Beneath the University of Nottingham's Park Campus lays the remains of one of Britain's lost villages. The small medieval settlement, named Keighton, appears to have occupied the site close to Highfield Park around 600 years ago.
It is one of more than 1,000 abandoned villages recorded in the country, and was first acknowledged in 13th century deeds. The village was in the possession of Lenton Priory, which had been founded by William Peveral in the early 1100s, writes Kathryn Steenson, an archivist at the University of Nottingham.
Keighton, which is thought to have always been a small settlement, was one of a number of villages that would provide the priory with payments. From the quantities recorded as payment researchers know that both the number of tenants and the quantity of land they held was small.
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Not all payments were with money either, sometimes the village provided grains, lambs and physical labour. The discovery of a lot of the village's history came thanks to a breakthrough in 1940, when remains were accidentally discovered during the Dig for Victory campaign in World War II.
When excavations were made after the war, signs of a medieval cottage and track were uncovered. However, due to the construction of the university's new biology building, archaeologists only had a few weeks to work.
But Ms Steenson says it is safe to say the remains were that of the missing village of Keighton. Evidence was later found of tile making at the site, which was most likely in use until the late 15th or early 16th century.
It seems likely that the tile works at Keighton were a temporary operation, with the workers setting up kilns specifically to produce tiles needed locally and then leaving. The final mention of Keighton in the monastic records is in 1387 when the five remaining houses were little more than ruins described as being ‘as much in want of repairs as of tenants’.
Read more about the lost village of Keighton here.
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