An Iron Age Estate in Steventon?
During the pandemic we have been blessed by our access to the beautiful countryside around the village and the chance to walk the many footpaths in the vicinity
A favourite for walkers, cyclists and horse riders is the track, lined on one side by Lombardy poplars, which leads southward from the trig point on Steventon Hill.
A Norman boundary line
The usual focus of attention here is watching the lambs and all their playful antics. What you might not know is that this track also marks the boundary of the Lord’s manorial farmland in Norman times, known as the demesne (pronounced domain). The land to the east was part of the open fields farmed by the villeins; the land to the west sloping down to Hill Farm and including the Truck Festival site, belonged to the King and was farmed by the less free peasants known as bordars, under the supervision of the reeve. In fact, there is a hint in the Saxon charter of 964 that this land had already been separated out from the surrounding fields and belonged to an unidentified Ealderman.
The demesne can still be traced
If you look at a 1:25000 Ordnance Survey map, the bounds of the demesne can still be traced in field boundaries and tracks. They make an almost perfect half circle stretching from the railway line in the north and sweeping around to Quab Hill in the south. Cutting across from one end of the semi-circle to the other is the parish boundary separating Steventon and East Hendred. It makes a sort of half-moon shape. It’s almost as if the boundary of the demesne was once a complete circle only to be cut in half at some later point by the imposition of the parish boundary. This might not be far from the truth.
Glanville Jones
Research in the 1970s, pioneered by the historical geographer Glanville Jones, identified many estates that could possibly be traced back to Iron Age and Roman times. If we use the Ordnance Survey map and our imaginations to extend the circle across the fields to the west, it takes in parts of East Hanney, East and West Hendred. Now draw a series of diameter lines across the circle to find its approximate centre. We could speculate that if this circle does represent an ancient estate of some kind, then it would be at this central point that the community that farmed and owned it would be located. That central point is just south of the recently built solar park backing onto the railway, in fact quite close to Coldharbour, which is the subject of another display in this exhibition.
A long forgotten community?
Is there any evidence for a now long forgotten community existing in this corner of our parish, the boundary of their lands coinciding in part with the later medieval demesne, which in turn can still be traced in the modern landscape? It seems quite a long shot! At least it did until 2013. In this year, an archaeological geophysical survey was conducted by the Bartlett-Clark Consultancy in advance of the construction of the solar park.
Ditched enclosures
To the south of the park, at the very centre of our speculative circle, the Bartlett-Clark survey detected a complex pattern of superimposed curving and rectilinear ditched enclosures of a kind commonly seen at late prehistoric or Romano-British settlement sites... also smaller circles, which are of suitable dimensions to represent hut circles c. 10 to 14 metres diameter.
.... Coincidence?
We will probably never know. But if we let our imaginations build on our logic, we can envisage a continuity of settlement extending not only over a thousand years to when the name Steventon was first recorded, but a further thousand years before that too.
