THE county's former archaeologist has sought to clear up a debate regarding the exact site of King Offa's Herefordshire palace.

A location was suggested by the journalist Garth Lawson in his Hereford Times walking feature for October.

However, one reader suggested another site close to the villages of Marden and Sutton St Nicholas.

Dr Keith Ray said excavations carried out from 1999 to 2002 with Channel 4's Time Team found evidence for mid-Saxon occupation of the area just to the west of St. Michael’s church at Sutton.

They also found links to a series of palisaded enclosures of possible military character across the landscape south from Sutton Walls hillfort down to the River Lugg, and for 12th-century buildings at Freen’s Court built for the administrators of the, originally Saxon, royal manor of Marden.

Dr Ray, the former county archaeologist, added: "The possible existence of a royal palace here belonging to the great eighth-century Mercian kings Aethelbald and Offa is indicated more definitely by the discovery, excavation and scientific dating of two timber watermills built (as an expensive investment) in that century on the floodplain of the Lugg in Wellington parish but immediately west of Marden church.

"It seems most likely that the palace complex stood on the bluff above the Lugg close to where St Mary’s church stands today: perhaps at the site once known locally as ‘Offa’s Orchard’."

Dr Ray said that, interestingly, this is overlooked by the west end of the hillfort, where skeletons found during earlier excavations were found to have been cast, some apparently decapitated, into a pit cut through the Iron Age and Roman layers.

"It could be ventured that these young men, all buried without order or grave-gifts, could have been part of the entourage of the unfortunate King Ethelbert of the East Angles, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time," he said. "But that is another story."

Findings from the fieldwork of 1999 to 2002 is currently being prepared for publication by Dr Ray and Tim Hoverd, of Herefordshire Archaeology.

Their report is expected to be published by ArchaeoPress of Oxford in the latter part of 2018.

In the meantime, interested parties can read more in the relevant chapter of Keith Ray’s The Archaeology of Herefordshire: An Exploration (Logaston Press, 2015).