Two new positive reviews of Roman Nottinghamshire have appeared. One of them, by Nottinghamshire’s historical and antiquarian society, the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, appeared in its autumn 2011 newsletter and is reproduced below. The shorter review below it appeared in the autumn/winter 2011 issue of Nottinghamshire Historian.
Nottinghamshire Historian review
cross-section of a well found at the Romano-British village. This image and all others on this page are copyright of Tarmac and Trent and Peak Archaeology.
A previously unknown Romano-British village has been found at Tarmac’s Langford Quarry, near Collingham. Measuring approximately 0.5km by 400m, including its field systems, the village has yielded artefacts from the Neolithic to the Anglo Saxon periods, with the Roman finds including the exceptional number of eight stone-lined wells (see left), 26 burials, ‘vast’ amounts of pottery, including fine Samianware and 200 coins up to the reign of the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century. The work was led by Lee Elliott, head of project development at Trent and Peak Archaeology. News of the excavations was released by Tarmac in a press release, which says that finds also included Romano-British brooches, iron knives, pins, buckles, rings and lead weights as well as a ‘major number’ of animal bones. Pots were found in the well, which – as at Margidunum – contained timbers still carrying tool marks. Speaking to Roman Nottinghamshire, Lee said that the site had been known about two years ago but that the full extent of the village wasn’t recognised until the soil was stripped off.”It’s a multi-period site with evidence from the Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman and Anglo-Saxon periods,” he said. The core area of the village measures around 200m x 180m and what led archaeologists to believe that this was a village, rather than the kind of small farmstead found more often in the Trent Valley, was the number of stone wells and evidence of buildings as well as tracks, burials and metalwork finds. Altogether, the village is an exceptional find for the Trent Valley and Nottinghamshire, underlining how much more of the local Roman landscape remains to be discovered. Describing the Roman coins, Lee said they covered the 1st to 4th centuries, with most dated to the late 3rd and early 4th centuries. “A lot of them are going to have to be sent off for conservation because they have eroded in the acidic conditions,” he said. “There are a few silver ones from the 1st and 2nd centuries but most of them are bronzes from the late 3rd and early 4th centuries, which is what you would expect because of inflation at the time. The latest coins are from the House of Constantine.”
fan-tail brooch found at Langford Quarry
Reports on the excavations have been published in local media including The Newark Advertiser and the Nottingham Post. The Post report can be seen at http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Major-Roman-near-Newark/story-13359342-detail/story.html while the Newark Advertiser piece is at http://www.newarkadvertiser.co.uk/articles/news/Ancient-finds-at-quarry.
Anyone interested in gaining a fuller picture of the density of settlement in the Trent Valley during the Roman period is advised to seek out the book The Emerging Past: Air Photography and the Buried Landscape, by Rowan Whimster, which was published by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England in 1989. The book describes a 15km long zone of dense occupation from Newark to Normanton-on-Trent, most of which remains unexcavated. Trent and Peak Archaeology, incidentally, is no longer part of the University of Nottingham but is now part of the York Archaeological Trust. Please note that the images on this page are all copyright of Tarmac and Trent and Peak Archaeology and should not be reproduced without their permission.
globular jar recovered from one of the eight wells
Roman Nottinghamshire author Mark Patterson is one of 17 writers who contribute to a new anthology titled Maps, published by Five Leaves Publications and currently available post free for £7.99 (see link below). The book is described as “a quirky compendium of essays on maps, places and people, many by leading writers including Iain Sinclair and The Guardian‘s David McKie and Chris Arnot as well as writers from the London Review of Books, academic journals, a journalist from the BBC World Service and several biographers.” The Roman connection comes from Mark Patterson’s contribution, A Short Walk up Dere Street, which examines the convoluted cultural and mapping history of the eponymous Roman road, which runs from York to the Firth of Forth. Long associated with the military campaigns of Agricola in the 1st Century, Dere Street’s story has also been tied up with the history of British mapping efforts, an extraordinary 18th century hoax and much more. Maps is available from Impress http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/maps_ross_bradshaw_i022678.aspx
A review of Roman Nottinghamshire has appeared in the May/June 2011 edition of Local History Magazine:
An article about the book also appeared in Nottinghamshire’s weekly Chad newspaper as part of Bill Purdue’s regular books column. The text is reproduced below (the original article has colour pictures!):
Bill’s local book of the month
FOR many people the history of Nottinghamshire
goes back as far as the days of Robin Hood, but as Mark Patterson found out when he began research for his book Roman Nottinghamshire, published last year, our local history goes back much further than that.
