A VISION of how an early Saxon settlement uncovered at Langford would have looked has been drawn up.
Archaeological artist Jon Cane has created a picture of how the village, discovered in April last year, would have appeared.
The settlement, along with the oldest cremation site in the UK, was discovered in advance of a new pipeline being built at Langford.
A deposit containing cremated human bone was found during excavations by Oxford Archaeology and has been dated back to 5,600 BC.
During the dig archaeologists found several buildings which date back to Saxon times.
Nick Gilmour, who led the excavation, said: “We were expecting to get prehistoric rather than Saxon. It became obvious there was quite a lot of Saxon articles – a lot more than we had thought from our initial digs.
“All that remains of the buildings are small posts which are not the sort of thing which shows up easily.
“We were probably on that site for four weeks with five or six of us digging the post holes.
“The picture is still a best guess. We only dug up one area where the pipe was going. There is almost certainly more settlements in the fields outside of the pipeline. Normally people build villages that are longer than a pipeline.”
Mr Gilmour said the settlement most likely was the home of wealthy farmers who were on the site for around 100 years.
“All Saxon settlements are still hard to find,” he said.
“With roman sites you have flood systems and trenches that go with them. Saxon settlements are not as common to find.
“So it is another piece of the puzzle.
“A lot of Saxon settlements become medieval sites and carry on all the way along or you will find a Roman area or Iron Age that is carried all the way through to the modern day.
“But with this one it seems there wasn’t any evidence of any Romans before or any medieval after.
“They only lived in it for a short time and it seemed to be a moderately wealthy settlement. They lived in reasonably big houses and were well looked after.
“It would have been a few families who were maybe there for a hundred years and were mainly farmers who would sell their farming surplus.”
The excavations were funded by Essex and Suffolk Water as part of its upgrade to the Chelmsford effluent pipeline.
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