The Romano-British farmstead at Fitz Woods lies on the western Cumbrian coastal plain, a few kilometres inland from the Solway shore between the Roman forts at Maryport (Alauna) and Beckfoot (Bibra). It is one of a dense scatter of small native enclosed settlements in this hinterland, most likely occupied between the later 1st and 4th centuries AD, comprising one or more roundhouses within a ditched or banked enclosure of the type typical for the region.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Its importance lies less in any individual prominence than in its place within the rural population that supplied the Cumbrian coastal frontier garrisons — farmsteads such as this would have produced grain, livestock and labour for the forts and milefortlets of the western extension of Hadrian's Wall system.
Little has been published from direct excavation at Fitz Woods specifically; the site is known principally from aerial photography and landscape survey identifying enclosure cropmarks, in line with the wider work of the Solway Plain and North-West Wetlands surveys. No detailed finds assemblage is recorded in the public literature for this particular farmstead.
The Romano-British farmstead at Fitz Woods lies on the western Cumbrian coastal plain, a few kilometres inland from the Solway shore between the Roman forts at Maryport (Alauna) and Beckfoot (Bibra). It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Romano-British farmstead in Fitz Woods 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 Derventio (1 km), Romano-British settlement and trackway at Ewanrigg (8.8 km), Rise How tower 25a, part of the Roman frontier defences along the Cumbrian coast including remains of prehistoric burial mound and early medieval kiln (9.4 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 Romano-British farmstead in Fitz Woods