Monument record 0632102001 - Taplow Hillfort: Iron Age Ditch

Wessex Archaeology undertook evaluation in advance of the building of a Butsuma at Taplow Court. They uncovered two ditches that they thought might be post-medieval but in later excavations (see below) were redated to the Iron Age. The inner ditch was probably found in Trenches 3 & 4 and the outer in Trench 5 (B3).
Oxford Archaeology's area excavation revealed a N-S ditch nearly 9m wide, running the full length of the site and tapering to an entrance at the northern end with a hornwork branching to the ESE. The ditch had an eroded U-shaped profile with burnt gravel and charcoal tipped in from the western side. Finds included sherds of prehsitoric pottery, with Roman and Saxon pottery and a double-headed spiral pin in the upper fills The Victorian County History notes in connection with the demolition of nearby St Nicholas Church that 'it was discovered that the foundations passed over a ditch which, with its accompanying rampart, showed that the position had been fortified in early times the church being built at the east end while the mound occupied the centre of the enclosure' (B1).
The early-middle Iron Age ditch was U-shaped in profile, with a flat base and steep, sometimes vertical sides. Near the top the side splayed outwards, but this has been shown by experimental earthworks to be a result of erosion, It is therefore likely that the sides of the ditch were originally straight so the current width of the ditch (6.5-8.1m) is greater than it would have been originally, which was about 4.4-6m. It is 2.4-2.8m deep. The inner edge of the ditch lay 0.8m from a chalk kerb, but when the ditch was originally dug the berm would have been wider, perhaps as much as 2m. The remains of a second, outer ditch were found to the north-east of the main excavation area in Trench 1 of the Phase 2 excavations in 2005. This ditch had a broad, V-shaped profile. When excavated it was over 12m wide and 3.35m deep. Its original width, assuming the sides of the ditch were straight, may have been 10m. If there was a rampart it would have been to the west, but this area has been truncated by a car park. It seems likely that this ditch belonged to the early-middle Iron Age, but its date os uncertain. As a consequence, it is impossible to determine how the outer ditch was related to the U-profile ditch and whether the two formed a multivallate hillfort or two phases of a univallate hillfort (B2).