The site lies towards the north end of the village, on the west side of Main Street. It is approximately 2.03m hectares in area and roughly rectangular, except for the plot of ‘Briar Lea’, a bungalow at the south end of a short row of dwellings, which is inset into its north-eastern corner. The site lies within the eastern part of a larger field bounded to the east by Main Street, whose west boundary continues the line of the south end of the row of properties north of Briar Lea. At the time that the archaeological works took place, the site was under long, rough grass with visible surface earthworks, further distinguished by variations in the vegetation above them. The evaluation consisted of four 30m x 2m trenches, positioned to investigate the footprints of the planned new dwellings and the development compound in the south-west corner while avoiding areas likely to have been recently disturbed as far as possible. The presence of surviving earthwork ridge-and-furrow on the site, forming part of the remains of the Shrunken Medieval Village of Ragnall, was confirmed by excavation. No evidence was found for occupation of the site prior to its incorporation into the parish open-field system. The evaluated area shows a palimpsest of activity related to land and water management. The earthwork ridge-and-furrow itself has a water management association, as the furlongs of open fields were typically laid out so that the furrows would channel surplus water off the cultivated land, an association whose effect can be seen into the modern day, as the patterns of late post-medieval and modern field drains are often found to follow the orientation of medieval furrows even where these have not been visible as surface features for many decades. Post-enclosure land division can be seen in the form of the hollow-way marking a track between two fields – itself possibly following the route of an earlier right of way or ‘balk’ across the open field – while linear features encountered by the evaluation may have fed water into ponds marked on late 19th- and early 20th-century mapping. The 1st edition OS map also marks the presence of the parish pinfold on or close to the east side of the site, and it is possible, although highly conjectural, that a cluster of smaller features exposed in an evaluation trench may have been related to this enclosure. The final phase of water management activity, in the late 20th century, has partially erased and overwritten earlier layers of the palimpsest.