Higher Town on St Agnes, the southernmost inhabited island of the Isles of Scilly, preserves a palimpsest of prehistoric to Romano-British activity, with stone-walled field boundaries, hut circles and clearance cairns reflecting continuous small-scale agricultural occupation from at least the later Bronze Age through to the early centuries AD. The settlement was a dispersed farming community working small irregular plots on the granite uplands, characteristic of Scillonian land use where Iron Age and Romano-British populations adapted earlier prehistoric field patterns rather than replacing them.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site lies at the extreme south-western edge of the Roman-period world and forms part of the wider Scillonian landscape that included the ritual focus at Nornour, where substantial Roman finds suggest the islands were known to traders and possibly pilgrims navigating the Atlantic seaways. Higher Town itself was not a Roman site in any administrative sense but reflects how indigenous communities on the periphery maintained traditional lifeways while engaging marginally with broader networks.
Survey work (notably by the Cornwall Archaeological Unit and as part of the Isles of Scilly Historic Environment Research Framework) has recorded field walls, lynchets, hut foundations and middens at Higher Town, but no major modern excavation has been published specifically for this settlement, and dating relies largely on morphological comparison with better-investig
Higher Town on St Agnes, the southernmost inhabited island of the Isles of Scilly, preserves a palimpsest of prehistoric to Romano-British activity, with stone-walled field boundaries, hut circles and clearance cairns reflecting continuous small-scale agricultural occupation from at least the later Bronze Age through to the early centuries AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Prehistoric to Romano-British field system and settlement at Higher Town, St Agnes 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 Iron Age to Romano-British fogou on northern Peninnis Head, 170m south of Carn Gwavel Farm, St Mary's (3.2 km), Prehistoric settlement, Romano-British cist cemetery and Civil War battery in northern Toll's Porth, St Mary's (4.7 km), Prehistoric field system and Romano-British cist in Green Bay, Bryher (6.2 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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