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When the current owners purchased Ancaster House in 2009 they decide to commission a magnetometry survey of what was then the Upper Paddock. The adjacent fields to the North form part of Ancaster Romano-British scheduled monument and, before commencing on along term plan to return the paddock to wild flower meadow, the owners wanted to see if there was anything of interest lurking beneath.
The survey was carried out by Alan Morris in 2010 and the results can be seen in the plot to the left. A larger scale plot is shown below.
The plot clearly shows a series of linear features running across the site in an ESE direction. These appear to be a pair of ditches with a compacted surface between them. The black points with white halos are high magnetic anomalies and could be either areas of burning or ferrous material. Caution is needed as these need not be of any great age and could just as easily be old bits of tractor or horseshoes.
FARI Archaeology also carried out a small Resistivity survey of the site in 2010 but the results from this were poor and showed very little in the way of features.
In 2014 an Electrical Resistivity Tomography survey was carried out cross a section of the site by David Hibbitt. Using a technique similar to a standard horizontal resistivity survey, this produces a section through the ground showing areas of different resistance. As you can see below it was able to identify the course of the road running across the site (the darker, more resistive 'blob' in the centre left of the plot).
Based on the results of these geophysical surveys the first excavations of the site commenced in 2012
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