Lynnsport 4 & 5: Land adjacent to Greenpark Avenue, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

Oxford Archaeology (OA) carried out a strip and map excavation between 27th February and 3rd March 2017 at Lynnsport 4 & 5: Land adjacent to Greenpark Avenue, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. This work was commissioned by Lovell Partnerships Ltd. The site comprised 2.79 hectares of undeveloped land, within the urban reach of King’s Lynn, proposed for residential development. The site is bisected by Greenpark Avenue which divides Lynnsport 4 (1.6 hectares) to the north and Lynnsport 5 (1.19 hectares) to the south.
The current site constitutes the first area of a wider scope of works (Lynnsport 1-5) scheduled to be evaluated by Oxford Archaeology. These works lie in a significant area of industrial archaeological remains relating to salt-making, prevalent during the medieval and early post-medieval periods.
The evaluation revealed evidence for salt-making on the site in the form of three mounds of deposits and their associated features comprising Salterns 1-3. Two of these salterns (Salterns 1 and 2) were located within Lynnsport 4, to the north of Greepark Avenue. The remains of a further saltern (Saltern 3) was located to the south of Greenpark Avenue within Lynnsport 5. The majority of Saltern 3 appeared to extend north beneath the current Greenpark Avenue. As well as revealing waste deposits from the salt-making process constituting the saltern mounds, the evaluation also revealed in-situ remains of a probable brine-boiling hearth and a clay-lined water tank. A large pit cut into Saltern 2 containing the broken-up remains of a probable hearth along with tips of burnt and ash presumably hearth waste deposits. These remains were considered to be typical of the known medieval salt-making remains previously excavated in the area.
The evaluation also revealed part of two curvilinear ditches (Hayricks 1 and 2), probably representing drip gullies of post-medieval hayricks, also known as ‘Riley circles’. The post-medieval dated for these features was reinforced with the recovery of a post-medieval ceramic tobacco pipe-stem from the fill of one of these features.
In addition to these remains, tree-pits were also identified of more recent date and associated with the orchard that once extended across the site.