Nornour is a small island in the Isles of Scilly that preserves a remarkable sequence of occupation from the Bronze Age through the Roman period. A cluster of stone-walled roundhouses, originally built as a domestic settlement in the later 2nd millennium BC and reoccupied/modified into the Iron Age, was repurposed in the Roman period (roughly 1st–4th centuries AD) as a shrine, probably to a female deity associated with the sea.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Nornour is one of the very few identifiable Romano-British religious sites in the far southwest and the only known shrine in the Isles of Scilly, suggesting the islands lay on a recognised seaway where sailors made votive offerings — possibly a navigational waypoint between Britain, Armorica, and the Atlantic trade routes.
Excavations by Dudley in the 1960s–70s recovered an exceptional votive assemblage from within and around the reused hut structures, including over 300 Roman brooches (one of the largest brooch deposits from Britain), coins ranging from the 1st to 4th centuries, finger rings, glass beads, and pipeclay figurines including Venus types. The character of the finds — predominantly personal ornaments and female-associated figurines — underpins the interpretation as a shrine rather than a continuing domestic settlement, though the original prehistoric houses are what survive structurally.
Nornour is a small island in the Isles of Scilly that preserves a remarkable sequence of occupation from the Bronze Age through the Roman period. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Prehistoric settlement and Romano-British shrine on Nornour 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 Prehistoric cairn group, cists and prehistoric to Roman field system and settlement on Little Arthur, St Martin's (1 km), Prehistoric to Romano-British ritual, funerary and settlement remains on Par Beach, St Martin's (1.2 km), Prehistoric settlement, Romano-British cist cemetery and Civil War battery in northern Toll's Porth, St Mary's (4.3 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 Prehistoric settlement and Romano-British shrine on Nornour