ridge and furrow
In some parts of England, it is possible to see the remains of ridge and furrow ploughing, however mostly it has been destroyed by more recent ploughing.
The excavations at Eastern Green, south of the A45, Coventry, were carried out by L – P : Archaeology (now part of MOLA) on behalf of Orion Heritage and Hallam Land Management. You can read more about the site and the progress of the excavations through these weekly update blogs.
In the last Eastern Green blog post we looked at the footprint of the Roman farmstead at Eastern Green and how it compared to some similar buildings from the same period. In this week’s blog we will explore how the farm building was constructed, and what happened in the following c.1600+ years to leave only traces of the building’s foundations.
Where are the Roman buildings at Eastern Green?
Before the Romans, domestic buildings in Britain were typically roundhouses. The Romans introduced rectangular farmhouses, such as the one at Eastern Green. Many of these were added to from the 2nd century onwards to make them into increasingly luxurious villas. However, as we discussed in last week’s blog, this did not happen at Eastern Green, and a big question for the archaeologists to answer now is “why did it remain a small farm?”
Another question the archaeologists have is: why there is so little of the building remaining today? To answer this question it is important to know how Roman buildings were constructed, and about the activity which has taken place on the site since the end of the Roman period:
To begin building your Roman style farmhouse, you would first dig foundation trenches. At Eastern Green these trenches appear to have been relatively shallow – this may have been because the bedrock is quite high. These trenches were then filled with rubble.
At Eastern Green it appears that the ground level was much higher during the Roman period than it is today. After removing the topsoil, we very quickly began to expose the foundations - in fact, what we found is only a small remnant of the original depth of the foundations! We have excavated around the rubble, but in reality, these would have been at the bottom of the foundation trench.
Because Roman buildings were constructed to a standardised template, we can imagine how the walls would have looked, even though we do not have any left standing. The walls would have been constructed from stone or brick with courses of tile. This method of building can be seen today in the ruins of Verulamium at St Albans (below).
Although much of the stone from the walls at Eastern Green would have been taken away and reused, we do have material from both the roof and floors. We believe that the building began with a roof constructed from classic Roman materials: ceramic tegula and imbrex. At some point this roof was replaced with stone tiles, possibly from Leicestershire. Whilst other farms grew into villa estates, the owners of this farm seem to have remained in their small house, working the land, until the Romans left Britain.
At some point after the building was abandoned and the stone walls dismantled to be reused in other buildings, the site was fully converted to agricultural use.
During the medieval period and into the early modern, much of the agricultural land in England was farmed in an open field system. The land was ploughed in long narrow strips, creating raised ridges of soil with deep furrows on either side, now referred to as “ridge & furrow”. At Eastern Green, this method of ploughing would have badly damaged the remains of Roman walls and floors, which lay below the surface. Roman pottery and tile would have been pushed into the ridges of farm soil, spreading it out across the field.
At Eastern Green the medieval ridge and furrow, along with much of the remaining Roman wall foundations, has been lost due to deep ploughing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The introduction of metal plough blades, the invention of steam ploughs, and eventually tractors, were very destructive to the underlying archaeology.
This intensive ploughing also brought a large amount of pottery sherds and ceramic building material into the topsoil. Although ploughing has destroyed a large amount of the archaeological remains at Eastern Green, ironically it meant that when archaeological fieldwalking was carried out, these tiles and pieces of pot were found - the first evidence of Roman habitation.