New Dating for Wat's Dyke
New theory explores the frontier earthworks on the Welsh border.
A post-Roman local king or powerful warlord, rather than an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon ruler of Mercia, now seems likely to have been the mastermind behind the construction of Wat's Dyke, the frontier earthwork that snakes through the northern section of the Welsh borderlands.
This new assessment of the historical context of the ancient earthwork follows radiocarbon dating of remains from an archaeological investigation of a site at Oswestry, Shropshire.
It means that the deep ditched boundary rampart on the Welsh border was constructed up to 300 years earlier than its previously accepted date. Hitherto the general consensus has been that it was an eighth-century near-contemporary of its more famous parallel boundary, Offa's Dyke.
According to one local historian, this latest finding has 'put the cat amongst the archaeological pigeons'. The new evidence has emerged from the line of the ancient earthwork on an Oswestry industrial estate, Maes-y-Clawdd, south of the town.
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