The feature group was located within this partitioned area of the enclosures, close to its south-western entrance. It was 2.60m long in total, and had the form typical of either a small kiln or a corn-drying oven, with a stoke-hole or fireplace at its east end and the base of a firing chamber or oven at its west end, connected by a short flue oriented roughly east-to-west. Its probable fireplace, at its east end, was a sub-rectangular pit: this element of the structure was 0.70m long and 0.80m wide, and had a maximum depth of 0.15m at its east end, becoming progressively shallower in depth until it reached the 0.08m depth of the flue. The variation in depth is probably due to repeated raking out of the fireplace at the open end. The base of this pit appeared to be blackened by burning or by the presence of ash, although excavation conditions were so wet that colour variations were hard to distinguish. At the west end of the feature, a circular pit, 0.70m in diameter with a flat base, probably represented the base of the firing chamber or oven. The kiln or oven base, which would have been above it, did not survive, but a number of medium to large stone fragments and patches of clean, pale grey clay in the pit fill suggest the collapse or demolition of a stone structure bonded or covered with clay. The flue connecting the two pits was 1.20m long and 0.36m wide.

The pottery assemblage retrieved from the two fills in the group was large enough to lead to the initial interpretation of the feature as a pottery kiln, but this interpretation was set aside when none of the sherds proved during finds processing to be kiln wasters and no fired clay fragments identifiable as pieces of kiln structure or furniture were retrieved. The feature group also had the characteristic plan form and structural elements of the features normally identified on Romano-British sites as ‘corn-dryers’ – a stoke-hole or fireplace, a flue and the base of a drying chamber – and its location within a small Romano-British enclosure was also compatible with this interpretation (Proctor and Taylor-Wilson, 2009, pp.28-32). However, environmental samples from both fills were almost devoid of palaeobotanical remains, including only traces of grasses and peas, with no charred cereal remains at all, which effectively rules out the interpretation of the feature group as a corn-dryer. When the finds were presented for specialist analysis, the pottery assemblage proved to consist of 142 sherds of abraded grey ware with an overall 3rd-century date from one fill, and 112 sherds, also of abraded grey ware and dated to the 3rd century, with a single fragment of fired clay, from another fill. Each fill also produced a redeposited earlier Neolithic struck flint. A large, very smooth sandstone cobble was retrieved, from fill with the 3rd century pottery, as a possible quern- or rubbing-stone, but specialist assessment did not find any indications of working or utilisation on it; it appeared to be heat-affected and had probably formed part of the oven structure. The Romano-British pottery assessment concluded that feature group was in fact most likely to have been a pottery kiln, active during the 3rd century AD, as small kilns of this period often do survive only as shallow scoops with few surviving features, and obvious ‘waster’ sherds are often absent from such features.

R. D. Savage, L. Brocklehurst & S. Palmer-Brown, 2021, Phases 3 and 3B, Fairham Pastures, West of Nottingham Road, Clifton, Rushcliffe, Nottinghamshire: Scheme of Archaeological Mitigation (Evaluation and Targeted Excavation) Combined Report (Unpublished document). SNT6051.