Roman painted plaster returns to Bradford
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When a Roman bath complex was excavated in Bradford in 1976, many jumbled pieces of painted plaster were collected. They would have fallen from the interior as the walls became ruined. They were put into Wiltshire County Council’s store along with other finds from the dig.
In 2004 volunteers from the Bradford on Avon Preservation Trust spent three months carefully sorting the pieces, looking for matches that would give a clue to the design of the baths’ walls -a massive jigsaw with possibly many missing pieces and no picture to go by!
Work continued for the next year to conserve the plaster fragments at the Wiltshire Conservation Centre in Salisbury and some that were thought to match up were mounted in blocks.
Now some of these pieces of Bradford’s Roman Villa have returned to Bradford on loan and are displayed in the Museum.