EMMA
CORKE, former president of the Surrey Archaeological Society, gave the April
talk about discoveries on the Iron Age and Roman site at Cocks Farm, Abinger. Her
great great
grandfather, Thomas Henry Farrer, bought Abinger Hall at Cocks Farm in 1875.
His gardeners soon discovered the remains of a Roman building on the site and
archaeological excavations in the following year uncovered six rooms, including
one with a coarse-tessellated floor from Roman times.
Farrer was friends with Charles Darwin, the founder of modern
understanding about evolution of species, and Darwin
Nothing more was done until a tree uprooted in the great storm of
October 1987 was seen to have the corner of a stone-built room in its roots,
together with painted wall-plaster and fine tesserae.
Three years of excavation in 1995-97 by Surrey Archaeological Society
found a large late-Roman building, which led to the site being declared a Scheduled Ancient Monument
Meanwhile, geophysics in the surroundings led to the discovery of a
Roman lime kiln (with a uniquely surviving entrance), a Roman field system, and
an area of high disturbance on the top of the knoll above the villa. This is
where archaeological efforts have been concentrated for the last five years.
Several phases of Iron Age enclosures have been discovered, with storage pits
and cremation deposits. Overlying them are many Roman features including farm
buildings.
The work has revealed artefacts from the Mesolithic period from 12,000
to 3000 BC onwards and provides evidence that the site was occupied and farmed continuously from the Neolithic through to the 19th century. Thirty Iron
Age grain storage pits, one of them 3.4m in diameter, indicate that the
site was the centre of a thriving network of farms in that era.
It is clear that the owners in the Roman period were rich but we can
only speculate who they were, how they made their money or how they used the
villa. Were they pre-Roman British owners taking on the Roman style,
foreigners who replaced them or what? Did they make their money from
farming or maybe from business in Londinium? Was this their permanent home
or a country retreat?
We do know that they made several attempts to establish a vineyard on
the site. In Roman society, anybody who was anybody produced their own
wine. The Abinger vineyard probably never worked very well because the
soil is greensand, not chalk, and not therefore ideal for grapes.
The excavations have uncovered several smaller buildings, a lime kiln
with some of the last load of lime still in place, and in the main villa the
tessellated pavement, part of a bath house and an unheated summer dining room
with a fine mosaic floor, sadly damaged when later occupants lit a fire on it.
Over the years the team has found the remains of sacrificed animals and
many human cremation burials, including one that used a Deverel-Rimbury Bronze
Age pot already centuries old to hold remains. Other ritual deposits include
complete and deliberately broken quern stones, some made from German lava
stone. Quern stones were valuable items so these were substantial
offerings. Roman pots discovered include ceramic beehives, imported storage jars and some of a style not
seen before now called OXSU (oxidised pottery from Surrey ).
Things are not always as they seem. The 2016 excavation revealed five complete cattle
skeletons, young animals and not butchered. The first guess was that they
were an ancient sacrifice but carbon dating shows they were buried around the
Tudor or Stuart periods. Possibly they died of rinderpest and were buried
to protect the rest of the herd.