I have now examined the archaeology of every county in Britain bar one – Wiltshire. This was no accident, for I have a confession to make: Wiltshire’s archaeology terrifies me. There is so much of it, so many famous names, such passion aroused. It is the toughest archaeological nut to crack in the United Kingdom, and so I left it to last. To ease my burden, I will split my examination into four different parts, with two columns on the county and two others on Stonehenge and Avebury. Alas, Wiltshire is a case-study of famous sites like these eclipsing others that are less well-known but equally important. There is surprisingly little reported in the magazine, for example, on the Vale of Pewsey, and some notable urban absences. Bar mention of its excellent museum, for example, Devizes barely gets referenced. So I begin with a plea: if you’re working in Wiltshire away from you-know-where, then please let us know. We’d love to report more from the wider county.
Gathering Places
I will begin my explorations in what is, in a strange sense, the centre of not just the county’s but also the country’s heritage: Swindon. To explain, although Swindon is sometimes denigrated as a town, it has some excellent historical sites, and it is also a political powerhouse, with the head office of the National Trust a scone’s lob from the offices of English Heritage and Historic England, including the latter’s archive – what used to be known as the National Monuments Record (see CA 140, September 1994, and CA 371, February 2021). Take a weekday peak-time train through its station, and you stand a reasonable chance of bumping into the senior management teams of all these organisations. And all of them are based within the former GWR railway works, which originated in 1843 and continued in use until 1986, with much of the remains still in place and listed Grade II and II* (see CA 216, March 2008; CA 271, October 2012; CA 301, April 2015; and CA 367, April 2020).
Further afield, the wider Swindon area has no shortage of sites, among them an Iron Age enclosure on the northern edge of the town in Groundwell (see CA 177, January 2002); a hoard of 12 Iron Age cauldrons discovered immediately south of the town at Chiseldon (see CA 214, January 2008, and CA 229, April 2009); and an enigmatic Roman site at Blunsdon on the extreme northern edge of the town (see CA 163, June 1999).
