A 'strip, map and sample' excavation was undertaken by Colchester Archaeological Trust in January 2013, in advance of the construction of the new school on the field. <1> A curved gully, c.8m in diameter, may be the eaves-drip gully of a prehistoric round-house but, on balance, it was not thought to have structural associations. Three phases of Roman activity were defined on the site, consisting of a cemetery, ditches and enclosures. The first phase (mid 1st to 2nd century) consisted of a rectilinear landscape including a NW/SE aligned ditch with a similarly-aligned paddock (34m wide) on its western side (an entrance-sized gap between the two indicates they are contemporary). The NW/SE ditch appears to be the western boundary of a 1st-century Roman cemetery including a high-status bustum (containing lamps and a coin of Vespasian, dating this feature to c.AD 70), and three cremations (one a high-status boxed cremation), although in later periods burials are placed beyond it. The cemetery continued into phase 2 (mid-late 2nd century), when it may have been associated with a Romanised farmstead building of early Roman date (found by the 2004 trenching) and associated with the northern of two connected east-west enclosures forming a new landscape arrangement (the enclosures were 40m wide N-S and at least 60m E-W). These enclosures were at right-angles to the presumed north-south course of the Roman road leading to the town’s south-east gate, thought to be on the approximate course of Mersea Road to the east of the new school site. The east-west landscape may have continued in use into the early 3rd century by when the Romanised building was seemingly abandoned. The Roman cemetery may have continued in use despite the landscape changes. In Phase 3 (later 2nd/3rd century) a large sand and gravel quarry was dug through the Phase 1 and 2 ditches and probably through the southern edge of the earlier cemetery. The quarry was itself cut by several large pits on its southern edge which were filled with domestic rubbish and building material of the mid-2nd to 3rd century. 12 undated grave-shaped cuts in and west of the Phase 2 cemetery are probably graves whose bodies have been dissolved by the acidic soil. In the absence of dating evidence, these are probably late Roman, of a similar date to the late Roman inhumation cemetery at GAL A1 site H (140m to the ENE). A large ditch (3.45m wide x 1.2m deep) on the southern edge of the site is probably a circumvallation ditch dug in the Civil War of 1648. The excavation followed trial-trenched evaluation in 2004 (CAT report 274) and 2011 (CAT report 607). <2><3>