Minety, Romans and the North Wessex Way

In 2022, Cotswold Archaeology  uncovered a significant Roman tile kiln near the level crossing in Minety. The kiln was five metres across and was capable of producing up to twenty thousand roof tiles in a firing season (May to September). The following year, further excavation revealed that it had been built adjacent to an earlier kiln,  with the inference that tile manufacturing took place over a long period of time.

Also in 2022, a PhD student from Bournemouth University published his thesis on Ceramic Building Materials in Roman Britain. By using chemical analysis of the clay, he was able to show that Minety was supplying tiles to Bath for two hundred years during the Roman occupation.

The real significance of the Minety kiln came on the discovery of broken tiles around the site with letters stamped on them. In excavations all around the South of England, tiles had been found with letters stamped on them, but it wasn't known where they were made. That mystery had now been solved, and revealed Minety as a centre of industry in Roman times.

As Minety lies only two miles from the North Wessex Way, I started to wonder whether it played a role in the transport of the tiles to customers.  We know from the settlements and archaeological finds along the route that it was used during the Roman occupation. It connects with the Fosse Way to the West of Malmesbury and to Ermine Street  at Blunsdon, so it would have offered  a convenient way to transport tiles to places like Bath and Silchester.     

I have long been curious as to why there was  dead straight and quite wide byway running South from  B4040 in Minety, seemingly to the middle of nowhere.  The discovery of the kiln and the North Wessex Way made made me look at this in a different way, particularly as I started to think about the logistics of getting twenty thousand tiles a year delivered to customers.                         

It would have taken something like one thousand  five hundred packhorses over a summer to shift twenty thousand roof tiles each weighing about six kilograms.  That's a lot of horse traffic and with the clay soil around the kiln, you wouldn't want that many horses churning up the ground.

So it seems likely that there would have been a distribution depot nearby; somewhere to store the tiles, sort them into customer orders and load them as the packhorse trains or carts turned up.     

And as this industrial site lasted for over two hundred years, it's also likely that some road was put in place to connect with the nearest major route.

So the theory is this:

• A road ran north from the North Wessex Way along what is now a byway.
• It would have continued straight on across the fields and woodland to meet up with another byway north of the Minety to Upper Minety Road near Buxwell Farm.
• It finished in the field to the East of Home Farm, on the ridge about five hundred metres from the kiln site.
• This field is a possible site for the depot where tiles were stored and loaded for transport.

The interesting section of this potential Roman Road is the middle section, between the byways to the North and the South. LIDAR scans of this area show a linear depression running across the fields and woods, directly in line with the byway to the South and leading to the byway to the North

So could it be that Minety has had a Roman road hidden in plain sight for all these centuries?

An industrial effort of this scale over a couple of hundred years would have taken a substantial workforce; workers to build and run the kiln, dig the clay and form the tiles, collect and store the wood to fire the kiln and to sort and load the completed  tiles for  transportation. The workers would need to be fed and housed, and would likely have had families as well. It's unlikely that all these people would be living on the site of the kiln, which was a working environment.

You can start to imagine how Minety could have been in Roman times.

Evidence of Roman buildings have been found in Upper Minety and the village was occupied in the Saxon period, implying that people carried on living there once the Romans departed.

For the workers, it would have been a short walk from the village down the hill to the kiln.

The tiles, once fired, could be taken by cart up to the distribution centre on the ridge above the kiln, next to what is now Home Farm, to be stored and sorted ready for the next cart or packhorse train to arrive from the South or the North.

Of course, all this is conjecture, guesswork and imagination. However, it does give us some clues as to where to look next as we start to understand the significance of Roman activity in this little village of ours.