Observing a group of first-year students kneel in the mud of an east Leicestershire field and extract coins that haven’t been touched since the Middle Ages is subtly amazing. There are no coins on display. Not copies. Real ones, small and corroded, bearing the burden of a life no one can recall.
At Loddington, where the University of Leicester has returned for its second year of active excavation at what was once a thriving medieval settlement, that has been the reality this summer. The site is being worked by fifty students from the School of Heritage and Culture and University of Leicester Archaeological Services. They are measuring, recording, and brushing soil off stone under a sky that is either cooperative or very uncooperative depending on the day.
It is simple to overlook the village of Loddington. It is not very large or well-known, and it is quietly located in east Leicestershire. However, there seems to be a much more nuanced tale beneath it, or at least beneath the land surrounding Loddington Hall. Since the university’s initial thorough investigation of the site in 2025, a diminished medieval village—the kind that shrank over centuries, losing population gradually, and having its buildings absorbed back into the earth—has been gradually revealing its secrets.
This season, the team has discovered some truly intriguing things. Beneath later 16th-century stone structures, medieval timber buildings have risen from the ground. The kind of stratigraphic overlap that causes archaeologists to pause and reconsider is when one era is literally built on top of another. It implies that the site wasn’t abruptly abandoned. It changed hands, evolved, and was rebuilt. That’s probably a more accurate story, but it’s more difficult to explain than simple collapse.
Pottery sherds from Stamford Ware, a lead-glazed earthenware made between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, as well as post-holes designating roadside structures and ditched field boundaries, had already been discovered during the 2025 excavations. Medieval and worn coins as well. The quiet, everyday activities of people cooking, sleeping, and going about their daily lives are preserved as evidence of domestic activity in soil that has not been disturbed in hundreds of years. Although the exact size of this settlement and the exact time it started to decline are still unknown, the picture seems to become clearer with each passing season.
The Loddington project differs slightly from a typical research excavation in that the digging is being done by someone else. Many of these undergraduates are doing fieldwork for the first time. They are learning how to record a feature, use a tape measure correctly, and think spatially about what they see. This learning curve is taking place on a real site in real time, with real repercussions if something is overlooked. That carries some pressure, but it also has a seriousness that classroom work can’t quite match.
Children from the Young Archaeologists’ Club came to try their hand at the work, and members of the local heritage group joined the excavation this year. There is something noteworthy about the combination of students, professionals, community members, and schoolchildren gathered around the same trench. At its best, archaeology isn’t confined to academic institutions. The people of Loddington appear to realize they are sitting on something worthwhile, and it belongs to the locations where it occurs.
This is a longer project that is still in progress. Given what the soil has already produced, it is reasonable to assume that the Loddington field school will continue for some time to come.
