Knave Hill, Leicestershire
First screened 24 February 2008

Knave Hill – Background

For getting on for 30 years, archaeologists have been fieldwalking extensively in Leicestershire. Unlike in many other parts of the country, the soil conditions are such that pottery preserves well in the ground here, so their efforts have turned up a number of concentrations of Anglo-Saxon pottery.

But when an excavation took place at a site adjacent to the deserted medieval village of Eye Kettleby, near Melton Mowbray, archaeologists discovered something special. The scatters of pottery recorded in fieldwalking perfectly matched the locations of rare Anglo-Saxon buildings. There were more than 40 of them in all, including at least 14 Anglo-Saxon hall houses, of which only 300 were known in the whole of England at the time, making the site the largest Anglo-Saxon settlement yet discovered in the east Midlands, and of national importance.

As the fieldwalking project continued across other areas of the county, archaeologists turned their attention to the site at Knave Hill, at Stonton Wyville, 11 miles south east of Leicester. They were in for a surprise. In only a few days, the fieldwalkers found the same sorts of concentration and recorded almost double the number of pottery sherds they had found at Eye Kettleby.

Could this be evidence of one of the rarest and trickiest archaeological prizes, an early Anglo-Saxon settlement?

« Knave Hill home :Previous       Next: What they found »

Back to top^