditch was exposed within the excavated area. The outer diameter of the ditch has been estimated at c 12.7m and it possessed an undulating, flat-based profile, on average about 2.25m wide at the surface and between 1.2 and 1.4m wide at the base. The feature was relatively shallow, only 0.2–0.4m deep, but there were slightly deeper irregularly-shaped areas at three points in the circuit.5 There was a gap or causeway in the ditch, 1.7m wide in the north-west quadrant. The fill of the ditch, which was completely excavated, consisted of a uniform layer of compact light brown silty clay, with occasional flints, fairly abundant chalk fragments and charcoal flecks. This material was virtually identical to the overlying hillwash deposit. Over sixty fragments of Deverel-Rimbury pottery, comprising two vessels were found in this fill, the majority from a restricted segment to the north-east. These may well represent cremation vessels, either derived from the original mound or close by. No other deposits were present apart from a few basal lenses of discoloured chalk. There was no surviving mound nor any archaeological features within the ring-ditch enclosure (1-3)

<1> Historic England Archive, 1920-2024, Historic England Archive Specialist oblique aerial photographs, NMR 2639/3132 01-AUG-1985 (Archive). SKE57106.

<2> Historic England Archive, 1964-2005, Historic England Archive Ordnance Survey vertical aerial photographs, OS/95018 V 302 10-MAR-1995 (Archive). SKE57105.

<3> CAT, 2008, At the Great Crossroads: Prehistoric, Roman and Medieval Discoveries on the Isle of Thanet 1994-1995 (Monograph). SKE59036.