Castle Folds is a small defended settlement perched on a limestone pavement outcrop on Great Asby Scar, Cumbria, at around 380m OD. The site comprises a roughly oval drystone enclosure wall enclosing a cluster of stone-founded hut circles, probably occupied during the later Romano-British period (broadly 2nd–4th centuries AD), with subsequent reuse of the structures as shielings (seasonal upland herding shelters) in the medieval period.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The settlement is part of a distinctive group of upland native farmsteads in the central Pennines/Cumbrian limestone uplands that flourished under Roman rule but lay outside the formal military and civilian infrastructure, representing indigenous pastoralist communities whose livelihoods likely intersected with the supply economy of nearby forts such as Brougham, Brough and Kirkby Thore. Its strong defensive walling on a naturally defensible crag is unusual for the period and makes it one of the more conspicuous prehistoric/Romano-British settlement sites on Asby Scar.
The site is known principally from surface survey rather than modern excavation: the perimeter wall, an entrance on the south, and the foundations of around twenty hut circles within are visible, with later, smaller rectangular shieling huts overlying or inserted into the earlier circ
Castle Folds is a small defended settlement perched on a limestone pavement outcrop on Great Asby Scar, Cumbria, at around 380m OD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Castle Folds Romano-British defended stone hut circle settlement and medieval shieling is classified as a Roman settlement — 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 Romano-British enclosed hut circle settlement 350m WNW of Maisongill (2.8 km), Romano-British settlement and Romano-British farmstead north-east and east of Gilts (3.3 km), Ravens Gill Romano-British farmstead (3.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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