The Brands Hill settlement is a native (Romano-British) farmstead complex situated on the north-east slope of Brands Hill in the Cheviot fringes of north Northumberland/Scottish Borders, comprising enclosed habitation, associated field plots and a linking trackway. Sites of this character in the region were typically occupied from the later pre-Roman Iron Age through the Roman period (roughly 1st–4th centuries AD), representing the persistence of indigenous pastoral-arable farming under Roman rule north of Hadrian's Wall.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site lies in the zone between Hadrian's Wall and the Antonine frontier, an area of dispersed native settlement that supplied agricultural produce (and possibly recruits) to the Roman military economy without ever being formally urbanised. Its surviving field system and trackway make it a useful component of the wider landscape of Cheviot-edge farms documented by aerial survey, where the integration of settlement, enclosure and routeway can still be read on the ground.
The site is known principally from earthwork and aerial survey rather than excavation, with visible enclosure banks, conjoined small rectilinear fields, and a hollow-way or trackway linking the settlement to its cultivated ground; no significant excavated assemblage is recorded for this specific site. Interpretation therefore rests on morphological parallels with excavated Cheviot farmsteads such as those on Dod Law and at
The Brands Hill settlement is a native (Romano-British) farmstead complex situated on the north-east slope of Brands Hill in the Cheviot fringes of north Northumberland/Scottish Borders, comprising enclosed habitation, associated field plots and a linking trackway. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Roman period native settlement and associated field system and trackway on north east slope of Brands Hill 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 Roman period native settlement and medieval shieling on east slopes of Brands Hill, 1100m south east of Carey Burn Bridge (0.4 km), Prehistoric cairnfield and unenclosed settlement, Romano-British village and field system and medieval field system on north east slopes of Brands Hill (0.6 km), Roman period native scooped enclosure, 930m north east of Langlee (0.7 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 Roman period native settlement and associated field system and trackway on north east slope of Brands Hill