Museum Celebrates Lottery Win!
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Bradford on Avon Museum has been successful in a bid for an award from the Heritage Lottery Fund’s “All Our Stories” round of grants. With the HLF funding and support, community groups like ours will carry out activities that help people explore, share and celebrate their local...
Read MoreThe Museum Collection: Medieval
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Although whole buildings of the middle ages stand in and around Bradford, so far very little from the medieval period has come to Bradford on Avon Museum. Less than from the New Stone Age (Neolithic ) and much less than from the Roman Period!
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This piece of stone is a part...
Read MoreIron Age Bradford
The pre-Roman Iron Age in Bradford is represented by an enigmatic site on the top of the hill at Budbury. The name itself includes the Old English word burh, which was used of a fortified site and suggests that there was a recognisable fort there in the Saxon period.
At the time when the land at Budbury was threatened with development in the 1940s, local...
Read MoreNew Acquisition: a Neolithic Flint Arrowhead
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Bradford on Avon Museum’s collection is very poor in objects from Broughton Gifford, which, as an area in the Bradford Hundred, falls within the the collecting area of the Museum. The chance find of a Neolithic flint arrowhead near Monkton adds not just to the collection of Broughton items, but is also probably a new record of a...
Read MoreMuseum Collection: Neolithic Flint Implements
The Neolithic Period (New Stone Age) was marked by the first introduction of farming, both in growing crops and keeping domesticated animals. Large areas of the country were cleared of ancient woodland to make fields, but hunting and gathering still went on. Metal tools were not yet available and the Neolithic people made tools from flint and polished stone axes were traded...
Read MoreSt Laurence School Roman Villa
It had long been known that there was significant Roman building in the Budbury area, on the plateau just north of the centre of Bradford. An excavation in 1976, when new houses were being built, found a bath house, so the villa house had to be nearby.
A fragment of plaster that had fallen from the walls of the bath house. Many of these pieces were conserved in a...
Read MoreThe Museum Collection: Post-medieval Archaeology
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In this country, the Middle Ages are considered to have finished in 1485 with the Battle of Bosworth Field. After that come the Tudor dynasty, the Reformation, the Stuarts, Georgians and the reign of Victoria and the modern period.
Click on the thumbnail picture for a bigger view.
The bowl of a clay...
Read MoreThe Museum Collection: The Civil War
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The area around Bradford figured slightly in the English Civil War. Royalist troops under Sir Ralph Hopton are assumed to have crossed the Avon at Bradford and headed towards Bath, culminating in the Battle of Lansdown in July 1643. The other action was at Great Chalfield, where Parliamentary troops occupied the manor house, except for a...
Read MoreThe Bronze Age
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The Bronze Age in Britain is the period of prehistory between about 2,500 and about 800 BC which is characterised by the making and use of tools, utensils and weapons of bronze. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin. In the Wiltshire area the Bronze Age is the period when the great megalithic monuments -Stonehenge and...
Read MoreSaxons & Vikings
Bradford is often referred to as the Saxon Town, because of its pre-Conquest connections and its surviving Saxon Church (right).
Bradford enters history in a record of the King of Wessex, Cenwalh, fighting a battle at the Broad Ford on the Avon (Bradanforda be Afene) in 652, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle doesn’t say against whom, or who won.
At the end of the...
Read MoreThe Museum Collection: Roman
. Click on the thumbnail pictures for a bigger view . A child’s sarcophagus (stone coffin) which was found in a field near Parsonage Farm, Winsley. It was originally carved from a single block of limestone, but had been broken into several pieces by ploughing. The lid, which would...
Read MoreRoman Bradford
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The limestone hills around the city and religious site of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath) are rich in remains from the Roman period (43-410 AD), including the uplands of the western part of the Bradford Hundred area. Even today, most of the northern border of the Hundred is defined by the line of the Roman road from Londinium.
There were major...
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