Rowe Ditch

HER no. 356 (SO 3795 6029)

Rowe Ditch is an artificial earthwork, consisting of a bank with a ditch on the western side, which straddles the river Arrow in the parishes of Pembridge, Staunton-on-Arrow and Shobdon.

It is a straight linear earthwork which traverses the Arrow Valley from north to south on two distinct orientations just to the west of the village of Pembridge. It is clearly a defensive structure whose straightness suggests that it was planned with some knowledge of Roman survey techniques.

The name "Rowe" may come from the Old English word ruh, meaning "rough" or "uncultivated", and in a document of 1219 it is recorded as Rogeditch or "Rough Dyke". In Old English the inflected form h was often exchanged for w. (See Eilert Ekwall, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names, 4th edition, Oxford University Press, 1960, and Paul White, The Arrow Valley, Herefordshire. Archaeology, Landscape Change and Conservation, Herefordshire Studies in Archaeology Series 2, Herefordshire Archaeology, 2003, p. 20.)

It presently runs as an earthwork for nearly two miles, but at some point it extended further.

Rowe Ditch survives as a clear earthwork from Milton Cross (between Pembridge and Shobdon) southwards to Byletts (on the main Pembridge to Kington road). Aerial photographs show the monument continuing up the slope of the Arrow Valley at the north end, and excavations have revealed that it terminated near Vallet Covert in Shobdon parish.

On the First Edition Ordnance Survey Map of 1887, slopes are shown adjoining a house called Grimsditch. In Old Norse Grimr is another name for the pagan god Odin, and in the village of Bearwood there is a crescent-shaped earthwork which is also called Grimsditch, pointing to Anglo-Saxon connections in this area.
 
Trenches excavated in 2003 on a cropmark (HER 10370) which underlies Rowe Ditch suggest that the site was occupied in the Iron Age and Roman period. As Rowe Ditch overlies this feature it is therefore of a later date than Roman, and may be indicative of the Anglian arrival in this area sometime in the 7th century.

During the 1970s and 1980s excavations were carried out along the line of this monument, directed by David Hill. These excavations showed that the ditch survives in good condition below ground, being up to 2m deep and 5m wide in places.

As a result of these excavations it seems that Rowe Ditch probably dates from the earliest arrival of the English in the Arrow Valley, c. AD 650. The fact that the defensive ditch is on the western, Celtic side suggests that it was built by the English.

[Original author: Miranda Greene, 2005]