Category: Archaeology: Warminster and District

West Wiltshire District Council’s Warminster Town Centre Conservation Area Character Assessment, Informative Document, Consultation Draft/Cabinet Draft, of December 2006, includes the following notes:

ARCHAEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE
There are no Scheduled Ancient Monuments currently in Warminster Town Centre. However, immediately to the east of the town are the massive earthworks of Battlesbury Camp, an Iron Age hill fort that provides tangible evidence of prehistoric settlement patterns in the area.

The Extensive Urban Survey undertaken in 2001 by Wiltshire County Council compiled from desktop studies of the sites and monuments record that numerous excavations within the Warminster area have revealed prehistoric and later artefacts including:

Neolithic worked flints that have been recovered from a number of sites throughout the town.

Bronze Age artefacts that were found to the rear of George Street prior to the undertaking of modern development in the mid 1990s.

On Weymouth Street, just outside of the conservation area, Roman materials were found during the redevelopment at the Regal Cinema.

Records of the Saxon period suggest that a Saxon church was located on the opposite side of Church Street to St Denys’ Church on ground now belonging to Warminster School adjacent to the swimming pool. Aerial photographs showing crop marks appear to support the documentary evidence of the site of the possible Saxon church. The County Council has not recorded further physical investigation in this location.

Archaeological evidence, including a series of drainage ditches and pottery finds, identifies further Saxon activity around the Emwell and Silver Street area.

During the medieval period there was a large expansion of the town to the east of the original Saxon settlement. The most notable feature that demonstrates clear evidence of this planned medieval growth of the town, are the number of burgage plots that still exist as narrow strips of private land often contained within brick or stone walls, at the rear of property fronting onto East Street, Market Place and High Street. The most notable section is to the rear of buildings on the south side of East Street into Market Place. Any proposals for development in these areas should ensure that these plots are maintained in an identifiable form. This issue will be taken up more fully in the section devoted to the town centre and the Warminster Conservation Area Management Plan.

Many finds and artefacts are now housed in the town museum that is housed within the Library and bear witness, to the thriving community during the past.

Whilst the historic buildings within the town represent an important element of Warminster’s environmental richness, it should be recognised that many of the buildings that display 18th and 19th century frontages are, in reality, earlier medieval and later medieval structures that were simply refronted during the more affluent part of the market town’s evolution.

The industrial heritage of the town is mainly represented by the malting and brewery buildings that are located in and around the principle streets. Many of them have survived although converted, to other uses including; residential accommodation. The most important group still operating are in Pound Street, whilst examples of converted maltings or breweries can be found to the north of Silver Street and south of Vicarage Street.

Wednesday 4th August 2004

A letter from Paul Marshall:

About two years ago there was a proposal to build a National Archaeology Centre near Warminster. I recall being at a meeting, when an archaeologist and another man tried to get support for the idea.

If my memory serves me right they said the Centre would be very successful, because a lot of people were interested in archaeology, hence the big viewing figures for the Time Team tv programme.

I’m not sure that I followed this thinking, as there are lots of other programmes that get far more viewers. Eastenders and Big Brother come immediately to mind. So why not a centre for them somewhere?

Something else that intrigued me, although it didn’t surprise me in this day and age, was the amount of money they said would be needed to build this Archaeology Centre. They were talking about millions of pounds.

Why is it that everything you hear about these days costs millions and sometimes tens and hundreds of millions? And, more often than not, goes millions over budget to ensure completion, or runs out of millions and is not even brought to fruition.

There has recently been a mention again about this Archaeology Centre. It was obviously wishful thinking of me when I expressed the hoped it had been shelved. It would undoubtedly be a silly use of money that would be better spent on something else, like a decent hospital for Warminster.

Excuse the pun but can I assume (and really hope) that the plans for an Archaeology Centre will be laid to rest and buried forever in the dust.

The Year’s Work In Archaeology 1921 published by the Congress of Archaeological Societies (in union -with the Society of Antiquaries of London) and printed by the Hampshire Advertiser Company Limited, 45 Above Bar, Southampton, 1922, included:

Warminster. Mr. Crawford reports that the northern part of this otherwise perfect and mathematically circular camp is being rapidly destroyed by desultory quarrying. This is most unfortunate, as the earthwork is of unusual type and has never been ploughed. He found some rough potsherds there, including one unmistakable Romano-British fragment.

Reverend John Jeremiah Daniell, in his History Of Warminster, published in 1879, noted:

Before A.D. 300, there was a Militaris Via (which is afterwards referred to in an old deed of a grant to the Monastery at Wilton) running from OLD SARUM (Sorbiodunum) to BATH (Aquae Solis). It seems to have entered Wiltshire near Short Street and Hisomleigh, where Roman coins and pottery abound, and passed by COLDARBER (The meaning or the word Coldarber is not known; it is frequently found in connection with old roads or ways, and is probably a corrupt form of some Celtic name) or COLD ARBOUR, near Warminster Church. The Roman road did not pass through the village of Warminster, but seems to have skirted it on the north; its course may still, with care, be traced along Woodcock Lane, through the fields of Boreham farm, and the grounds behind Bishopstrow House.

