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Five Late Bronze Age Enclosures in North Wiltshire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2014

C. M. Piggott
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is briefly to draw attention to a new group of Deverel–Rimbury enclosures in Wessex. These were found in the course of field work by the writer and Mr Owen Meyrick during the year preceding the outbreak of war, and all five are within two miles of one another on open downland north of the Marlborough–Wootton-Bassett road (fig. 1).

1. Preshute Down. (See fig. 2 and pl. VII). Squarish enclosure covered with L.B.A. pottery and flints. Slight excavations were made here with the help of Mr W. E. V. Young from Avebury. The field system around the enclosure was shown to be later.

2. Ogbourne Down. (See fig. 4, and pl. VIII). Three enclosures close together, east of the Four-Mile Clump and at the bottom of a valley. Much L.B.A. pottery scattered over the whole area. Many ancient fields all round are visible from the crest of Smeathes' Ridge, but their relationship with the earthworks was not discovered before the war made more excavation impossible. Thanks to many boys from the Marlborough College Archaeological Society, excavation was made at a number of points.

3. Ogbourne Maizey Down. (See fig. 3). An interesting sub-rectangular earthwork of the same type. No excavations made. Only a few potsherds were found, but all proved to be L.B.A. This enclosure had been constructed by digging the ditch into the soft lynchet soil of a pre-existing field system.

Type
Research Article
Information
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society , Volume 8 , 1942 , pp. 48 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1942

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References

page 48 note 1 Excavations, IV, 1–58, and 185 ff.Google Scholar Note that Handley Hill enclosure is medieval and not Late Bronze Age.

page 48 note 2 At Boscombe Down East, Wilts. Arch. Mag., 1936, XLVII, 466Google Scholar, and the settlement site at Thorny Down, Wilts. Arch. Mag., 1937, XLVII, 640Google Scholar, and Proc. Prehist. Soc., 1941, 114Google Scholar.

page 48 note 3 Proc. Hants. Field Club, 1939, XIV, 143Google Scholar.

page 52 note 1 Pitt-Rivers, , Excavations, IVGoogle Scholar.

page 54 note 1 Proc. Prehist. Soc., 1935, 1Google Scholar.

page 54 note 2 Sussex Arch. Colls., LXIX, 35–75Google Scholar.

page 54 note 3 By M. E. Cunnington (Devizes, 1923).

page 61 note 1 Ant. Journ.

page 61 note 2 Kendrick, and Hawkes, , Archaeology in England and Wales, 1914–1931, 300Google Scholar, pl. XXIV, 1.

page 61 note 3 These remarks are only intended to refer to the Late Bronze Age, for by the Iron Age, when farming was probably better controlled, the reorganisation led in a great many cases to the reverse sequence, i.e., the ploughing up of earlier pasture.