Welsh Journals

EXCAVATIONS AT CAERSWS, 1968 C. M. DANIELS, M.A., F.S.A., G. D. B. JONES, M.A., D.PHIL., F.S.A., W. G. PUTNAM, B.A. F.S.A. Rescue excavations financed by the Ministry of Public Building and Works and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne formed the third and final season of excavation at Caersws during Easter, 1968. The area concerned consisted of the dismantled railway sidings of Caersws station which are scheduled for conversion into a builders' yard. It forms the most extensive piece of land available for examination in the large Roman vicus known to underly the modern village. The ballast dumped over the goods sidings in the 19th century during the construction of the Cambrian Railway was first stripped experimen- tally by mechanical means in 1967, thus allowing the northern part of the site to be sampled to some extent.1 Following this promising beginning, in 1968 it was planned to examine the portion of the goods sidings in detail, thanks to the access generously granted by British Railways, Midland Region. The results produced a complex picture of the development of a vicus, not as yet paralleled anywhere in Wales. The area examined was intensively occupied by timber buildings from the establishment of the fort in circa A.D. 75 until at least the latter half of the third century. Buildings jostled one another in competition for the most advantageous position close to the porta praetoria of the fort and the access road to the fort bath-house, which is known to underly the present goods shed on the western side of the railway line (Fig. 1).2 Pressure of space explains the rapidity with which building followed building on the same site, the average age of any one of which being as little as fifteen years in the early stages of the vicus' existence. This was demonstrated in the area stripped down to natural subsoil, where linked samian and coin evidence showed that three successive buildings had occupied the same position as early as the beginning of the Hadrianic period. Traces of each structure appeared in the form of clay-cut construction trenches from ten to twelve inches wide, which were relatively easy to identify. From the middle of the second century the Roman ground level was raised by the addition of massive gravel dumps (to counter the 1 Mont. Coll., vol. 60, (1967-8), p. 65. Arch. Camb. XII n.s. (=Arch. Camb. XXXIII (1857)), 155ff and The Roman Frontier in Wales (2nd ed.), (1969), p. 169.