Mere End Down lies on the chalk downland of the Marlborough Downs in north Wiltshire, where extensive earthwork remains of a Romano-British field system survive as low banks (lynchets) and trackways. The system was likely in use from the later Iron Age through the Roman period (roughly 1st–4th centuries AD), forming part of the agrarian landscape exploited from nearby farmsteads and villas in the upper Kennet valley.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
It represents the kind of organised arable landscape that underpinned the rural economy of Roman Britain on the Wessex chalk, supplying grain to local markets and possibly to the small town at Cunetio (Mildenhall) a few kilometres to the south. Such "Celtic field" systems on the Marlborough Downs are among the best-preserved in southern Britain, demonstrating continuity of cultivation across the conquest.
The site is known primarily through aerial photography and earthwork survey rather than excavation, with rectilinear plots, lynchets, and linear boundaries visible on the downland surface; no detailed published excavation report is recorded for Mere End Down itself. Associated surface finds typical of such systems in the region include Romano-British coarse pottery scatters indicating manuring of fields from nearby settlements.
Mere End Down lies on the chalk downland of the Marlborough Downs in north Wiltshire, where extensive earthwork remains of a Romano-British field system survive as low banks (lynchets) and trackways. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Mere End Down Romano-British field system 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 Maddle Farm (5.8 km), Roman villa E of Cornhill Farm (6.3 km), Maddle Farm Roman settlement (6.6 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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