‘Cambridge Park and Rides: Three Places in a Prehistoric Landscape’

Lawrence Billington (Oxford Archaeology)

FEAG talk: Friday 13th March, 7.30pm at Rampton Village Hall,  4 Church End, Rampton, Cambridge CB24 8QA

Between 1996 and 2003 the then Cambridgeshire County Council Archaeological Field Group undertook extensive excavations ahead of the construction of three of the Park & Rides facilities on the outskirts of Cambridge – at Trumpington, Babraham Road and Newmarket Road. At the time these represented some of the largest excavations ever undertaken in the Cambridge environs, and all three revealed extensive remains of prehistoric settlement and funerary activity.

With the results of the excavations now due to be published as a monograph in the East Anglian Archaeology series, much has changed in the decades since the original fieldwork and the areas surrounding each of the Park & Ride sites have witnessed fresh, very extensive, programmes of fieldwork, with the landscape between the Trumpington and Babraham Road Park and Rides in particular now ranking as one of the most intensively investigated landscapes in the region.

This talk will present an overview of the prehistoric archaeology of the Park and Rides, which alongside the results of other work in the area provides a remarkably rich and full record of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age activity on the southern and eastern edges of the modern city of Cambridge.

Lawrence Billington is a post-excavation Project Officer at Oxford Archaeology’s Cambridge office and has worked in developer-led archaeology in Eastern England for over 15 years. He has previously talked to FEAG about the late Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic of the Fenland.

Free for members; £3 for non-members

All welcome