The current development site is within the village centre, near the junction of Moor Lane, which connects to the A46, and Hawksworth Road, which turns southwards from the centre of the village to connect to Longhedge Lane at the parish boundary. The plot, also known as The Croft, lies on the east side of Hawksworth Road, at the bend near the junction, and is consequently of irregular shape, with three rectilinear sides and one curved around the line of the road. It measures some 0.65 acres (c.2600m²) in area, and was entirely under rough grass at the time of the archaeological scheme of works. It is bordered on the south side by the plot occupied by Ivy Cottage – a large detached house facing south, separated from the development site by a public footpath – to the north by the rear boundaries of residential plots along Moor Lane, and to the east by open agricultural land. Based on the results of the evaluation trenching, a mitigation strategy was prepared, to consist of strip, map and record excavation of the footprints of the new dwellings and the associated service trenches. The house footprints of both plots were to be fully excavated, with a 1m margin around each to allow for disturbance and adjustment of the house footprint position. The services (including drains) are planned to extend from the roadside along the southern side of the house footprints, and so the excavation area was extended to include these, resulting in a single excavation area of c. 650m². Topsoil and subsoil layers were removed separately under archaeological supervision, using a small mechanical excavator fitted with a toothless ditching bucket. Machine excavation ceased at the first archaeological horizon, or at the surface of the natural geology where no archaeological remains were present, and was followed by the manual cleaning and excavation of all archaeological features exposed, the recovery of artefactual or ecofactual remains, and detailed recording. The main period of occupation on the site appears to have been from the early 13th century to the mid-14th, with possible traces of earlier medieval activity and a period of post-medieval re-use. No evidence for any prehistoric, Roman or early Saxon presence on the site was retrieved, and there was little evidence that the site continued in use between the 15th and 17th centuries. The earliest evidence for occupation or activity on the site consists of four sherds of late 9th to 10th-century pottery, three of which were residual in later deposits while the fourth was retrieved from the topsoil. Eight Saxo-Norman sherds, of 11th to 12th and 12th-century dates, were also considered to be residual, as they were retrieved from several layers and a ditch fill that all produced later material. No contexts exclusively produced finds that could be dated to the 12th century or earlier, suggesting that little use had been made of the site during the late Saxon and early medieval periods, and any features that might have been present had been obliterated by later activity. The pattern of occupation on the site falls into two linked halves, with a sequence of buildings on the west side, close to the street, and a sequence of small enclosures, defined by ditches and possible hedgerows and fences, to the rear. A wall footing could be directly dated to the 13th century or later by the presence of two sherds of pottery within it, while other structures could be indirectly dated by the layers covering them: a clay layer, which post-dated another wall, produced no sherds likely to be later than the 13th century, while the rubble spread recorded variously as three layers, overlying features in the centre of the site, also produced only early to mid-13th-century pottery. There were some indications of timber buildings, in the form of post-holes and possible beam-slots, among and partially below the substantial stone wall footings, which in several places had themselves been supplanted by similarly constructed buildings on different alignments, while the relationship of two further wall footings suggested that a standing building had been extended. The nature of the pottery corpus from the site was principally domestic, suggesting that the buildings were dwellings rather than agricultural buildings – no identifiable structural features of houses, such as hearths, were found, but the shallowness of the ditches and pits on the site suggests that the ground level on the site has been reduced, and floor-level features are unlikely to have left traces. The complex of ditches and gullies to the rear of the buildings also displayed a sequence of alterations. None of the linear features on the east side of the site had the broad, shallow profile and regular spacing typical of strip-cultivation furrows: this area appears to have been part of a zone of private plots and garths lying between the buildings of the village and the communally worked open fields. The earliest layout appears to have been remodelled in association with the westward extension of the street-fronting building complex, as several of the structures in the centre of the site overlay two ditch sections which appeared to form part of the four-way junction dividing four enclosures. It is notable that finds were only retrieved from the features and deposits that were closest to the buildings, including the ditch sections that formed part of this four-way junction, and that a particularly large finds assemblage froma ditch terminal produced one of the earliest dates on the site, with a pottery assemblage of mainly late 12th to 13th-century date suggesting deposition in the early to mid-13th century. The site appears to have gone out of use in the late 14th century, and little activity other than the probable retrieval of re-usable stone from the derelict buildings appears to have taken place here during the 15th, 16th and early 17th centuries, although it seems likely that the well remained open and may have continued in use. Only five sherds of late medieval to early post-medieval pottery were found during the excavation, four of which were residual in layers that also produced both earlier and later material, while the fifth was unstratified. While it was not easy to distinguish deliberately laid stone surfaces from spreads of demolition rubble on the site, the variations in the dates of the finds from such layers, with the site stratigraphy, suggests that both are likely to have been present: since extensive alterations to the buildings had clearly been made, it seems probable that some, if not all, of the stone spreads had taken both forms, with demolition rubble from earlier buildings being spread around to create metalled surfaces around newer buildings. Syerston was enclosed by Act of Parliament between 1792 and 1795, representing the final act of a process of transferral of communally worked or utilised land into individual ownership that would have been in progress, on a smaller scale, for several decades beforehand. It is possible that this widespread change in land ownership and use may have led to changes in the nature or amount of activity on the site. Later post-medieval and modern finds were confined to the features and deposits closest to the street frontage of the site: one pit, near a well, and a layer both contained late 17th- to 18th-century pottery with residual medieval sherds. Finds from the possible buried soil in the north-west corner of the site and from a deposit to the east of the well included pottery of all dates from early medieval to modern, the latest vessels being of probable mid- to late 19th-century date, as well as other late post-medieval to modern artefacts such as bottle glass and clay tobacco pipe fragments; a similar range of material was retrieved from the fill of a well. Two layers were both interpreted on site as the surfacing of parts of a path, and the location and form of both makes it plausible that they might have formed a route to access the well from the adjacent footpath on the south side of the site; however, the well had certainly gone out of use by the late 19th century, as it does not appear on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map.