Brandiers Farm, Minety, Wiltshire

At the beginning of July 2022, we opened up three trenches in a pasture field at Brandiers Farm, Minety, to start two weeks of community excavations at the site of what was thought to be a Roman tile kiln. The ‘community’ in this case was a mix of local residents, some of our established volunteers and work-experience students, and members of the Wiltshire Archaeology Field Group, all guided in the art of archaeological excavation and recording by five of our professional staff. At the end of the fortnight, the results exceeded all our expectations – not just in the significance of the remains uncovered, but also in how the community project developed over those two weeks, bringing together our staff, specialist advisors and sponsors with the community volunteers and the landowners, creating a positive and valued experience for everyone involved.

Site background

Archaeologically, Minety is well known as having been an important production centre of Roman ceramic building material (brick and tile) and, later, of medieval pottery too. Two kilometres to the north-west of Brandiers is Park Farm, Oaksey, where the remains of two Roman tile kilns were excavated in the 1970s and 80s. These were thought to have been the place of manufacture of tiles stamped ‘LHS’ or ‘TPF’, which are well known from Roman sites in Gloucestershire, despite none actually being found during the excavations there.

Back at Brandiers, our field was known to contain another possible kiln site, from the scatters of tile fragments found around a pronounced earthwork mound – could this have been a tile kiln, perhaps the actual place of origin for the stamped tiles? A geophysical survey found that there was widespread magnetic debris around the mound, plus several other anomalies – certainly enough evidence to justify opening up a trench or three to try to find out!

The excavations

The planning for the Community Research Project, and details of its spectacular results, can be followed through the series of stories published on our website (linked below), with further details and interpretations to be found in our ‘Ask an Archaeologist’ Q&A video, which was shot on site during the excavations (again linked below). In summary, the project uncovered the remains of an incredibly well-preserved Roman tile kiln and huge dumps of waste tile and kiln rake-out, from which a total of 36 stamped tiles were recovered that included examples of all the ‘TPF’ stamp categories, and a few ‘LHS’ tiles too. All the evidence suggests that it was the Brandiers kiln, rather than those at Park Farm, that was the centre of manufacture of Gloucestershire’s stamped Roman tiles.