Excavation and recording in advance of the construction of the Four Crosses bypass (A483) in northern Powys in 2010 afforded a rare opportunity to examine a long strip of land bordering the known complex of prehistoric, Roman and early medieval sites close to the confluence of the Severn and Vyrnwy. Mesolithic activity is suggested by a group of pits, probable post-pits and a gully, of which some of the probable post-pits are associated with calibrated radiocarbon dates of the eighth and ninth millennia BC. Neolithic activity in the third and fourth millennia BC is suggested by a number of pits which produced Neolithic pottery and by calibrated radiocarbon dates from two later prehistoric boundary ditches. A previously unrecorded Early Bronze Age ring-ditch, forming part of the more extensive barrow cemetery at Four Crosses, had a central pit containing a possible timber coffin and token cremation burial. A short stretch of pit alignment, part of the more extensive complex at Four Crosses, was associated with pottery and radiocarbon dates suggesting that they date to the later Bronze Age. Comparable radiocarbon dates were obtained from two linear ditches which are assumed to be part of a later prehistoric field system further to the south. Medieval activity was represented by a number of small pits and a possible ditched drying platform, dated to about the fourteenth to fifteenth century, while a small corn-drying kiln and a rectangular post-built structure date to the period between the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Eighteenth-century activity is represented by an earlier road line and by a group of brick clamp kilns and clay pits.
Grant et al. (Thu,) studied this question.