The Iron Age Woman and Child Found at Kings Drive, Eastbourne

The discovery at Kings Drive

The burial came to light during archaeological excavations at Pocock’s Field, off Kings Drive on the eastern side of Eastbourne, where the chalk of the South Downs meets the low, wet ground of the Willingdon Levels. The work was carried out by Archaeology South-East, and the grave of the woman and child proved to be one of the most affecting finds ever made in the town.

The pair had been buried together, the woman’s arm placed around the child — a gesture of care preserved in the ground for well over two thousand years. That single detail has made the burial the emotional starting point for the town’s heritage story, chosen to open Eastbourne’s “Story of Eastbourne” exhibition and its ongoing efforts towards a permanent museum.

Who were the woman and child?

Careful study of the skeletons has allowed archaeologists to build a surprisingly detailed picture. The woman was around 30 to 45 years old when she died, and stood about 156cm tall — a little over five feet. The child buried with her was aged between four and five years old. They lived in Eastbourne almost 2,250 years ago, in the middle of the British Iron Age.

We cannot know for certain whether the woman was the child’s mother, though the tender arrangement of the burial strongly suggests a close bond. What the grave makes plain is that these were real people, part of a settled community living on this exact spot, going about lives shaped by the marsh, the Downs and the sea.

The two glass beads

Buried alongside the pair were two glass beads — small, precious objects that survive today and have been recorded in fine detail, including as a 3D digital model for Eastbourne’s heritage trail. Because of the way the woman and child were positioned together, it is impossible to say whether the beads were worn around the woman’s wrist or the child’s neck.

Glass beads were valued items in the Iron Age, and their presence in the grave hints at status, sentiment, or both. In a world without shops or mass production, a coloured glass bead was a small treasure — the kind of thing that might be handed down, exchanged over distance, or kept close as a personal ornament. That they were chosen to accompany the dead tells us these individuals mattered to those who buried them.

A life of salt and marsh

The woman probably lived in a settlement on what is now Kings Drive, just metres from where she was buried. And there is good evidence for how she may have spent her days: working to extract salt from the marshes on her doorstep.

This is not guesswork. Excavation at Pocock’s Field revealed that the first sustained settlement here was a substantial Early to Middle Iron Age enclosure where large-scale saltworking was carried out as a specialist activity. Salt was hugely valuable in the ancient world — essential for preserving food, and a genuine trade commodity. Producing it involved evaporating seawater or brine drawn from the tidal marshes, a laborious, skilled process that would have occupied whole communities.

The picture that emerges is of a busy, purposeful place: people living at the edge of the wetlands, exploiting the resources of both marsh and Downs, and turning the salt of the Willingdon Levels into something worth trading far beyond Eastbourne.

Two millennia of settlement

The Iron Age burial was only one chapter in a remarkably long story. The Pocock’s Field excavations revealed evidence of human activity spanning roughly two thousand years, from early prehistory to the post-medieval period — a site returned to again and again by communities living where the Downs meet the Levels.

The earliest activity was a probable Bronze Age burial on a low chalk promontory, with further cremation burials added in the Middle Bronze Age. After the Iron Age saltworking settlement came a Middle to Late Iron Age community that continued, with changes, right through to the Late Roman period — taking on a specialist crop-processing role, most likely once a Roman villa was established just to the north.

Later still, in the 6th and 7th centuries, sunken-featured buildings and a timber hall appeared — the first identified Early Anglo-Saxon settlement at Eastbourne, and among the largest of its date in East Sussex. A medieval farmstead followed, and then a substantial 15th-century farmhouse. Few sites anywhere capture such a continuous sweep of local history in one place.

Why the find matters

Eastbourne’s story is far older than most people imagine, and the woman and child of Kings Drive have become its most powerful ambassadors. Alongside the Bronze Age timber platform at Shinewater and the Neolithic enclosure on Combe Hill, the burial shows that the land beneath the modern town was densely settled, worked and cared about for thousands of years.

Above all, the grave puts a human face on the deep past. Statistics about salt production and settlement enclosures are one thing; a mother’s arm around a child is another. It is a reminder that the people of Iron Age Eastbourne loved, grieved and remembered their dead much as we do — and that beneath the streets and suburbs of the present town lie the lives of those who came, unimaginably long ago, before.

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