A small trial trench, 2m x 1m in size, was excavated inside the vacant shop at 14 Vineyard Street, Colchester. This trenched revealed the southern side of an east-west orientated ditch situated 18m beyond the town wall. The location and datable finds from the fill suggest that this is the outer side of Roman Colchester’s town ditch. <1> The uppermost 350mm consisted of modern concrete floors (L1, L2) and hardcore (L3). Beneath this material was a layer of dark earth (L4) which extended to an overall depth of 700mm. Finds from the dark earth indicate a post-medieval to early modern date for this soil. Below the dark earth was a 400m- to 500mm-thick deposit of dark brown silt loam (L5) which contained Roman pottery, tegulae (roof tile) and box-flue tile fragments, together with a dumped deposit of oyster shell at the northern end of the trench. L5 continued down to the top of natural sand and gravel (L6), which was exposed at an overall depth of 1.1m in the southern end of the trench. In the central and northern part of the trench, the natural (L6) had been cut by an east-west linear feature (F1). The fill of F1 was removed to an overall depth of 1.3m, at which point excavation ceased for safety reasons. A 700mm-deep auger probe into the F1 fill at the northern end of the trench showed no soil change, which suggests that the feature extends to an overall depth of at least 2m from the surface. Datable finds from the fill of F1 were exclusively Roman.