Having carefully protected the exposed archaeological remains, we began to close up the site at East Field Road for the Christmas break at the end of 2016. We struggled through the mud of the marshland farmer’s field where the water had risen and fallen over the last few weeks. There, a former wetland hollow had silted up gradually from at least the Iron Age until finally being levelled, perhaps around the time of the demolition of the former RAF base at North Killingholme. We had been fighting the water with pumps and machines, but, although the landscape next to the Immingham oil refinery looked like it had been tamed, mere humans could do nothing to erase the seasonal swell of groundwater.
As for why Wessex Archaeology were contending with such challenging excavation conditions, a valuable opportunity to investigate this landscape had been provided by the installation of 40km of electricity cables by Ørsted, connecting the Hornsea Project One offshore windfarm to the National Grid. While the windfarm itself lay 120km off the Yorkshire coast, its onshore cables were located entirely within the Lincolnshire marshes, making landfall at Horseshoe Point and passing through the lowest-lying coastal areas of Outmarsh in North Cotes and Tetney parishes, before crossing a series of parishes in the Middle Marsh inland of Grimsby and Immingham.
From this relatively narrow slice through the landscape we uncovered a diverse range of sites, including six late Iron Age and Romano-British settlements, evidence of Anglo-Saxon occupation, two medieval moated sites, and extensive evidence of medieval salt-working. In each of these periods we can see how people survived in the challenging environment of the marsh – and that, until recently, the strategies they used changed only gradually, with a general continuity of land-use, agricultural practice, and economy. However, there were times when even these trusted methods were useless in the face of landscape changes, with parallels to the challenges of climate change that we face today.
