The 'archaeological profiles' of the five Herefordshire market towns are designed to incorporate the results of all the archaeological fieldwork that has taken place in the towns since they were last looked at in the mid-1990s, and to break new ground using townscape characterisation and town-plan analysis.

Such studies were identified some years ago as a strategic necessity for the county, and are being compiled in consultation with building conservation colleagues working simultaneously on Conservation Area Appraisals.

Ross-on-Wye

The first market town archaeological profile, that of Ross-on-Wye, was completed in 2006. The Ross study highlighted issues such as the unusually high incidence of building in stone late into the post-medieval period, the problems of recognising early structures concealed by later facades, evidence for the early growth of the town, and a small but possibly significant quantity of Roman material now recorded from the town centre.

Kington

Kington, the second of the market town profiles (following Ross-on-Wye) was completed to draft stage in 2007. As before, the intention was to update the work of the Central Marches Historic Towns Survey in the mid-90s, adding new information derived from PPG 16 archaeological investigations, with an additional emphasis on the historic topography and townscape.

Kington first appears in the documentary record as a rural manor in Domesday Book. By the mid-13th century two boroughs had been created there though the actual foundation of neither is recorded. The first, generally known as ‘Old Kington’ lay around the church and the castle, though little is known of its size or form. The second, ‘New Kington’, the present town centre, was established below Old Kington in the valley bottom. It is a miniature masterpiece of medieval town planning, laid out around a simple T-plan of streets, with parallel rear access lanes throughout. The plan is extremely well preserved, with very few of the plot amalgamations characteristic of even slightly larger towns. However, despite its regular plan, a document from the end of the 13th century suggests that Kington was then largely inhabited by farmers, with only a handful of townspeople following urban occupations and holding burgages. Very few excavations have as yet taken place within the historic core, so it will be up to future archaeologists to determine just how ‘urban’ medieval Kington really was.

Leominster

Leominster is the subject of the third of the Herefordshire Archaeology market-town profiles. Unlike the previous profiles, this one concentrates on reviewing the below-ground evidence and relating it back to the development of the town plan.

Leominster could be said to have reached a milestone in that more than fifty archaeological investigations have now taken place there, mostly associated with new developments around, rather than in, the historic core. Nevertheless, sufficient information is now on record to be able to comment on the medieval growth of the town, which, as Joe Hillaby has suggested, appears to have been very rapid within the 12th century. Already by c.1200 occupation had spread from the core of Broad Street and its triangular market place into new side streets to the west, and north up Bridge Street into the floodplain of the Kenwater and Lugg. Mysteries remain: was Corn Square, the medieval Cornmarket, really a primary feature of the 1120s or even earlier, or was it an additional facility added in the 13th century, like the corn markets in Shrewsbury and Worcester? Anglo-Saxon Leominster appears to have been the minster and nothing more, but the form of the church and its precinct remain, for the moment, unknown or unconfirmed. As for the town defences: while their existence and demise has now been established beyond doubt, their origin and complete course remain obscure.