Chapperton Down lies on the chalk downland of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, within what is now the Salisbury Plain Training Area. It preserves an extensive multi-period landscape of later prehistoric and Romano-British settlement, including small enclosed farmsteads, field systems ("Celtic fields") and trackways, with Romano-British occupation broadly spanning the 1st to 4th centuries AD overlying and reusing Iron Age features.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is part of the remarkably well-preserved network of low-status rural settlements across Salisbury Plain — almost certainly part of an imperial estate (saltus) or large landholding supplying grain and livestock — that survives because the chalk uplands escaped later medieval and modern ploughing. Chapperton Down is one of several Plain settlements (alongside Charlton Down, Compton Down and Knook Down) that together provide one of Britain's best preserved Romano-British agrarian landscapes.
The settlement is known principally through earthwork survey, aerial photography and field-walking (notably the Wessex Archaeology and English Heritage/MoD-funded Salisbury Plain Training Area surveys of the 1990s–2000s), which recorded ditched enclosures, hut platforms and coaxial field systems together with surface scatters of Romano-British pottery and tile. No major excavation has been published for Chapperton Down itself, so artefactual det
Chapperton Down lies on the chalk downland of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, within what is now the Salisbury Plain Training Area. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Chapperton Down Prehistoric and Romano-British Landscape 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 Enclosure and Romano-British settlement north-west of Imber (5.2 km), Knook Castle hillfort and associated prehistoric and Romano-British landscape (5.5 km), Orcheston Down Romano-British landscape (6.1 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 Chapperton Down Prehistoric and Romano-British Landscape