A general fieldwalking survey of the available arable land surrounding

Mansfield began in 1969. It soon became clear that large areas had been lost to archaeology through open cast mining, pit tipping and soft-wood forestry.

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Much of the remaining farmland particularly on the sandstone to the south and east of the town yielded very few finds either of flint or pottery. However to the north and west in the region of the Meden and its tributaries there wasan abundance of occupational evidence. Almost every field examined yielded worked flints and several localised scatters of Romano-British Pottery were alsorecorded.

Over 100 fields were systematically walked and the finds plotted. Frank Fletcher subsequently drew more than 1000 flint artifacts.

These drawings and the distribution reports were published in 1975 and 1986; copies of these reports and their assessments are filed in Mansfield Museum.  Permission to access this material and the paperwork could be granted to bonafide students via the Museum's Curator or through the contact page of this website. 

 

A sample cross-section of the assemblage was dispatched to Dr.Pat Phillips of Sheffield University for her expert appraisal.

The assemblage from the Hardwick Park area was studied by Mr. A.J.B. Parton also of Sheffield and his report of 1986 is also filed in the Museum. The broad conclusions of both these pre-historians were that the area had been intensively used by hunter-gatherer societies since the Mesolithic period and a continuity of flint implement techniques was traceable into the iron-age.

 

Our shelves in Mansfield Museum contain around 40 boxes of flints and pottery, the results of this work, each labelled with the field locations.

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On display in the Museum is a cross-section of examples of this flint work with their field locations.

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Very few hard copies remain of this very important work and it is an ambition of the Society to re-publish the document and possibly make it available in digital form.