An excavation to uncover evidence of the Iron Age in Bradford on Avon has been hailed a success after the edge of a hill fort was found along with medieval pottery.

The three-week dig got underway on July 20 in the garden of Peter and Jane Mann, of Budbury Place, who live in a house thought to be the former Budbury Manor, dating back to the 16th century.

Led by former Wiltshire archaeologist Roy Canham, 66, and coinciding with an Iron Age exhibition at the town’s museum, the dig has uncovered more evidence of the fort in the Budbury area, which first came to light in the 1960s.

Mr Canham and his team had to dig through a stone floor, which the Manns first discovered buried in their garden in the spring, while planting trees.

Mr Canham said: “We were dealing with some kind of yard floor, we did get beneath that and we started to find medieval pottery, from around about AD 1300.

“It is mainly domestic pottery, with a bit of what looks like a pitcher and other shards and animal bones.

“We will have to look through that, clean it carefully and try to identify it.

“We also found half a dozen bits of Roman pottery there that shows there must have been some kind of Roman activity in the area and found an edge of the hill fort ditch too.

“We could see the hill fort ditch diving down the edge of the hole we made with huge blocks of stone.”

Local historians have been trying to unlock the history of the area for years after eminent archaeologist GJ Wainwright first uncovered evidence of a hill fort, which could date back to 600BC, during a dig in 1969.

Because the excavation took so long, the team did not extend the dig to the Wine Street area as they had originally planned.

Mr Canham said there were around eight or nine people involved in the dig at different times, which covered an area of ground measuring three metres long by three metres wide, and about one-and-a-half metres deep, in the Manns’ garden.