The evaluation area is located on land that lies to the north-west of Barton Lane, and to the north-east of Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Thrumpton in Nottinghamshire. A 22-hectare parcel of land was surveyed. Thirty-three trial trenches, each measuring 50 m in length and 2 m wide, were excavated in level spits using a 360º excavator equipped with a toothless bucket, under the constant supervision and instruction of the monitoring archaeologist. Machine excavation proceeded until either the archaeological horizon or the natural geology was exposed. To judge by the geophysical survey evidence, the three ditches formed part of a larger field system. The remains were contained within the eastern part of the site. No dating evidence was recovered, and the artefactual assemblage is limited to animal bone. The animal bone is well-preserved, and the presence of all three molars in the mandible of the sheep/goat indicates the remains arrived in the ditch neither far from nor long after the animal's death. Approximately 18 of the trenches targeted geophysical anomalies although corresponding archaeological features were only confirmed in three. No sub-surface features were recorded in, for example, one trench which corresponded with a mine shaft recorded on historical mapping and a prominent geophysical anomaly or another trench which crossed a field boundary also visible on historical mapping and accompanied by a geophysical anomaly. Many of the geophysical anomalies were interpreted within the report for that survey as being of only ‘possible’ or ‘probable’ archaeological origin however, and it may be that few of these did in fact relate to buried remains – although this cannot be argued where anomalies are corroborated by mapping. A more likely possibility, then, is that the archaeological horizon has been substantially plough-truncated, meaning that the deposits responsible for the geophysical readings only survived as vestiges at the topsoil/substrate interface, and were removed within the overburden when the trenches were opened. The lack of a subsoil and the fact that the ploughsoil directly overlay the archaeological features support this scenario. This explanation would not account for the absence of deeper features such as the mine shaft, however. Another factor may be that the trenching occurred in wet winter conditions, which probably hindered attempts to identify some features, especially those of subtle appearance or limited extent, or in the wettest (downslope) parts of the site. From the foregoing it can be seen that the evaluation has been moderately successful in achieving its objectives of providing information on the distribution and character of archaeological remains on the site and testing the reliability of the geophysical survey results. A lack of dating evidence means that it is not possible to confidently place the remains within a wider historical and archaeological context, but the features resemble field boundaries relating to enclosure systems of Late Iron Age or Romano-British date, which are commonly encountered in this part of the Middle Trent Valley.