Roman and Post-medieval landscape features at Manor Farm, Kempsford, Gloucestershire (Paperback)

Over the course of eleven campaigns of archaeological excavation, covering an area approximately 1.5km by 0.5km, several phases of land use were defined. Dating is problematical but both early and late Roman elements can be identified, along with at least two post-medieval phases, and it is considered likely that some features on the site were pre-Roman (Iron Age), including a single, discontinuous boundary some 750m long. It is clear that a large parcel of landscape in the south-west of the site was divided up according to a single scheme in the Roman period, the basic elements of which (a ditched trackway and very large fields) lasted through Roman remodelling and appear to have influenced the post-medieval layout as well. A second, apparently unconnected, Roman field system occupies the north-east of the site. Finds of all kinds were rare and environmental evidence sparse, but molluscan analysis, nearly all from what have turned out to be post-medieval features, suggests the area was damp, perhaps water meadow, throughout that period. The disconnectedness of the Roman landscape elements supports the case for seeing this landscape as parcelled up on a large scale, yet at the same time piecemeal, with a density of a farm every kilometre or so.