Aileen Fox (Lady Fox)

Aileen Fox (Lady Fox, born Henderson) was born in London on 29 July 1907 and died in Exeter on 21 November 2005, aged 98. In 1945 she was asked to do trial excavations in bombed Exeter, and she went on to dig the Roman legionary fortress there (Roman Exeter, 1952). She lectured at University College of the South West, Exeter, from 1947 until she retired. Sources give 1971, 1972 or 1973 for that.

Her Dartmoor work is the excavation at Kestor, on the Kes Tor Round Pound, which ran from July 1951 to July 1952 with funding from the University College and the Devonshire Association. Hut 1 was about 27 feet across inside, with eight postholes and a south-west doorway, and the finds included pottery, quartz, a whetstone, flints and a saddle quern. She published the results as "Celtic fields and farms on Dartmoor, in the light of recent excavations at Kestor" in the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society in 1955. The detail on Hut 1 comes from one website, Legendary Dartmoor.

The field system at Kestor and Kestor Rocks are nearby. Her other books include Roman Britain (1961, with Alan Sorrell), South-West England (1964) and an autobiography, Aileen: A Pioneering Archaeologist (2000). She founded the Hillforts Study Group in 1965 and received an honorary doctorate from Exeter in 1985.

Image: Aileen Fox aged 26 (1933), digital drawing by CharlotteEllery (2023), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. An illustration, not a photograph.