The Martin Down enclosure, lying just east of Bokerley Dyke on the Hampshire/Dorset border, is a small rectilinear earthwork of Late Bronze Age origin (c. 1000–700 BC) that saw continued or renewed use into the Romano-British period. It is a modest banked and ditched enclosure on chalk downland, broadly square in plan and associated with surrounding "Celtic" field systems, representing a farmstead or stock enclosure rather than a defended site.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site sits within one of the most intensively farmed prehistoric and Romano-British landscapes on the Wessex chalk, immediately adjacent to the later boundary work of Bokerley Dyke, which would in the late Roman period become a significant frontier earthwork dividing the Cranborne Chase estate from territory to the east. Its value lies in demonstrating long-term continuity of low-status agrarian settlement in this border zone.
Pitt-Rivers investigated the enclosure in the late 19th century, recovering Late Bronze Age pottery, loomweights, and domestic debris that helped define the "Deverel-Rimbury" tradition; Romano-British surface finds and field-system relationships have been recorded by later survey (notably by the RCHME work on Bokerley Dyke and the Martin Down complex), but no large-scale modern excavation of the Roman phase has been published.
The Martin Down enclosure, lying just east of Bokerley Dyke on the Hampshire/Dorset border, is a small rectilinear earthwork of Late Bronze Age origin (c. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Bronze Age and Romano-British enclosure on Martin Down, east of Bokerley Junction is classified as a Roman site — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Roman road along the south side of Vernditch Chase: part of the Roman road between Sorviodunum (Old Sarum) and Vindocladia (Badbury) (0.7 km), Roman road north east of Vernditch Chase: part of the Roman road between Sorviodunum (Old Sarum) and Vindocladia (Badbury) (1.9 km), Two linear earthworks, two barrows and Iron Age and Romano-British settlements on Tidpit Common Down (3.1 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Bronze Age and Romano-British enclosure on Martin Down, east of Bokerley Junction