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 main excavation area was L-shaped, covering the area where the most significant archaeological remains were found during the evaluation with the areas into which those remains are thought most likely to extend, and measured approximately 16,900 square metres. A small additional excavation area was situated in the north-west corner of the site, in order to intercept the projected courses of two parallel pit alignments, recorded during the Phase 3 excavation (Savage et al., 2021), should either feature group extend into the Phase 5 works area, as neither had appeared in the evaluation.