In 1987, builders cutting a road for a Newquay housing estate found prehistoric pottery and burnt ground. The ground had already been occupied. By rather more than three thousand years.
The discovery was at Trethellan Farm, on the south side of Trethellan Hill above the Gannel. An emergency excavation in May lasted twelve days before roadworks resumed. English Heritage then funded a larger investigation that summer.
What emerged was a Bronze Age settlement: houses, worked ground and evidence of everyday life preserved beneath soil which had moved down the hillside.
A village beneath the hillside
An early specialist report describes six or possibly seven roundhouses, with part of a field system and other, less easily explained features. This was enough surviving structure to begin reading the ground as a place where people had made homes.
The houses had left post holes and other structural traces. Their surviving remains gave archaeologists evidence for buildings made principally from materials that had long since disappeared. Any drawing which puts complete roofs back over them is reconstructing what those traces might have supported.
That does not diminish the discovery. A post hole can seem a modest object until it joins several others and becomes the outline of somebody’s house.
The early specialist interpretation places its abandonment by about 1200 BC. By the time roadworks reached it, the settlement had been out of use for more than three millennia.
The ordinary things survived
Trethellan’s preservation made it possible to ask questions beyond where the houses stood.
The deposits contained pottery, stone objects and charred plant remains. Vanessa Straker’s analysis identified barley as the principal cereal, alongside wheat, beans and flax. Those small remains bring farming into the picture in a way that a plan of roundhouses alone cannot.
There is a temptation to populate a prehistoric reconstruction with people standing purposefully outside their homes. The evidence suggests they had plenty to be getting on with.
Some pottery fabrics also point beyond the immediate landscape. Petrological work identified gabbroic clay associated with the Lizard. Materials or finished vessels had travelled across Cornwall; the settlement was not economically confined to the patch of hillside on which its houses stood.
Between the houses and fields were features which the specialists thought might have ritual significance. Alongside the recognisable business of growing food and maintaining homes, there were activities whose meaning is harder to recover.
Burial preserved one history and added another
Hillwash helped seal the prehistoric layers and limit later disturbance. That is one of Trethellan’s important qualities: much of the settlement survived as buried evidence rather than being repeatedly disturbed at the surface.
Later activity included an Iron Age cemetery. The full excavation publication therefore concerns both a Bronze Age settlement and a subsequent burial landscape.
It is an unusually clear reminder that a place can change its purpose without changing its location. Ground used for living, farming and other activities became ground in which people buried their dead. Much later, it became land for a housing development.
There is no need to choose one of those periods as the site’s real history. The changes are the history.
Development opened a brief window
The archaeology was exposed by modern construction, and the first investigation had to fit around roadworks. The longer excavation allowed far more of the site to be understood.
That sequence is worth keeping intact. It was neither the discovery of a pristine village with its roofs still on nor evidence that an entire housing estate had to be cancelled. It was a substantial rescue excavation prompted by a chance exposure, followed by the work of specialists making sense of the finds.
The road opened a window onto the earlier landscape. Archaeology made a record while the opportunity existed.
Trethellan belongs to a wider landscape
Nearby, the 1998 investigation beside Atlantic Road found later Iron Age and Romano-British occupation. Cropmarks and survey evidence across the Fistral links point to further archaeological features.
Those sites do not establish one village continuously occupied for thousands of years. They show that different generations repeatedly made use of the ground around Pentire and the Gannel.
That is the more useful way to look at Trethellan. It was an exceptional discovery within a landscape whose history extends far beyond the visible town.
The estate is familiar modern Newquay. Beneath part of it, the 1987 excavators found evidence of homes, farming and later burial which had been concealed for centuries. An ordinary road-building job briefly made an older neighbourhood visible.
Follow the trail
The Roman Settlement Under Atlantic Road — the later settlement exposed by a pipeline.
What Is Still Under Fistral Golf Course? — what survey evidence can tell us about the surrounding ground.
When Ships Sailed Up the Gannel — the estuary’s later working history.
Before the Mines — prehistoric landscapes between Poly Joke and Holywell.
The Mine Beneath Mount Wise — another, much later layer beneath Newquay.
Sources
Historic England — Charred Plant Macrofossils from a Middle-Late Bronze Age Settlement at Trethellan Farm — settlement scale, preservation, roundhouses, fields and environmental evidence.
Cornwall Archaeological Society — Cornish Archaeology 26 (1987) — contemporary excavation reports and the twelve-day emergency excavation / summer campaign.
Cornwall Archaeological Society — Volume 30 (1991) — full published excavation: Trethellan Farm, Newquay: the excavation of a lowland Bronze Age settlement and Iron Age cemetery.
Historic England — Soil Report on Trethellan Farm — burial/preservation of the prehistoric soils and later sand movement.
Historic England — Petrology of Middle-to-Late Bronze Age Pottery from Trethellan — gabbroic pottery fabric evidence.