Sharpstones Hill

Sharpstones Hill rises gently about 400 metres south-west of Weeping Cross in Shrewsbury. Archaeologists found traces of Bronze Age huts and later Iron Age and Roman farmsteads on the slope. In 1969 a single enclosure was excavated. It measured 37 metres square, surrounded by a ditch, with a round hut at its centre. The finds suggest a small Celtic farming village that continued into Roman times without major changes. Pottery fragments show the site remained in use until the 2nd century AD. At some point in the Roman period the round hut gave way to a square building. The remains reveal how ordinary people lived in both Celtic and Roman Shropshire. No grand villas appear here, only the everyday life of farmers. Today the hilltop is quiet farmland with no visible ruins. Visitors walk over grassy fields where the ditches and hut floors once lay. The view stretches across the Severn plain to the Shropshire hills. There is little to see above ground, yet the place carries the memory of two thousand years of continuous settlement.