4th October 2011, 10:27 PM
Dirty Dave Lincoln Wrote:Usually, anything bigger than a rut is a gully, larger than that, it's a ditch! if that helps.
I am a bit confused as well now, below is taken from a dig report and I have seen others where features have been labelled gullies but were bigger and deeper than ditches named in the same report. In the scottish reports I have read gullies are natural geographic features or those features extended by man and ditches are manmade. In other reports they call them gully/ditch and dont classify them as 2 different things.
A southwest-northeast aligned ditch (G703) almost completely traversed Area 7, terminating
2.5m from the eastern edge of the area (Fig. 3) and may have been utilised as a boundary
feature, enclosure or field system. The ditch, which cut the northern edge of posthole 7085,
had a minimum length of 19m, a width of 0.5m and average depth of 0.25m. The fill produced
a total of 11 Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age sherds of Peterborough Ware and Grooved
Ware/Beaker. To the south of G703 were two gullies (7037 and 7049) on a northwestsoutheast
alignment (Fig. 3). These measured between 0.45m and 0.60m in width and were
fairly shallow, with a depths ranging between 0.10 and 0.20m. The two gullies (7037 and
7049) were aligned perpendicular with G703 and therefore may be part of a contemporary
field system.
Two more gullies (G610 and G611) located within the northern half of the main enclosure
were clearly earlier than the enclosure ditch. Gully G610 was aligned southwest-northeast and
measured around 0.5m in width and 0.3m in depth and had been cut at its eastern extent by a
northwest-southeast aligned gully (G611). This measured 1.04m in width and 0.66m in depth
and produced fragments of Iron Age pottery. To the northeast was a further gully (6184),
which may have been a continuation of either G610 or G611. This measured around 1.13m in
width and around 0.59m in depth at its deepest, and was filled by grey-brown silty sand.