Monument record MDO985 - Dewlish Roman Villa

A large and elaborate 4th-century Roman corridor style villa which represented the final stage in a series of alterations and rebuilds. The villa unlike others in the area appears to be a county retreat and not the centre of a farm as no outbuildings exist in the near vicinity of the main building. The main body of the villa, following a fairly symmetrical plan, consists of a single range of rooms fronted by a corridor with a bath house at one end, a private suite at the other. Situated behind the main building and accessed via a corridor is a series of kitchen/service rooms. The main feature of the building, apart from the large multi roomed bath house, is a central placed ornate porch behind which is an elaboratly decorated apsed dining/audience room. A high level of decoration, for Roman Britain, in both wall painting and mosaics can be found throughout the villa. A number of the mosaics are especially of significant note in their design and style. The site indicates the retreat of the political elite from the towns and into the countryside. It further reflects the growth in elaborate villas in both scale and design throughout the West Country of England, at a time when villas in others areas of the Western Empire were being abandoned.

Roman villa, SY 768972. The earliest reference to the site was that a black and white tessellated pavement had been found in a meadow a little south of Michel's Farm about 1740. <2> Trial excavations in 1969 and 70 confirmed the existence of a mosaic and full excavation began in 1971 and is continuing. Eleven rooms and a corridor have been discovered. All of the rooms appear to have some evidence of a floor covering and mosaics have been found in two rooms. Two hypocausts have also been found. Comparatively little pottery has been recovered, mainly black burnished ware and occasional New Forest sherds. Roof tiles and painted wall plaster were found in large quantity, and thirteen coins of the 4th and early 5th century were uncovered. A few bronze and iron fittings, bone pins, styli, an iron knife, a glass bead and an almost complete hamstone finial were also found. The only burial was that of an infant inside the building. <3-5> Continued excavations in 1973 revealed ten more rooms of the villa, including a bath suite, making a total of twenty-four rooms so far; while trial trenching indicated further extensions including a range running along the SE of a supposed courtyard. Finds will be transferred to the County Museum (there were very few, owing to the short life of the villa and the fact that it was cleared before abandonment). <6> Excavations continued in 1974, 1975 and 1976, and the unusual drought conditions of the latter year caused parch marks which revealed a number of buried pits and ditches. There were extensive traces of a system of small square or rectangular fields, which were dated by a trial excavation to the 1st or 2nd century AD. The quantity of finds in a ditch toward the south corner of the field suggested the presence of an earlier villa or farm in that direction. An irregular pattern of enclosures, together with a large number of circular pits on the north-west side of the field, was found to be of late pre-Roman Iron Age date. One pit excavated was characteristic of Iron Age grain storage pits. The site thus provides three main settlement areas - Iron Age, early Roman and late Roman - and the settlement may have been continuous over 400-500 years. The major excavation of 1976 was in the southwest side of the presumed courtyard of the third-fourth century villa, where an aisled barn of at least four building phases was found.<7-9> DO 11 Listed as the site of a Roman villa. The latest coins, of Honorius, have been found in association with cooking hearths built directly onto patterned tessellated floors. <13> According to feedback received via the ADS catalogue, this site was excavated for eleven seasons from 1969-1979 inclusive. <15> According to feedback received via the PastScape website, a recent geophysical survey revealed that the villa comprised three wings and not two as orginally thought, and that the site included a romano-celtic temple and possible priest's house. A new post-excavation project is due for completion in early 2012. <15>

Record last edited

Jan 11 2024 4:02PM