Introduction
Brandon Remembrance Playing Fields in Brandon, Suffolk, is home to a number of clubs and plays host to several events throughout the year.
Established in 1948, the fields were dedicated to the memory of those who served in World War II and were designed to provide a space for sports, recreation, and community events for the residents of Brandon.
Managed by the Brandon Remembrance Playing Fields Management Committee, the playing fields operate under charitable objectives to provide facilities that benefit the local community. This includes maintaining the sports grounds and social club.
Current Day
Today the playing fields provide varied sports and recreational games.
The bowls club (discover more on our Groups page) was the first to be established in 1949 and opened by Henri Gustave Joly De Lotbiniere. This soon followed by Cycle tracks, Football pitches, Cricket, and Scouts. Plus, a playground with swings, slides, roundabouts, and more.
Currently by far the largest group being the football clubs of which there are 16 teams that range from 5 years through a range of ages for both male and female.
The playing field have strong links to the BFER who provide additional activities such as River Swimming and Canoeing, and walking.
There are other events throughout the year such as The Brandon Festival, Funfairs, and more!
History
Brandon sits on the edge of fenland, and Staunch Meadow occupies an island of windblown sand within the floodplain of the Little Ouse. Prior to excavation in the 1980s, Staunch Meadow was characterised by earthworks, including a ditched enclosure and a causeway linking the island to the floodplain.
Open area excavations (11,750 sq. metres) revealed evidence of a settlement dating from the mid-7th to the late 9th centuries.
The remains of at least thirty-five buildings were found, some with timber surviving in post-holes, also a raised causeway, a wooden bridge, two cemeteries and two churches.
Part of the waterfront was given over to textile processing with structures linked to dyeing and bleaching, a smithy and a possible bakery were also identified.
Thousands of artefacts were recovered, including a gold plaque from the cover of a Bible, coins, bronze pins, fragments of window and vessel glass, and items of personal dress manufactured in silver or gold.
There was compelling evidence for several objects bearing runic inscriptions, and fragments of eight glass inkwells.
By plotting the finds from the buried occupation surface, it has been possible to demonstrate both the casual loss of objects and the accumulation of rubbish in heaps across the site.
Following a rapid decline late in the 9th century, settlement moved away from Staunch Meadow to the edge of the
floodplain, but a causeway leading to an enclosure remained.
Trial trenches suggest that the enclosure contained a medieval religious building, possibly the chapel of St Andrew, that disappears from historical records in the 13th century.
The playing fields were originally identified as Chequers Close, number 272 on the Ordnance Survey map of the district. Some years later (actual date unknown), the land currently used for allotments was added to the fields, growing it to approximately 15 acres.
Excavations
The Brandon excavations were begun in 1979 with a trial excavation funded by the Ancient Monuments Commission in advance of a proposed site levelling for football pitches.
Subsequently, excavation was undertaken by a labour force from the Youth Opportunities Programme (YOP), which was recruited in Ipswich. Supplemented with a grant to provide trained archaeological supervisors, provided by English Heritage.
Robert Carr, acting for the County Council, initiated the project with the help and co-operation of the landowners, Brandon Remembrance Playing Fields Committee, and successive committees Chairmen were of great help — Bill Bishop and ‘Kenny’ were conspicuous in their support in the early stages by allowing access and ensuring space in the development timetable.
Encouragement from the local community came via the Revd Canon Munday, the prominent local historian, and most particularly from David Pocock, the local archaeologist and schoolmaster.
The all-important excavators for all the subsequent seasons were entirely drawn from government employment programmes, firstly, the Youth Opportunities Programmes and, from 1983, adults from the Manpower Services Commission schemes; all came to the site without archaeological knowledge and left (mostly fulfilled and encouraged) one year later; a remarkable number have progressed into full-time archaeological jobs.
Invaluable funding was also supplied by English Heritage to supervise the excavations and carry out post-excavation work.
The excavators are too numerous to mention, but those of us who have remained look back with fond memories on the camaraderie generated by excavating latrines and sharing the burden of excavation in all kinds of weather, summer and winter.
Whether the schemes were meant to massage unemployment figures or not, there is no doubt that the majority of the participants benefited from the experience.
