Excavation in 2000-2002 found a a small part of a 1st century Roman trackway which lay on the valley side 45m to the north-east of the Ritual pools. This trackway may have originated in the early Roman period, though a slightly later date is perhaps more likely as its course appears to have followed that of a mid-Roman enclosing ditch, rather than the reverse. This trackway had suffered from a considerable degree of erosion and only a little over 6 m of the metallings survived, lying within a shallow hollow way which ran south-east to north-west, at 90° to the slope. It was up to 1.5 m wide and several wheel ruts (0.80–1.0 m apart). The single surviving metalled surfacewas overlain by deposits containing a few sherds of mid-Roman pottery in an otherwise early Roman assemblage. How long the trackway remained in use is uncertain, as is its purpose, though it probably ran down to the edge of the Ebbsfleet to the north-west. (1)

<1> Oxford Wessex Archaeology Joint Venture, 2010, Settling the Ebbsfleet Valley. CTRL Excavations at Springhead and Northfleet, Kent. The Late Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, and Medieval Landscape (Monograph). SKE31245.