Roman settlement and red hill/saltern at Thorney Point (EHER 7179)

Traces of occupation ranging from Iron Age to medieval including the site of a red hill (destroyed by the sea) were found on the edge of the low water mark at Canvey Island.

Monument description derived from merging EHER 7181, 7179, and 7202. Original HER entry merged with NRHE data import: Traces of occupation ranging from Iron Age to medieval including the site of a red hill (destroyed by the sea) were found on the edge of the low water mark at Canvey Island. Finds included a few pieces of 1st century BC Iron Age pottery and plenty of briquetage and slag from the red hill. There was a vast quantity of Roman pottery including a good proportion of Samian, roof and flue tiles and a fragment of rubble foundation. A short stretch of gravel road was orientated north-south. <1> - <3> Two fragments of a decorated Samian bowl, Dragendorff form 37, found in the Thames off Thorney Bay in 1964, have been deposited in Southend Museum. The bowl, which is East Gaulish in origin, is stamped COMITIALIS F and bears a freestyle hunting scene showing a stag, lions and dogs. Date: late 2nd century AD. <3> Roman pottery recovered from a settlement site that was being exposed in the mud in the early 1960s. Finds of various periods including Anglo-Saxon, indicate that although the water-level was rising relative to land-level in Roman times, the island was not liable to submergence by high tides in early Anglo-Saxon times as was generally assumed. Little pottery from Canvey as a whole can be attributed to late Roman period (in 1976) but a few late Oxfordshire ware and other sherds from Thorney Bay should be dated to the latter part of the 4th century or later and some could be contemporary with early Anglo-Saxon pottery finds (see EHER 7182). Possibly all finds are in Southend Museum (Saxon ones are). <5>