Pentrehyling and Brompton Roman fort 2010

Watching brief on roadworks through the Pentrehyling and Brompton Roman fort

Pentrehyling is in southwest Shropshire on the A489 Craven Arms to Caersws road. The road runs through an area occupied by the remains of Bronze Age funerary monuments, a Roman fort and marching camps, a section of Offa’s Dyke, and a medieval settlement. In spring 2010 the Archaeology Service carried out a watching brief on roadworks in the area of the Roman fort and marching camps.

The Roman fort, extra-mural settlement, and marching camps at Brompton were first discovered by aerial photography in 1969 and 1973 (Ferris, in Jones 1991). The fort and camp complex was the subject of a programme of archaeological investigations in the 1980s and early 1990s by the Central Marches Archaeological Research Group (Allen, 1986 – 1991). The area covered by the current road resurfacing scheme has also been the subject of archaeological recording in 1990 by the Birmingham University Field Archaeology Unit (BUFAU) - now Birmingham Archaeology. This work was undertaken in advance of planned road widening along this stretch of the road (Jones et al., 1991). These archaeological investigations located and sampled the Roman marching camp ditches and also located features associated with the Roman fort defences, internal structures, the external road, and features associated with an extra-mural settlement (vicus) to the east of the fort. The excavations recovered a quantity of Roman pottery, glass, and metalwork, including coins, and metalworking residue comprising iron smithing debris and litharge cakes, this latter a by-product of extracting silver from argentiferous lead only known from a very few Roman sites in Britain. (Bayley and Eckstein, 1998).

The watching brief found that substantial remains of the Roman period survived in the verge alongside the road. These remains mainly took the form of negative features – filled-in pits and ditches – some of which produced finds of Romano-British date. Some of the features, principally those which lay in the area of Pentrehyling Fort, could be tentatively correlated with features recorded during the 1990 excavations, and thus associated with the fort.

Although there had been some truncation of the features in the road verge in the area of the Pentrehyling fort larger archaeological features did survive in this area, notably features the fort and annexe ditches.

In the area of the fort vicus archaeological features were better preserved, and some were found that produced pottery finds of Romano-British date. The features seen in this area seemed to be domestic rather than industrial in nature.

In the area of the scheduled Roman marching camps a couple of archaeological features were recorded, one possibly representing the western arm of the ditch around one of the marching camps. The fill of this feature produced Romano-British pottery and an amphora handle.

References

Allen, J, 1986: The Roman Fort at Pentrehyling, Shropshire, Archaeology in Wales 26, 17-20.

Allen, J, 1988: Pentrehyling, Shropshire, Archaeology in Wales 28, 66.

Allen, J, 1991: Pentrehyling, Shropshire, Archaeology in Wales 31, 35-6.

Bayley J & Eckstein K, 1998: Metalworking debris from Pentrehyling Fort, Brompton, Shropshire, English Heritage AMLab Report 13/98

Cane, J, and Allen, J, 1989: The Archaeological Evaluation of a Cropmark Complex at Brompton, Shropshire, BUFAU

Hannaford, H R, 2010: An Archaeological Watching Brief at Bluebell Crossroads, Brompton, Shropshire, 2010, Shropshire Council Archaeology Service Report No 277

Jones, A E, Sterenberg, J, Richardson, S, Ferris, I M, et al, 1991: Brompton Shropshire: Excavations 1990; Site Narratives and Post-excavation Research Design, BUFAU Report No. 155