Whilst our county was not the site of famous battles during Roman times, there is still much to discover about Roman
activity in the area.
Though there is only one visible sign of Roman occupation left in the county – which Mr Patterson calls “a bump in a farmer’s field next to the A46 Leicester to Lincoln road, the remains of several Roman villas have been discovered down the years, as well as forts, towns and even a bridge across the River Trent.
Some of the most notable villas are at Southwell, at Margidunum which was a “sprawling Roman town” near East Bridgford and at Mansfield Woodhouse.
The villa near Woodhouse was discovered
at the end of the 18th Century and included an intricate mosaic floor.
A small building was erected over the mosaic to protect it from the elements, but, by the early 19th Century, the floor had been vandalised and destroyed and the walls written over.
Fortunately a copy of the mosaic had been made and this is reproduced in the book.
Now nothing is visible above ground, but a model showing what the Mansfield Woodhouse villa would have looked like is in Mansfield Museum.
Mark Patterson is a freelance journalist
and is keen to emphasise that he is not an archaeologist, but his interest in the Roman period stems from the fact that he was born in County Durham and made many trips to Hadrian’s Wall during his childhood.
Roman Nottinghamshire is a very informative and entertaining read. It is published by Five Leaves Publications at £11.99 and can be obtained online at http://www.nottinghambooks.co.uk or http://www.fiveleaves.
co.uk .
You can also find out more about the book at https://romannottinghamshire.wordpress.com
Finally, Roman Nottinghamshire gets another few mentions in Nottingham’s LeftLion magazine thanks to Pippa Hennessy, who, when not studying for a BA degree in creative and professional writing at Nottingham University, works as a marketeer for the book’s publisher Five Leaves Publications (not Five Leaf, as Local History Magazine would have it). Pippa’s ‘Five Leaves Diary’ can be read in full at: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/the-five-leaves-diary/id/3864
A review of Roman Nottinghamshire was printed in the Nottingham Post newspaper on August 9, 2011. The review is the same as was printed in Nottinghamshire Today (see previous posts).
Those nice people at Nottingham’s free LeftLion magazine have published an interview about Roman Nottinghamshire in the Aug/Sep 2011 issue. The photograph, by the way, shows the author on Broxtowe Estate – a background chosen because of the Roman fort that was found under the estate in the 1930s. The article, by James Walker, is reproduced in two parts below and is now also online on the LeftLion website: http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/title/mark-patterson/id/3818
Remnants of painted Roman plaster immediately after their removal from the Southwell villa's cold bath during the original excavation in 1959. Photograph is copyright of the University of Nottingham Museum.
An update on the on-going saga regarding plans to build houses on top of the large Roman villa at Southwell has been published in the Newark Advertiser today. The report’s key news actually lies in the final paragraph: that the developer, Caunton Properties, intends to sell the land in question to an ‘Irish syndicate’ regardless of the outcome of Newark and Sherwood District Council’s decision on the planning application this year. The full news report can be read at: http://www.newarkadvertiser.co.uk/articles/news/Once-in-a-lifetime-chance-for-heritage
A positive review of Roman Nottinghamshire has been published in the August 2011 edition of Nottinghamshire Today. The magazine’s content is not on-line.
