The Sill Project, Once Brewed, Northumberland. Conservation Management Plan:Appendices 1 and 3-7

The Sill Project relates to land at Once Brewed, Henshaw, Northumberland (NY 75248 66892), and is part of the partnership The Sill: Unspoilt Landscapes, Inspiring
People, between the Northumberland National Park Authority (NNPA) and the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) (England and Wales). It was proposed that the YHA hostel and visitor centre at Once Brewed be redeveloped. The site, at the northern end, includes part of the Vallum, which is a scheduled monument (SM nos 26061 and
26063), and part of the Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site (WHS). Therefore, being sited within an extremely rich historic landscape, a Conservation Management Plan
(CMP) was required in order to inform the project proposals and to ensure the long term conservation management of the site, as well as to provide learning and engagement opportunities.
An interim assessment report briefly setting out a summary of the current understanding of the historic environment of the CMP area and provisional recommendations for further archaeological work and mitigation, was produced by
OA North in July 2013. In order to understand the archaeological sensitivities and how these may affect the designs, or how these may be mitigated, a programme of
iterative archaeological works was proposed. The first stage of which was a magnetic gradiometer survey. The survey was carried out over two fields to the south of the Military Way (B6318) and either side of the north/south road to Henshaw, and identified a number of responses of both potential archaeological or pedological origin. Some of the most obvious being several responses corresponding to
palaeochannels identified during the desk-based assessment and walkover survey. Spreads of magnetic debris also identified may be natural in origin, but the nature of
the responses suggests that an artificial origin cannot be ruled out.