 The modern village, on the A120 between Braintree and Coggeshall, is the former hamlet of Blackwater (also once known as Blackwater Green) by which name it was known into the twentieth century.There is evidence for settlement in Bradwell as far back as the late Mesolithic period.There are crop marks and some funerary remains attesting to Bronze Age settlers; excavations in the 1970s uncovered a large Iron Age ditch.