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FISHERWICK

A NEW picture of the Iron Age is emerging. Recent studies, both along the Thames in Oxfordshire (CA 63) and along the Great Ouse in Bedfordshire (CA 66) revealed Iron Age farms which flourished in the Middle Iron Age but which either abandoned or moved their position during the Later Iron Age: the big change came not with the advent of Rome, but in the final stages of the Iron Age. How far is this pattern repeated in other parts of the country? The recent excavations at Fisherwick in the Tame Valley suggested that, here too, a similar picture prevailed.

The site at Fisherwick lies two miles north of Tamworth on the banks of the River Tame, shortly before it joins the River Trent. Air photography, first by Professor St. Joseph and later by Jim Pickering, revealed extensive traces of ancient fields, and as gravel quarrying threatened to destroy those at Fisherwick, a series of excavations was carried out by Christopher Smith, who was at the time a research student at Nottingham University; the results have been reported in BAR 61.

The air photographs revealed three enclosures at Fisherwick, strung out along the river bank. The main occupation was in the middle enclosure, which revealed two main phases of settlement. In the first phase, it was an open settlement consisting of three houses of the ring groove type in which the uprights for the walls were set is a shallow "ring groove". The evidence for these houses was scanty. Traces of one were found underlying the later house, while the edge of the second was revealed in excavating the entrance to the later enclosure, while

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Fisherwick; an Iron Age landscape. The gravel terrace was divided into ditched and hedged fields for both arable and pasture. To the west, beyond a major boundary, lay rough pasture and secondary woodland, while to the east open meadows lay along the riverside.

a third was visible on air photographs.

This unenclosed phase was followed by the construction of a massive enclosure where a ditch 2 metres deep was dug out to form a farmyard a quarter of a hectare in extent. This enclosure ditch went down below the water level and thus the lower levels were waterlogged and preserved masses of wood and other environmental evidence that was thoroughly analysed. There is only a single house from this phase, but it was of the ring ditch type. These ring ditches are usually rather mysterious as normally no traces of the house survive, but here there was evidence to suggest that it had mud walls, for substantial pieces of mud