During an archaeological investigation ahead of the development of land to the north of Cliffsend Road, Cliffsend features including a hollow way, a group of pits and a collection of ditches forming a system of fields and enclosures were identified. These features date to the middle Bronze Age and appear to have been laid out over an extended period. in the later part of the middle bronze age and late bronze age, the field system was altered to form fewer bigger fields.

In detail, the hollow way appears to be the earliest of this group of features, it was not dug, but rather was created as the result of slow erosion by humans and animal traffic. The holloway is c 5-6m wide and up to 0.9m deep with concave sides and a flat base. The routeway became gradually shallower to the south. At some point a patchy metalled surface of flint gravel was laid; no doubt as an attempt to stabilise the routeway surface. It was apparently an axial feature on which much of the subsequent Bronze Age activity was articulated. Beyond the confines of the site, its northern course is not certain as it was not identified with any confidence on the immediately adjacent EKA2 site though others were identified elsewhere during these excavations and clearly this area of western Thanet was criss-crossed with a network of local routeways, presumably connecting with Dunstrete, the central ridge trackway to the north with the resource-rich coastline.

The form of the field system appears to have been dictated by the hollow way. The curving north to south-east aspect of the routeway is reflected in the alignment of many of the ditch elements of the field system. Many of the ditches were curved or undulating and survived in segments only, although the reasons for this are not clear. It was composed of numerous ditches, mostly small and shallow although with some larger elements. The majority of the fields and enclosed areas were irregular in shape and included numerous embedded minor routeways or tracks, represented by parallel paired ditches. These facilitated both access to the fields and movement through the landscape. Generally speaking, all of the ditches were filled with grey brown silts containing only a few finds One such notable was the structured deposit of two near-complete pottery urns placed in the base of a ditch.

One notable element of this field system was a D-shaped enclosure which was comprised of a series of two roughly parallel curving ditches respecting a straight ditch. A comparable enclosure was discovered 300m to the north-east during the East Kent Access investigations. These two distinctive examples may well have been contemporary landscape features.

Dispersed in and around the field system were Twenty-six pits which have been broadly dated to the Middle Bronze Age. There were two significant concentrations of pits, one in the north-central part of the western excavation area, the other in the south-central part of the western excavation area. Some of the pits are of particular interest, including instances of structural deposition. These pits were mostly located in the south-west of the site. For example, pit 580, which was sub-circular and 2.1m in diameter and 0.65m deep with concave sides and base. The pit had begun to silt-up when a dump of fired clay fragments and burnt material including the fragment of a broken bronze socketed hammer. (information summarised from source)

<1> Archaeology South-East, 2019, Post-excavation assessment and updated project design report, Archaeological excavation at land north of Cliffsend Road, Cliffsend, Ramsgate, Kent (Unpublished document). SKE53060.