The Trendle - Tavistock’s prehistoric settlement

In a field on the edge of Tavistock owned by Mount Kelly is a prehistoric earthwork with a bank and ditch which encloses an area of about 0.7 hectares. It is situated on a hillslope which overlooks the Wallabrook stream and the River Tavy and has fine views towards Dartmoor. The enclosure, which is known as the Trendle, is a scheduled monument. Few local people have heard of it and until recently it had received little attention from either archaeologists or local historians. New historical and archaeological research is producing tantalising clues about the town’s earliest known settlement site.   

The place name Trendle appears to date from the Saxon period. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the Old English word trendel means a circle or ring. A survey of Tavistock Abbey’s Manor of Hurdwick in 1387 refers to ‘a parcel of land called Trendle’ for which the tenant paid one halfpenny rent on St Rumon’s day. The earliest map of the Trendle was drawn in 1768 for the Duke of Bedford’s estate. It shows an enclosure nearly twice the size of the present site divided by a road (now called the Old Exeter Road) into two fields with the northern one named Trendle Meadow and the southern one marked as Little Field. It is clear by comparing the 1883 and 1905 Ordnance Survey maps that most of the northern part of the monument was destroyed when the London and South Western Railway was built from Tavistock and Okehampton in 1890. In the 1940s, bungalows and gardens were built on what remained of this northern section.  

The only excavations at the Trendle were conducted in 1968-9 by Kelly College students supervised by a young geography teacher, Tom Clare. Tom’s report was never published although he gave a typed copy with very grainy photostat photographs to Plymouth Museum. He moved to the north of England where he ultimately became the county archaeologist for Cumbria. We tracked Tom down in late 2018 and he kindly sent us digitised colour copies of his photographs and his original drawings. Tom’s report concluded that the Trendle had been fortified by a single ditch and a rampart 4 metres wide and 2 metres high which was originally constructed as an earth bank and was later faced with stone. 

The Trendle Project was established at the suggestion of Tavistock Forward’s chair, John Taylor, to conduct further research into the site and its place within the wider landscape. We are very grateful for support from the governors, staff and students at Mount Kelly, Tavistock Forward, Tavistock Local History Society, Tavistock Museum, Historic England, the county archaeologist and volunteers from the local community. In the summer of 2017, we commissioned geophysics specialists GeoFlow to work with Mount Kelly students and members of the local community to survey the interior of the monument. Geophysics provides a way of identifying archaeological buried features without damaging the site by excavation. The project team were hugely excited when the survey revealed curved features which could be trenches surrounding circular structures which could be the remains of up to three roundhouses. The largest and most complete is about 14 metres in diameter which is very large for Iron Age houses (marked A on the photograph). The survey also showed an additional bank and two previously undiscovered ditches enclosing the monument (marked B on the photograph).  

In 2018 we surveyed the visible earthworks. This has enabled us to produce new plans of the Trendle which we can compare with the earlier OS maps. Tom Clare’s excavation is shown in pink. Overall our results confirm the accuracy of this earlier work. They also provide clearer evidence than existed previously that a boundary bank that runs between the monument and the grounds of Mount Kelly appears to contain traces of the original earthwork. Many earlier maps and plans mark only the boundary or leave this part of the monument as a blank space.  

The hillslope location, original size and plan of the earthworks suggest the Trendle is an example of a prehistoric settlement known as a round. Rounds are common in the far south west, especially in Cornwall where over 2,500 are known. The few examples that have been excavated show them to have contained a hamlet or farmstead with round houses and other buildings. They tended to be occupied at some time from the Middle Iron Age about 400 BC to the Romano British period around 300 AD with many in use for several centuries. Pottery found by Tom Clare and photographs of objects reportedly found on the site in the 1940s suggest the Trendle was occupied for a lengthy, but not necessarily continuous period, from the Middle Iron Age to the Roman conquest. The size of the large roundhouse and the complexity of the earthworks suggest it is possible that the people who lived in, or used, the Trendle may have enjoyed considerable social status.  

Andrew Thompson & John Hudswell 

More information about the Trendle project is being produced as a booklet and as exhibition material for Tavistock Museum.