EHG6425 - Watching brief - new agricultural building, Meikle Geddes

An archaeological watching brief (strip and record) was undertaken by Avon Archaeology (Highland) in 2025 during preliminary topsoil stripping for a new free-range poultry unit at Meikle Geddes Farm. The project was designed to identify and record all buried archaeological features, deposits and finds, in particular buried features or deposits associated with prehistoric funerary and/or settlement-related activity, which has been recorded widely in the Meikle Geddes area. The fieldwork recorded a generally uniform and simple sequence of deposits across the site that in the main comprised a stone-free plough soil, which in turn overlay a patchy sandy silt subsoil and the undisturbed natural sandy to gravelly substrate. This sequence was interrupted in the southern half of the site by a truncated L-shaped ditch segment, which was interpreted to represent the remains of a former enclosure ditch that may have held wooden posts or stakes. No artefacts were recovered from the single ditch fill although the deposit produced charred plant material that may be suitable for independent scientific dating. The ditch segment appeared to originally extend further to the northwest and southwest, where it had been destroyed by an area of more recent disturbance. On the basis of its general character alone the ditch was provisionally considered to most likely date from the prehistoric or medieval periods. <1>