05/07/2025
*Important Announcement*
The Highdown Big Dig 2025 - Saturday 19th July to Friday 1st August
We are delighted to reveal that we are embarking on an exciting excavation at Highdown Hill this month. The Highdown Big Dig 2025 will see Worthing Museum join in partnership with National Trust Archaeology and Worthing Archaeological Society for this community Big Dig. This project will be part of the Council for British Archaeology’s annual Festival of Archaeology. There will also be lots of free-to-attend tours and workshops during the project, suitable for children and adults alike! (see Events below) We will be hosting a Big Dig Open Day on Saturday 26th July, with extra activities, and of course daily updates will be made on this page and our website.
Highdown Hill is an archaeological site of national importance, with its Bronze Age enclosure, Iron Age hill fort (built on top of the Bronze Age enclosure!) Roman activity, including a bath house, and of course the nationally significant Anglo-Saxon/Early Medieval cemetery within the ramparts.
Highdown has seen numerous excavations in the past, most notably the poorly-executed digging of the 1890s, when the cemetery was first revealed, and a rescue dig after hurricane damage in 1988. This will be the first ‘Big Dig’ to take place at Highdown, and the first excavation in nearly 40 years.
We will be investigating multiple features across the hill, including a possible Bronze Age burial mound, Iron Age field systems, Roman activity near the bath house and more. By applying this holistic approach to the landscape we hope to reveal archaeological evidence for human activity at Highdown over thousands of years. Visitors will be able to see live archaeology take place, with trenches and test pits visible to the public from Sunday 20th July through to Thursday 31st July.
We are very grateful to UCL Institute of Archaeology (Archaeology South-East) who will be loaning us their top osteoarchaeologist in case we come across human or animal remains on site.
Later next year Worthing Museum will be hosting a major exhibition, showcasing the results from the Highdown Big Dig. In conjunction with this we will be hosting a conference in our venues titled ‘The Story of Highdown Hill’, inviting speakers from across the country to discuss the multi-period history of this special landmark.
EVENTS
We will be hosting *free* children's workshops at the Big Dig HQ at the summit of the hill during the project. There will also be *free* daily tours of the excavation and history of this local landmark (times and dates in the comments below)
On Saturday 26th July we will be hosting an Open Day where we'll have the Weorod living history group demonstrate Anglo-Saxon life and death on site, in addition to workshops for children and young adults, flint knapping demonstrations, bug hunts hosted by the National Trust Ranger team and the opportunity to see the artefacts uncovered so far. We will also be joined by young archaeologists from both Brighton and Chichester!
Members of the team will be camping on site throughout the project to ensure the site is secured.
Accessibility: Free parking at Highdown gardens. Toilets at Highdown gardens. It is a twenty minute walk from Goring-by-Sea train station, along the path adjacent to the A259. No gates on the hill so wheelchair access is possible, but there are roots in places that could make it challenging at certain points.
Chichester YAC Brighton YAC