Figure recovered from the Epperstone villa, now in the University of Nottingham Museum
A former lecturer of mine at Nottingham Trent University’s Brackenhurst college near Southwell has been doing research into old field patterns and boundaries in the fields on and around the campus. His work had led him, in part, to material written by the late Philip Lyth, former Brackenhurst principal and author of A History of Nottinghamshire Farming (1989), whose research into how Southwell’s Anglo Saxon boundaries offered clues to the area’s long obscured Roman roads features prominently in Roman Nottinghamshire (see page 170). In brief, Lyth thought that some of the boundaries preserved certain Roman routes including a road from Ad Pontem on the Trent to the hill-top fort at Osmanthorpe, and a track from the villas near Thurgarton to Southwell. My former lecturer told me he thought that one of the old Roman tracks had been found on Brackenhurst’s land. And, he asked, had I seen the website about Thurgarton? I hadn’t, but when I did I had one of those ‘really-wish-I’d-seen-this-before’ moments since the Roman page on the Thurgarton village website http://www.thurgartonhistory.co.uk/2011/03/roman-thurgarton/ presents hitherto little seen information – and photographs – that I could have done knowing about when writing the section on Thurgarton in the villa chapter of Roman Nottinghamshire. On Ordnance Survey map Explorer 260 the site of a Roman building is located near Thurgarton Beck, about mid-way between Thurgarton and Epperstone villages. It is an unassuming but quietly lovely place to walk to in good weather, far from any main roads and with the beck gurgling away nicely in the background. And when you consider that the area’s thick red clay soils were farmed by Romano-Britons over 1600 years ago, the landscape view becomes imbued with an additional depth of meaning. Encouraging people to get out to see places like this was one reason for writing the book.
Thurgarton beck near the Thurgarton villa site. The objects in the beck are the remains of an old sheepwash
In fact, there were at least two neighbouring Roman buildings here – one being a corridor-type villa with a hypocaust central heating system, the other also a high status building with painted plasterwork, hypocaust, bath suite and evidence of various alterations and extensions. The buildings were excavated in the 1950s and 60s, the first being dubbed the ‘the Thurgarton villa’ because it is in Thurgarton parish while the other is called ‘the Epperstone villa’ because it falls within the boundaries of Epperstone parish. The problem in writing about these was that the published excavation reports were scrappy, consisting only of brief notes in contemporaneous copies of the East Midlands Archaeological Bulletin. I always thought I’d missed a book or journal I should have known about. But, upon reading the Thurgarton website, it seems I didn’t miss anything in print: website author Ellis Morgan confirms that no formal excavation reports were published and that exacavation diaries, notes and photographs have in fact been kept at Boots Archives. The Thurgarton website’s other news is that a third villa may have been located 500m to the north of the Epperstone villa. There is also an old aerial photograph which purports to show a Roman road and minor track in the area. This isn’t the first time that additional material has come to light since Roman Nottinghamshire was published. In the past few weeks alone I’ve met people who’ve had personal involvement with excavations at Margidunum, Segelocum and Norton Disney. Derrick Riley, the pioneering air photographer who discovered several important sites in Nottinghamshire, was a name on paper only until a woman in the audience at a recent talk casually told me later that she had know Derrick very well and that he’d entrusted a pile of his notes to her. All of these stories will be followed up. Whether they appear here or in a possible second edition of the book is undecided. At present, I favour both.
Looking down onto the site of the Thurgarton villa, near the coppice to the right
hoardings around the villa site in Southwell
Author Mark Patterson will be giving an illustrated talk on Roman Nottinghamshire at Southwell Library on September 22, 2011. The event starts at 7pm. Tickets cost £3.00 and can purchased from the library, in King Street, NG24 0EH, by ringing 01636 812148 or by emailing southwell.library@nottscc.gov.uk. Meanwhile, the book Roman Nottinghamshire has been selling so well that it is now into its second print run.
Roman Nottinghamshire 
