Bronze Age House Recreated at Beeston Castle

17 May 2019 12:21 PM

Volunteers recreate 4,000-year-old roundhouse using authentic tools at Beeston Castle.

A Bronze Age house is being reconstructed by English Heritage volunteers at Beeston Castle in Cheshire.

The volunteers have used authentic tools and archaeological evidence to recreate the house and based the reconstruction on recent discoveries at the Bronze Age settlement at Must Farm in Cambridgeshire. They've also drawn on earlier evidence found at Beeston Castle itself.

People lived on the rocky Cheshire crag long before the existing medieval castle was built, and in the late Bronze Age it was an important defended settlement and metalworking centre.

Although little visible evidence remains of this early activity, in the 1970s and 80s archaeologists discovered traces of post-holes for what was called House Six. This was a thatched Bronze Age roundhouse with walls of wattle-and-daub – a mixture of twigs, earth and clay. Bronze Age objects such as axes and knives were also uncovered during this time. 

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