ARCHAEOLOGIA CAMBRENSIS Cylchgrawn Cymdeithas Hynafiaethau Cyrmu The Journal of the Cambrian Archaeological Association. VOL. 171 (2022)

The course of the Roman road running west from Carmarthen is described. Earthworks and cropmarks define the road, which can be traced for 38km to Wiston, in Pembrokeshire. The destination (or destinations) of the road is unknown. Also described is an excavation of the road undertaken during the construction of the Whitland bypass. As the road here crossed a small peat bog timber-lined drains were constructed prior to formation of the road surface. Two clear phases of road surface were present. Analyses of pollen, beetles and plant remains showed that the road had been constructed through a predominately grassland environment. It is likely that the road was built during the military campaigns of Frontinus, AD 73/4‒77/8, and that it continued in use following the military conquest of the area and the withdrawal of troops in the early second century AD.

King John granted the Shropshire castle of Ellesmere and all its appurtenances to Llywelyn ab Iorwerth of Gwynedd in 1205 as a gift on his marriage to the king’s daughter Joan. This article examines for the first time the chequered history and political significance of a charter issued by Joan, styling herself ‘Lady of Wales’, conferring borough status upon Ellesmere, probably in 1230‒31. It enables us to identify Ellesmere as her place of confinement after she was banished from the court in Gwynedd, following an alleged affair with William de Braose, lord of Brecon.

King Edgar the Peaceable’s parade along the river Dee in AD 973 highlighted not only the significance of royal and comital power at Cheshire’s main seat at Chester, but also, it is interpreted here, at the Anglo-Saxon royal vill of Farndon in Cheshire, of which Aldford township formed a fundamental secular component. By focusing on a wider geo-political context, the former site of a late Anglo-Saxon royal palace is suggested based on fresh evidence. In turn, it is demonstrated that Aldford Castle was unlikely to have been built over the former regal palace site, as has been asserted in the past, but instead over an Anglo-Saxon thegnly site of particular strategic and commercial importance. The paper concludes that the seemingly humble earthworks of Aldford Castle that remain in the landscape today, are in fact symbolic of a continuation of significant regal and comital power within the more comprehensive context of the entire royal vill at Farndon from at least the tenth century. Ultimately, the paper promotes a wider temporal and spatial research methodology, to help explain the siting of castles generally.

Building remains emerging out of sand dunes at the deserted medieval settlement at St Ishmael on the Towy estuary, Carmarthenshire, first noted in the late nineteenth century, were recorded intermittently between 2010 and 2018. A linear arrangement of at least eight, rectangular structures with stone footings are known, lying along the foreshore over a distance of c. 300m, to the south of the medieval church dedicated to St Ishmael. The building types and form of settlement cannot be paralleled in the region. Occupation between the twelfth to fifteenth centuries is indicated by a small ceramic assemblage. Associated plant, animal and fish remains indicate domestic occupation. The fortunes of the settlement were likely to have been linked with fisheries in the estuary. These and the settlement were abandoned in the fifteenth/early sixteenth century due to coastal change and the encroachment of sand dunes. Limited activity up to the late sixteenth century is suggested by a few sherds of post-medieval pottery

The article considers three large rabbit warrens at Cefn Cul, Crai and Pant Mawr constructed on marginal land in the Brecon Beacons in the mid-nineteenth century and represented in the field by pillow mounds, pit-traps, stone-walled enclosures and warreners’ houses. Though poorly documented, the warrens were probably all in a single ownership and constructed by Joseph Claypon, a member of a Lincolnshire banking family, following his acquisition of land in the Beacons as a creditor of the entrepreneur John Christie. The warrens were probably in use between the late 1830s and the late 1850s and may have been exploited in conjunction with the adjacent Brecon Forest Tramroad. Unique in Wales, comparisons are drawn with a number of similar large commercial warrens established in various parts of England in the mid to later nineteenth century.