Stone courtyard houses of an Iron Age and Roman-period farming village on a Penwith hillside
Open to visitorsan English Heritage site — check opening times and admission before you go
Standing remainssubstantial fabric survives to stand in front of
North of Penzance, on a hillside above the Penwith moors, people built the farming village now called Chysauster Ancient Village, occupied from late Iron Age times into the Roman period, roughly the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. Ten stone-walled courtyard houses stand here, each built around an open yard with a scatter of round rooms leading off it, a house style found nowhere outside the Penwith peninsula and Scilly.
Something like fifty to seventy people probably lived across the two loose rows of houses at the village’s busiest, farming the surrounding fields for grain and grazing sheep on the rougher ground beyond. Walls still stand up to three metres high in places, and the tidy, terraced layout probably follows two older farming terraces already on the hillside, rather than any planned street design.
A stone-built underground passage called a fogou runs into the hillside just south of the village, its original purpose unknown; storage, refuge and ceremonial use have all been suggested. Visitors could once go inside the fogou, but part of it was sealed off in 1986 once it became unsafe. People seem to have abandoned Chysauster by the 3rd century AD, leaving nothing to suggest violence or upheaval, around the time Cornish farming families began building smaller, defended settlements known as rounds instead.
Early surveys of Chysauster date to the 1870s and 1890s, and much of what you see today comes from repair and recording work carried out in the 1930s. Chysauster is free to visit, though it opens at set hours. The Iron Age hillfort at Castle-an-Dinas stands under a mile east, and the South West Coast Path and the open ground of West Penwith Moors and Downs are both close by.
