30/08/2023
Well worth a visit if your visiting West Penrith …..
Chysauster is one of the best-preserved ancient villages in Britain. A close-knit community lived and worked here between the late 1st century and the end of the 3rd century AD, a time when much of Britain was under Roman rule. The villagers lived in stone-walled houses, each with a number of rooms arranged round a courtyard – a unique house layout found only in late Iron Age and Romano-British settlements in western Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly.
LIFE IN THE VILLAGE
Chysauster was surrounded by fields, where the inhabitants grazed their flocks of sheep and grew cereal crops. The field boundaries have survived for 2,000 years as low walls and earthworks.
The village is laid out on top of a series of field lynchets, probably dating to the late Iron Age. Lynchets are ridges created by the build-up of soil along the lower boundary of a field when it is ploughed. These long fields were divided into smaller plots, creating the characteristic brick-shaped fields of this period.
Closer to home, people probably used their garden plots to grow vegetables and keep pigs. The villagers may have been involved in tin-streaming, using stream water to separate tin ore from sediments. The tin may have been exchanged or exported, along with woollen cloth and agricultural produce.
It is likely that a network of trusted chiefs organised trade in tin and agricultural produce from a series of local centres, including defended hillforts and coastal cliff castles. The larger courtyard house settlements often seem to be found near one of these small hillforts – Chysauster lies less than a mile west of the impressive hillfort of Castle-an-Dinas.
Read more here: https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/chysauster-ancient-village/history/
Picture credit: Peter Urmston)
