Site Event/Activity record ESF22636 - Monitoring - St Edmund House, Outney Road, Bungay

Two monitoring visits were made for a pipe trench and footings. The area was highly disturbed by earlier services. Along the pipe trench >0.8m of deep humic topsoil was observed over cleam sand and gravel natural geological deposits. No archaeological features of finds were revealed. A similar situation could be seen in the footings at the western end of the buildings. Here the ground level had already been reduced by c.0.3-0.4m, leaving c.04.m of topsoil remaining. Although the site is close to the historic core of Bungay (located c.250m to the north-west of Bungay castle), significant landscaping in the past has probably removed any archaeological remains and resulted in the truncation of natural sand and gravel deposits. St Edmund House is now being operated as sheltered housing for the elderly but has the appearance of Victorian alms houses. These buildings are not on the first edition of the Ordnance Survey map of c.1880 but they are on the second edition map of c.1900. It is likely that the development of these buildings along Outney Road in the late 19th century resulted in severe landscaping of the site (S1).