Excavations within the Medieval Town at New Radnor, Powys, 1991–92

Abstract

Excavations just inside the main West gate of the town, a plantation of probably the later twelfth century, confirm that parts of the town that were intensively occupied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries were abandoned as the settlement shrank and diminished in status from the later fifteenth century onwards. The earliest buildings, founded on earth-fast posts appear to have been replaced by ones of sill-beam construction during possibly the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. One structure was converted into an ironworking smithy in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, to which a corn-drying kiln was attached. Charred remains of cultivated plants are dominated by oats, most of which probably represents crop processing activity.