The Fairham Pastures development site is located directly to the south of the town of Clifton, within the north side of Barton in Fabis parish, in the Borough of Rushcliffe in Nottinghamshire. The application area in its entirety consists of some 253.5 hectares of land between the A453 to the west and the Fairham Brook, which here forms the boundary of Barton in Fabis parish, to the east: it is divided in two by the north-to-south course of the Nottingham Road. Before the commencement of development it consisted chiefly of open arable land, with some small wooded areas. The Phase 5 works zone is approximately 11 hectares in area and roughly lozenge-shaped, and lies on the north side of the site. It lies within an area shown as ‘common pasture’ on 19th- and early 20th-century mapping, which was drained and converted to arable land during the Second World War. The north side of the Phase 5 site adjoins an estate of mid-20th-century terraced and semi-detached housing; at the time the evaluation took place, the site was otherwise divided only by recent fencing from the open pasture land extending to south, east and west, and construction work was beginning in adjoining areas to the west. The scheme of works was twofold, consisting of a programme of evaluation trenching, followed by the open excavation of two targeted areas. The evaluation consisted of sixteen trenches, each measuring 30m x 2m to give a total sampled area of 960m2. The evaluation trenching programme was informed by a geophysical survey previously carried out on the site, and by the findings of similar archaeological mitigation schemes carried out in Phases 1-5 of the development. The results of the archaeological evaluation informed a second phase of archaeological mitigation, in which an open area excavation was carried out in the area where significant archaeological remains had been encountered, with a second, much smaller excavation area sited to intercept the projected route of a possible long-distance landscape feature identified in an earlier phase of works. The Phase 5 works area was typical of the wider Fairham Pastures site in that it included remains from several different periods, with some features continuing in active use over long periods of time while others were redesigned and incorporated into new landscape divisions and others still were overlain by new patterns of settlement and land usage. The focus of each phase of settlement on the wider site appears to have moved around as the needs and purposes of the occupants changed: Phase 5 was particularly heavily influenced by Roman activities, although pre-Roman landscape uses were also represented.