Page Text

UPFRONT News

Evidence for Columban monastery on Iona

A geophysical survey carried out on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland (NTS), with grant support from Historic Scotland, shows that the long-sought early-Christian monastery built by the 6th-century missionary Saint Columba on the Isle of Iona probably lies beneath the restored 12th-century Benedictine Abbey, which forms the focus of spiritual life on the island today.

Using a range of techniques, including resistivity, magnetometry and groundpenetrating radar to provide images both horizontally and vertically through the earth, a team from Orkney College, led by Dr Sue Ovenden, has mapped a succession of enclosure ditches and banks in the fields around Iona’s Medieval abbey that form a large rectangle about 400m long by 200m wide. On the assumption that this enclosure surrounded the Columban monastery, and that it was centrally located within the enclosure, then it looks as if the later Medieval monastic complex sits on top of its early Medieval predecessor.

One of the ditches in the survey was excavated in the late 1970s by John Barber. Wood-turning debris and leather-working scraps from the ditch gave radiocarbon dates in the 7th to 8th centuries AD. ‘The survey has been an outstanding success,’ said NTS archaeologist Derek Alexander. ‘For the first time we can easily follow the outline of the ditches that surround both the early monastic site and the later Abbey’.

Another major discovery has been the rectilinear ditched enclosure in the field to the south of the Abbey and just to the south east of the ruins of St Mary’s Chapel, defining an area 44m long by 30m wide. Derek Alexander suggests that this might represent a cemetery for the monks of Iona, with the famous Reilig Odhrain, burial place of Scotland’s early Medieval kings, located further to the west, being reserved for high-status individuals.

The NTS will now work with Historic Scotland to draw up an archaeological research strategy to determine how best to answer the questions that this survey and previous work at Iona has thrown up.

ABOVE AND BELOW Geophysical survey under way with (TOP) the Abbey in the background.

les a l Monume n ts of W

i storica

HAncient an d the on ission l Comm

: Roya

PHOTO

The most north-westerly Roman villa in Wales for the dating the site and were all found lying on or near late clay floor surfaces underneath the collapsed slate roof.

underneath the collapsed slate roof.

The Abermagwr villa was heavily robbed for its building stone, probably

The Abermagwr villa was heavily robbed for its building stone, probably

Trial trenching established that the building has a ‘winged corridor’ plan and was fronted by a cobbled yard. It had walls of local stone built on cobble foundations, glazed windows and a roof of local slate, cut to form a highly decorative roof of pentagonal shapes, common amongst villas in south-west England and the Isle of Wight.

Archaeologists from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) have confirmed that the villa-like structure identified in aerial photographs of the landscape around Aberystwyth (CA 240) is a small Roman villa, the first such structure to be found in the north and west of Wales.

of Wales (RCAHMW) have confirmed that the villa-like

A piece of roof slate from the villa.

in the Medieval period. Only the local place-name element in the Medieval period. Only the local place-name element magwr, meaning

‘ruined homestead’, preserved the memory of a building here.

‘ruined homestead’, preserved the memory of a building here.

Driver, of the RCAHMW, said: ‘This was an imposing Romano-British building

Excavation co-director Toby Driver, of the RCAHMW, said: ‘This was an imposing Romano-British building in the heart of mid-Wales, where no Roman villas were previously known. The nearby Roman fort at Trawscoed was abandoned by AD 130, yet here we have a later Roman building where the owners were importing pottery, using coinage, and insisting on decorative slate roofing akin to the largest Roman villas in England.

Finds from the site indicate occupation in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries AD. They include kitchen pottery in Black Burnished ware, imported from Dorset, and fine ware bowls from Oxfordshire. Three coins of Constantine I, minted in the first quarter of the 4th century AD, were crucial

The discovery raises significant new questions about the regional economy and society in late Roman Wales, and raises the possibility of future villa discoveries in the surrounding countryside’.

10

current archaeology | www.archaeology.co.uk

October 2010 |