It was third time lucky for the members of the Longtown & District Historical Society when they learned in 2015 that their Longtown Castles Project had been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant after two previous applications had failed. They now had the money they needed (£78,300) to work with professional archaeologists to excavate, study, and publish two scheduled monuments in their parish: one a motte and the other a stone-built castle sited on one corner of a massive rampart, from within which ‘ancient Roman remains’ had been unearthed in 1869.
Work began in May 2016 at castle number one, Ponthendre Motte. Led by Tim Hoverd, Herefordshire Archaeology (the county council’s archaeological service) worked with local volunteers to carry out a full survey of the site, while Adam Stanford of Aerial-Cam, whose drone photographs often feature in this magazine, took multiple digital images from which to create a 3D terrain model of the motte and the surrounding landscape. Using software to strip back trees and vegetation, this showed in crisp detail the circular mound located on the spur of a ridge on the south bank of the Olchon Brook, close to its confluence with the River Monnow. Measuring up to 44m in diameter and 10.5m in height, the motte is surrounded by a ditch and bailey enclosed by a rampart, all overlooking a stone bridge over the Olchon Brook and a cluster of small farmsteads.
The results of the geophysical work (resistivity, gradiometry, and ground-penetrating radar) – here and at Longtown – were, to quote the book that has just been published as a result of the project (see ‘Further reading’ on p.45), ‘largely uninformative and frankly disappointing: there were no obvious indications of buried buildings and those anomalies that were detected were amorphous and could not be resolved into anything recognisable’. What could excavation reveal to fill in the story of the two castles – when were they built, by whom, what activities took place there, and what relationship did the two have to each other?
