The lie of the land
Wantage grew up where the chalk of the Berkshire Downs gives way to the clay of the Vale of White Horse. The old parish climbs from about 200 feet above sea level in the north to around 600 feet on the downs, crossing gault clay, greensand and chalk as it goes. The Letcombe Brook, which rises below the downs at Letcombe Bassett, runs through the town, and the lower road along the foot of the hills, the Portway, passes through the Market Place on its way east to Wallingford. Above it all, the Ridgeway follows the crest of the downs.
This mix of land shaped everything that followed: sheep on the chalk, arable fields on the greensand, and wetter meadows down in the vale.
Bronze Age and Iron Age
The best-known prehistoric monument near Wantage is the White Horse cut into the scarp above Uffington. Excavation in 1990 and luminescence dating of the silts in its lowest layers placed its origin somewhere between about 1380 and 550 BC, which makes it the oldest known chalk figure in Britain.
Closer to the town, Segsbury Camp (also called Letcombe Castle) crowns the downs above Letcombe Regis. It is a roughly circular hillfort of about 10.7 hectares. Oxford University excavated it in 1996 and 1997 and found that it was used on and off between the 6th and 2nd centuries BC, probably as a shared meeting place for the surrounding farms, where sheep were managed and goods exchanged, rather than as a permanently crowded town.
Down in the vale, excavation ahead of house building has found the farms themselves. At Crab Hill, on the north-east edge of Wantage where Kingsgrove now stands, Oxford Archaeology found an Iron Age settlement that began in the 8th or 7th century BC. At East Challow, Cotswold Archaeology recorded a run of late Iron Age and Roman enclosures and boundary ditches.
Roman Wantage
When the Victoria County History described Wantage in 1924 it knew only of Roman coins turned up in the town, and concluded that there was no evidence of a Roman station. Later digging has filled in the picture. An excavation at Mill Street in 1993 and 1994 found Roman and early Anglo-Saxon occupation, and in 1996 and 1998 a site behind Denchworth Road, in the Belmont area, produced a trackway with ditches on either side, plot boundaries and pits dating from the late 1st to the 2nd century. A stone building went up there some time after about AD 270; it was later taken down and its stone carried off for reuse.
At Crab Hill, corn-drying ovens of the middle and late Roman period show that grain was being processed on a large scale. Put together, the evidence points to a farming settlement of some size, not a fort or a walled town. Some local accounts describe a Roman village lasting from the 1st into the 4th century, with granaries and a cemetery.
The first English settlers
After Roman rule ended, new settlers arrived. The clearest sign of them is at East Challow, where excavators found sixteen sunken-floored buildings and the remains of perhaps two timber halls. Finds included loom weights, spindle whorls, bone combs and pins, a whetstone and beads: evidence of households spinning and weaving their own cloth. Crab Hill produced one similar building, probably of the 6th or 7th century, and early Anglo-Saxon material was also found at Mill Street.
The town’s name comes from these people. Its earliest recorded form, in the 9th century, is Wanating. Place-name scholars usually explain it as an old stream name meaning something like ‘the dwindling one’, a fair description of a chalk brook whose flow rises and falls with the seasons. The Victoria County History preferred an older idea linking the name to a tribe called the Unecungas; that theory is no longer widely followed.