Thornton to Switch Island Link Road, Merseyside. Archaeological Watching Brief.

A new 4.2km long single carriageway link road is proposed between the A565 Southport Road, at Thornton (NGR SD 3323 0160), and the Switch Island junction of the M57, M58, A59 and A5036 (NGR SD 3770 0009). Jacobs Engineering UK Ltd
(Jacobs), on behalf of Balfour Beatty, are providing environmental, planning and design input into the proposed scheme, for which a programme of ground investigation (GI) works was required. As part of the GI works, a series of trial pits was excavated along the proposed route, which lies in an area of flat agricultural land where there has been little previous archaeological investigation. Due to the possibility of currently unknown archaeological remains being encountered during excavation of the trial pits, Jacobs commissioned Oxford Archaeology North (OA North) to undertake an archaeological watching brief. This would enable any archaeological remains disturbed during the groundworks to be recorded.
The watching brief was undertaken over nine days, between 15th and 28th September 2009. In total, 39 trial pits was excavated (TP101-139) under a continuous archaeological presence. The mechanical excavation of the trial pits was interrupted approximately every 0.5m by the geotechnical engineers undertaking the GI works, in order to sample the soil for the purposes of contamination and compaction testing. The trial pits measured between 0.6m and 0.7m wide, and 2.7m and 3.8m long, to an average depth of 4.0m.