History and Archaeology of the parish of Perranarworthal

Principal investigator: Liam
Level: Personal research project

I am Steve Hartgroves; I developed and managed the Cornwall and Scilly HER for Cornwall Archaeological Unit in Truro for 30 years until my retirement a few years ago. I am currently Chair of the Roman Cornwall Research Group, a sub-committe of the Cornwall Archaeological Society, and I also chair the parish's Local History Group.

I have been researching the History and Archaeology of the parish of Perranarworthal, in order to compile the Historic Environment and Built Environment sections of our Neighbourhood Development Plan. I have drawn extensively on the HER, published sources and the grey literature, but there has been practically no fieldwork or research in the parish to date and information on the prehistoric period is particularly thin - we have just four or perhaps five prehistoric sites, and no evidence at all in these sources for a local Romano-British presence. I suspect that there will have been some detectorist's finds in the past few years which should allow me to make some broad conjectures about what might have been going on, but I have been unable to investigate further because of the limited searching criteria and absence of adequate location information in the Portable Antiquities database.

I am requesting an upgrade to my account to enable me to extract details of all Romano-British metalwork (and any other artefact types) for my parish (Perranarworthal) and for the contiguous parishes of Feock, Kea, Gwennap, Mylor, Stithians, St Gluvias and Chasewater. A simple listing with Parish Name, Site Name, Site Location (8-fig NGR if poss), Artefact Type(s) and Date, sorted by Parish, would be extremely useful. A distribution map would be a real bonus. If this can be extracted in digital formats, this would be far more convenient than paper. I'm not sure what levels of access to the PAS database are possible, but I am sure that it will be possible to interrogate the data to retrieve this information in a useable format.

I can't give a precise date for the completion of the project, which would be the official adoption of the neighbourhood plan I suppose, partly because we are dependant on several other organsiations including the County Council to do thier bits. We had hoped to complete in 2020, but Covid shot this target down and we now hope to get it over the line in 2021 - but thats by no means certain. It all depends on how we manage in the coming months.

Referee: Anna Tyacke

Audit data

• Created: 3 years ago
• Created by: S M