The pottery has included a large assemblage of sherds of Romano - British pottery
, which includes Samian ware and comprises a wide range of High Status types with date ranges from the late 1st Century to at least the mid 3rd Century and coming from distant sources including the Cheshire Plains, around Belper in Derbyshire, Lincolnshire and possibly mortaria from Widerspool. It also includes quite a number of scraps of briquetage, which was a type of pottery used to transport and store salt.
Most of these came from the top two fills of the Deep Inner Ditch which seems to have been deliberately back filled at some later date. Several other excavated features have contained artefacts from the 1st to 4th Century, but repeated useage of the site does mean that many of these could have been redeposited within in-fills of later features. This was quite possibly the case with the large amount of finds from Trench 18 which was excavated in 2003.
Was the site actually occupied by the Romans
It has not been possible to establish whetherbthis ws the case or not. Given the stategic and topographic advantages of the site it might have been anticipated that it would have been subject to a militay occupation . Excavation has so far found little structural evidence for such a settlement and certainly no characteristic dominating 'Roman Footprint' Military occupation would also have been expected to have ended well before the 4th Century, possibly even to have been confined to the principal phase of military occupation of the North West (AD 70-125) and yet Mellor continues in use far beyond this period.
It is possible, therefore, that either the site was either civilian in character from the start, or that military occupation was either sited elsewhere on the hilltop or so temporary in nature that it only had a limited impact.
Were there any buildings here during that time
The discovery of tile fragments suggests that buildings must have been erected during this period, although no structural remains have so far been found. Only one securely dated feature has been uncovered which can be assigned to the Romano British Period, stratigraphically and artefactually, which was a single shallow ditch containing a sherd of Romano-British Derbyshire Ware pottery, dating from the 2nd Century AD, several stake holes cut into the edge of the ditch suggesting that it served as an enclosure boundary.