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Iron Age to Early Modern Activity and Palaeochannels at Magor Pill, Gwent: An Exercise in Lowland Coastal-Zone Geoarchaeology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2011

J. R. L. Allen  and
S. J. Rippon
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Extract

A geological and geomorphological survey, combined with sedimentological results, has provided a detailed, trans-zonal famework in which to examine the significance of an eclectic variety of artefactual and documentary evidence relating to prolonged human activity on the tidal stream known as Magor Pill.

The shoreline, underlain by estuarine silts and peats of the Flandrian Wentlooge Formation, has retreated by a minimum of some 800m since Iron Age-Roman times, leaving exposed on the modern foreshore the earlier but silted-up courses of Magor Pill. As the coast retreated, fishing stakes, one a double row from the tenth century, were set up on the widening lower foreshore. The palaeochannel deposits yielded small amounts of stratified Iron Age, Romano-British, medieval and early modern occupation debris, together with woven baskets and hurdles related to the early modern and probably also medieval fishing activities in the area. One of the palaeochannels contained the wreck of a medieval, clinker-built boat carrying high-grade iron ores. By far the largest amounts of occupation debris, however, were transposed and mixed into semi-mobile foreshore gravels. This material demonstrates that there was a thriving Romano-British settlement at Magor Pill, apparently in sea connection with the southern shores of the Bristol Channel. From the eleventh to the early fourteenth century, there existed a port to which much pottery from various English sources was imported. In early modern times at Magor Pill, a vigorous outward trade in store cattle to west and south-west England was balanced by pottery imports chiefly from Devon and Somerset. Coastal erosion not only destroyed the primary evidence for these activities, and the wetland landscapes in which they occurred, but also forced, probably in late medieval times, the repositioning inland of the (?) Romano-British sea defences of the area. As part of the general process of reorganizing the defences and drainage of the wetland, the seabanks along Magor Pill and its tributaries were shortened in a number of stages and the outfalls moved further seaward.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Antiquaries Journal , Volume 77 , March 1997 , pp. 327 - 370
Copyright
Copyright © The Society of Antiquaries of London 1997

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