The paved ford at Iden Green, near Benenden in the Weald of Kent, carried a Roman road across a small watercourse (a tributary of the Hexden Channel/River Rother system). It formed part of one of the routes linking the Wealden iron-working district with the road network heading north toward Rochester and the Medway, and was likely in use from the later 1st through the 3rd centuries AD, the main period of Wealden iron exploitation.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The ford is significant as a tangible engineering survival on a road serving the imperial iron industry of the eastern Weald, an economically important extractive zone whose output may have supplied the Classis Britannica. Such surviving paved crossings are rare in Britain, where most river-crossings are inferred rather than physically attested.
The site is known principally from observation and recording by Ivan Margary, who traced the road across the Weald in the 1940s–60s and noted the surviving stone paving of the ford in situ. No major excavation has been published, and finds are limited; the feature is recorded chiefly as an alignment indicator and a rare instance of preserved Roman road furniture.
The paved ford at Iden Green, near Benenden in the Weald of Kent, carried a Roman road across a small watercourse (a tributary of the Hexden Channel/River Rother system). It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Paved ford crossing the line of the Roman road at Iden Green 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 Little Farningham Roman iron production site (3 km), Romano-British site S of Bodiam Bridge (7.3 km), Bardown Roman industrial site (14 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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