St Laurence School Roman Villa
It had long been known that there was significant Roman building in the Budbury area, on the plateau just north of the centre of Bradford. An excavation in 1976, when new houses were being built, found a bath house, so the villa house had to be nearby.
A fragment of plaster that had fallen from the walls of the bath house. Many of these pieces were conserved in a project by the Bradford Preservation Trust and an attempt was made to get an idea of how the baths would have looked. The plaster had been painted in fresco in red, blue, green and yellow in panels with some suggestion of leaves and of figures and faces.
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A dry summer showed where the villa could lie, under the playing field of St Laurence School. Grass turned brown where the soil was thin over traces of walls and could plainly be seen from the air. The aerial survey was followed by a magnetometer survey and it seemed there were two identical villas.
The eastern villa building, seen from the south. The large stones in front were the threshold of the entrance. Beyond were the main reception rooms, with more rooms on the right and left.
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The reception rooms both had floors that were covered with mosaic.
The western building had the same plan as the eastern, but seems not to have been provided with the same level of luxury. It may have had an agricultural function. One large room was equipped with under-floor heating (hypocaust).
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These lozenge-shaped slabs were the tiles (tegulae) of the roof of the buildings. They are of thinly-bedded Pennant Sandstone, which would have been brought from the Kingswood area, on the east side of Bristol. They were hung by a peg through a hole in one corner and overlapped to allow rain to flow from one to another.
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A corner of the bath house was uncovered. The big stone slabs, of grey Pennant Sandstone, were the floor. The deeper level is a corner of what would have been the plunge bath.
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Below the walls of the villa buildings the natural rock of the plateau has been cut by deep grooves. These are the marks made by the iron tips of plough blades as Iron Age farmers ploughed the soil before the Roman villa was built.