Brandon has been a long-running project, and many people have been involved over the years. While Robert Carr oversaw the excavations, the list of supervisors running the site included Tom Loader, Andrew Tester, Cathy Tester, William Filmer-Sankey, David Gill, Isobel Perry and Joanna Caruth.
The basics of a good excavation have changed little since the early eighties, but Brandon saw the introduction of computers as an invaluable tool in post-excavation. William Filmer-Sankey should be credited with wrestling with the ‘green screen’, creating our first digital database and analysing the bronze pins which were the classic find type of the site.
He also carried out the first experiments with the gridded recovery of the finds from the excavation layer, which, with the advent of new technology, has produced the spectacular distribution plots that appear in Chapter 4.
The Suffolk Archaeological Unit has owned and used metal detectors from the early eighties, but without the experience of Alan Smith, the finds recovery from this and many other sites would have been all the poorer.
Post-Excavation Work
Post-excavation work on the site was carried out during the 1980s, and a number of reports were started and many completed during the 1990s, but it is fair to say that the overwhelming scale of the excavations was not properly addressed as a whole until the new project for publication was begun in 2004 with new funding agreed from English Heritage following a MAP2 assessment and project design and which this publication is the result.
Significant help and corrective guidance have been supplied by Barney Sloane, Kath Buxton and Tom Cromwell at English Heritage. Within the Suffolk County Council, patient support for the project has come from Dr Stanley West and, particularly, Keith Wade and Richenda Goffin, alongside their excavation work.
David Gill and Joanna Caruth have contributed both to the interpretation of the site records and to the publication.
In this later phase, alongside her specialist work, Rosemary Cramp has offered encouragement throughout. Thanks should also go to those indirectly linked to the project who have offered opinions by attending the site seminars and those who have been canvassed from outside the project; included in these groups are (in no particular order) Jess Tipper, Catherine Hills, and Andrew Rogerson, Tim Pestell, Richard Hoggett, John Blair, Mark Gardiner and Chris Scull. Pam Crabtree would like to acknowledge a grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities, which helped to fund her work on the faunal remains.
Summary
Between 1980 and 1988, excavations took place on the
The Middle Saxon settlement at Brandon which is located on the edge of the fenland in the county of Suffolk.
The site occupies a raised ‘island’ of windblown sand within the floodplain of the Little Ouse, and approximately 11,750 sq. metres were excavated to make way for sports fields. Prior to excavation, the field was a meadow that was characterised by a series of earthworks, which included a raised enclosure tentatively identified as the site of a medieval chapel, a causeway that linked the island to the floodplain, and a series of linear features.
It is a normal archaeological coincidence that the significance of the earthworks and Middle-Saxon dating of the pottery in mole hills was first recognised by archaeologists in the mid-1970s, at the same time as the independent discovery by a metal detectorist of a gold plaque with an image of St John the Evangelist, possibly from the corner of an Anglo-Saxon Bible, confirmed that this was likely to be a site of particular importance.
The excavations uncovered approximately one-third of the
‘island’ and exposed the evidence of a settlement which lasted from the mid-7th to the late 9th centuries.
The remains of at least thirty-five buildings were excavated, which included timber in many of the post-holes. Other structural features were: a raised causeway, a wooden bridge, two cemeteries and two churches.
An area along the waterfront was given over to textile processing with structures linked to dyeing and bleaching, and a smithy and a possible bakery were also identified. Bulk finds from the site included 157,000 fragments of animal bone, 24,000 sherds of pottery and 416kg of slag. Smaller objects included twenty Anglo-Saxon coins, bronze pins, fragments of window and vessel glass and over 100 bone objects.
Several items of personal dress were manufactured in silver or gold. There was compelling evidence for literacy with a number of objects bearing runic inscriptions, including a knife handle, silver tweezers and a gilded silver pin, as well as fragments of eight glass inkwells.
By carefully plotting the finds, either individually or by grid, from the buried occupation surface, it has been possible to demonstrate both the casual loss of objects and the accumulation of rubbish in heaps across the site. Following the rapid decline of the site late in the 9th century, settlement moved from the ‘island’ to the edge of the floodplain, but a medieval causeway leading to an enclosure remained.
The enclosure awaits excavation, but trial trenches across it suggest that it contained a medieval religious building, which may have been the chapel of St Andrew that disappears from historical records for Brandon in the 13th century.