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Dyfneint's District of
Chysauster
Ceann mor:
Position is currently vacant
 Iron Age Village Chysauster was an Iron Age village inhabited from about 100 BC to sometime in the 3rd century AD. It was probably built by members of the Dumnonii tribe of Cornish Britons. The village is composed of eight courtyard houses, laid out in two rows of four. Outside the main grouping of houses is another stone house, and there are the remains of several outlying buildings in the surrounding fields. These Courtyard houses are found only on the Land’s End peninsula and the Isles of Sicily. The houses line a ‘village street’, and each had an open central courtyard surrounded by a number of thatched rooms. There are also the remains of an enigmatic ‘fogou’ underground passage and a hill fort nearby.
 Chysauster Each of the main houses is similar in layout. The building is oriented on an east-west axis, which the entrance in the east. The east-west diameter is approximately 90 feet. A passage leads from the entrance to an inner courtyard of about 25 feet diameter. On the far side of the couryard is a small circular room with chambers radiating out from it. Rooms for storage and living were built into the walls, which are as thick as 14 feet in places.In some of the houses there is evidence of covered stone drains. A quern for grinding grain can be seen at the site, as can a collapsed fougou, or underground tunnel. All of the houses are served by a series of water channels. Some of these are still visible with their covering stones. Where they survive in some detail the channels seem to have provided the houses with clean water and a means of clearing foul water. The latter would have been especially important if livestock were kept in the houses. The settlement at Chysauster, of which only a small section remains, seems to have been built during the time of the Roman occupation and inhabited for a relatively short period of time – perhaps about 100 years. Although pottery and other Roman-style goods have been found in the area, no clear evidence has been found to date to indicate that the Romans ever had a significant presence in west Cornwall. The inhabitants of Chysauster were almost certainly strongly influenced by the Roman occupation to the east - but they would not have been dominated by it as were their contemporaries east of the Tamar.  Town plan The inhabitants of Chysauster survived by farming and livestock raising. Evidence of field enclosures show where the herds were prevented from getting at food crops. the soil conditions in the area are such that no bone has survived and so we can only guess what animals were farmed – presumably cattle and possibly pigs and goats. It is probable that the villagers worked the local river for tin as a source of extra income or bartering power. Was the nearby hill fort a festival ground or agricultural storage or a base of local or regional elite having the village in a subservient position? Scholars are divided on this issue. In the early nineteenth century, people came to Chysauster to listen to Methodist preachers who liked to use the village as an open-air pulpit. Now the site is maintained by English Heritage. English heritage has a wonderful eight page article designed for teachers with some ideas for school activities, but the first several pages has some really excellent information including historical background, description of the Village and documentary sources.  Courtyard Home Recently, as in 2003, a workman near the site found a significant find at the site. What was to be determined as a spoon from the same era. "The spoon, an alloy of copper and tin, was almost certainly made from metals found around Chysauster. What made the find so amazing is that metal was so valuable in ancient times that it was normally recycled - leaving no trace of the past. The tin and copper trade was already well established by 40 AD. The Celts exchanged metals with the Romans for luxury goods at St Michael's Mount, the main port in the area at the time.But so much lay about the Cornish landscape there was no need to dig mines to find it. And perhaps this relative glut of metal led to the spoon's survival." The debate whether the spoons were used for medicine in the form of herbalists at the time as sort of a pistil (as in mortar and pistil) or to scrap the flesh out of the mussels found in the surrounding Cornish coast, we will have to debate for years to come. Sources for text and images include:
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