Evidence of prehistoric occupation in the area includes a bowl barrow, reduced by ploughing, in the west of the parish on Woodley Down. Nearby is a linear earthwork straddling the county border, which is truncated by the Roman road from Badbury to Bath; a separate 480m section of the road survives as earthworks, with the flint road surface visible in places. On Berwick Down in the north of the parish a late Iron Age farmstead was replaced by a Romano-British settlement.
