Kingsborough Manor

A picture is emerging of the way the landscape of the Isle of Sheppey has developed from the Neolithic to the post-medieval period, thanks to extensive investigations at the Kingsborough Manor housing development over the last decade.  The work has been commissioned and funded by Jones Homes (Southern).

During the Neolithic period this was a ceremonial landscape, dominated by two causewayed enclosures. The 16 hectare site has commanding views to the south, west and north and this must be one of the reasons why the two causewayed enclosures were constructed here.

After the monuments fell into disuse little activity took place for two and a half millennia, until the Middle to Late Bronze Age when the site was used for rituals and burials.  

Now the coastline is a mere 1km north of the site, but in prehistory it was further north and the resources the land offered would have been very different and the land  has been used almost exclusively for agriculture until the housing development of the late twentieth/early twenty-first centuries.

Jörn Schuster provides an up-to-date overview of the results of ten years of investigation in a recent article in Archaeologia Cantiana, 30, 2010, ‘The Neolithic to Post-Medieval Archaeology of Kingsborough, Eastchurch, Isle of Sheppey: from monuments to fields’.