The times 17 August, 2004
An archaeologist has chanced upon a previously unrecorded Roman town in the Cotswolds. The town, which was established shortly after the Roman invasion in the 1st century, was large enough to have been a regional capital and trading centre for the wealthy agricultural area.
The 37-acre fortified settlement would have had no more than 1,000 inhabitants, but that was large by the standards of the times.
The town, the name of which has been lost to history, had a grand entrance gate, a forum, a smelting works and several rows of houses.
Its discovery was made after David Isaac, a farmer, showed Roman coins that he had found on his land at Thornbury, north of Bristol, to Andrew Young, a local archaeologist.
Mr Young, an associate of the Institute of Field Archaeology and partner in the Avon Archaeological Unit Partnership, accepted an invitation to inspect other artefacts found in the fields and stored at Mr Isaac’s farmhouse at Rangeworthy, Gloucestershire.
It proved to be quite a collection. Three generations of the Isaac family had gathered a mass of Roman coins, brooches, dice, thimbles and pottery from Hill End Farm.
Mr Young said: “I was astonished. To stumble over it was quite amazing, and quite by accident as well. My feeling is that there will never be another site like this in this region.
“This fills in a very big hole in our understanding of Roman Britain because until now there wasn’t a single focal point for the population of the area.â€Â
Mr Young chartered a helicopter to survey the site. He found that Hill End Farm lies on the route of a Roman road from Bath to Gloucester. |