Camden erroneously says that Warminster is the Roman VERLUCIO: but Verlucio was a station, according to Sir R. Hoare, at Sandy Lane, on the road between AQUAE SOLIS and CUNETIO, near Marlborough.

Warminster, however, produces evidence of Roman occupation that cannot be gainsayed. The fine earthen fortress on Battlesbury is probably Roman work. It has been said that it would tax the strength of a nation in ancient Celtic times to raise such entrenchments. But those who remember Caesar’s account of the foss and vallum he drew from the Rhone to Geneva, will allow that a Roman legion or two, with a Caesar for captain, would throw up such a camp as that on Battlesbury in a week. It is formed on the head of a high, irregular hill, enclosing an area of about twenty-four acres, and is in circuit nearly a mile. This bold, extens ive work remains almost perfect; its ramparts run sixty feet high; its steep acclivities render it almost impregnable on the south and east; there are double trenches and ramparts, with openings and defences at the east and west. On the tableland within, now under the plough, were formerly lines of internal encampments.

Reference has been already made to the existence of three barrows within and upon the defences of Battlesbury. These barrows had been raised before the camp was formed. This is an interesting fact: and when the ramparts were in process of construction, the three monumental mounds previously existing, were respected, and left undisturbed; and though they offered, close at hand, so large a supply of material, earth to raise the ridges of the camp was fetched from other parts. This is a marked forbearance and regard shown to British entombments by Roman soldiers, which Saxon and Dane, who, in all probability, occupied this stronghold in turn, also observed. It was reserved for the nineteenth century to dishonour and desecrate burial-places, where the bones of the ancient men had mouldered so many ages in peace. Near the north-west angle of Battlesbury, A.D. 1773, in an old chalk quarry, thirty-six Roman coins were found in an urn, silver and copper, of ANTONINUS PIUS, JULIA, and CONSTANTINE, with some skeletons of men, and the bones of a horse.

In 1766, as a labourer, by name Mifflin, was digging stone on Warminster Common, he came upon a small brass image, and near the same spot, turned out an urn containing about one hundred and fifty Roman coins, viz., of DIOCLETIAN, GALLIENUS, PROBUS, CONSTANTINE, VICTOR INUS, &c.: all were in pretty fair condition; some few were coated; and one bore on the reverse Romulus, Remus, and the Wolf. In 1773, Scot Davis, a labourer, found two medallions of the larger brass, a VESPATIAN and TRAJAN, in the meadow between the BURIES and PITMEAD. In 1780, the workmen employed in enclosing some land at the Common, dug up a pot of silver denarii from TRAJAN to SEPTIMIUS and ALEXANDER SEVERUS, with legends clearly traceable.

The BURIES (so named from standing on a large Barrow) is a house and grounds belonging to the Astley family, partly in Warminster parish and partly in Bishopstrow. It was decidely a Roman station; part of the agger is still visible, and at various times much Roman pottery has been dug up, wherever the spade broke the soil, deeply embedded in black mould. In 1792, Richard Archer and John Arnold, while employed in levelling a high ridge and digging a ditch at the Buries discovered several pieces of iron armour, much Roman ware, and two large urns, one of which contained several thousand Roman coins, a peck in measure, chiefly of the middle and small brass, of all ages of the Roman Empire from Tiberius, viz., Claudius, Vitellius, Domitian, Antoninus Pius, Com modus, Alexander Severus, Lucius Verius, Maximus, Gordian, Philip, Gallienus, Tetricus, Probus, Tacitus, Carausius, Alectus, Carinus, Max entius, Maximinus, Constantine, Constans, Magnentius, Victorinus; and two female heads, Salonina, wife of Gallienus, and a Julia. A lump of these coins, firmly rusted together, in good preservation, was in the possession of Mr. Halliday, of Warminster, but cannot now be found.

PITMEAD, a large meadow south of the river Wylye, locally situate between the parishes of Bishopstrow and Sutton Veny, belongs to Warminster. Ruins of a Roman Villa were first noticed here in 1786. They were examined, and described by Mr. Gough and Mr. Downes in the VETUSTA MONUMENTA, and by Mr. Wansey, in the Gentleman’s Magazine: Lord Weymouth, to whom part of the field belonged, assisted in the excav ations. But being left a short time unprotected, the pavements were picked to pieces by bucolic visitors. The site was again laid open in 1800, by Mr. Cunnington; and a third time in 1820. As the result of all these investigations, it appeared that two villas had formerly stood on this site, the abode of some Roman, or Romanized Briton. Amongst the ruins were found traces of several rooms, with mosaic pavements inlaid with very beautiful tesserae, black, white, and red. Bath-stone quoins, part of a leaden pipe, stone tiles hexagonal, white marble, bricks for flues, an iron star and ring, an ivory style, a coin of Claudius, &c. One of the encaustic tiles bore the figure of a woman, another that of a hare sitting in form. Bones and skulls of men and animals were intermingled. Two skeletons were found, one recumbent, the other of a man in a sidelong position, into which he seemed to have been forced by the wall falling upon him.