The Roman Villa at St Laurence School, Budbury

Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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Budbury Roman Villa

The central area of the eastern villa building, with threshold of the main entrance and mosaic floors beyond

It had long been suspected that there was significant Roman building in the Budbury area, on the plateau just north of the centre of Bradford because of a concentration of Roman finds in the area. An excavation in 1976, when the school playing field was being levelled, found a bath house just on the field’s perimeter, so a major villa house had to be very nearby, but was thought may have been destroyed by building works.

aerial view of Budbury Roman villa

The dry summer of 1999 showed the extent of the buildings as parch marks in the playing field’s grass- grass dries out and yellows where the soil is thin, above masonry walls. Aerial photographs showed that there were the remains of two villa buildings on the site. They were of the same size, 38x18m, and the same plan and orientation, 30m apart. On partial excavation of each house it was found that only the eastern one seems to have been inhabited and developed into a luxury mansion, with ranges of subsidiary buildings including a baths suite. The western house looks to have had more mundane, agricultural or industrial purposes.

A trench for a drain had been dug across the eastern house, but nobody seems to have noticed what it passed through at the time. It just missed the mosaic. The Wiltshire Music Centre was built nearby to the east in 1997; again, despite knowing a villa was likely to be nearby, no-one seems to have been looking out when it was built.

Budbury Roman villa excavation, with Mark Corney

It wasn’t until 2002 that excavation was carried out by archaeologists from Bristol and Cardiff Universities, led by the late Mark Corney. What they found in two summers of digging was the large house with mosaic-floored reception rooms and subsidiary buildings around a courtyard and, surprisingly, another villa next door, of nearly the same plan.

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Excavation of the villa bath house in 1976 showing the small rooms paved with Pennant Stone slabs and steps down into a plunge bath.

Photo by the late Peter Maundrell

The entrance to the main house of the villa complex, with cut limestone blocks forming the threshold (limen), leading to a porch (porticus). The remains of the villa are only a few inches below the surface and are fortunate to have survived.

Beyond the entrance was a hall with mosaic floor and then a room with a polygonal apse and a relatively undamaged mosaic.

The central motif of the mosaic is a stylised red rose surrounded by geometric shapes made up of braided pattern known as guilloche.

The western house has a similar plan to the eastern, but seems not to have been fitted out in the same way. Part of it has a hypocaust (underfloor hot air heating system) with supporting columns of single blocks of limestone.

The 2003 season of digging unearthed the floor of the front hall. A mosaic had covered it, but the centre had been excavated and a circular structure had been built there. A possible interpretation of this structure is that it was a very early Christian baptistery that had been built inside the old villa’s house which may then have served as a church.

A strange burial was found just beyond the second villa building: natural stones, scratched by Iron Age ploughing, had been removed to make a grave containing a skeleton whose head had been removed and placed between the feet. It is thought that this was done to neutralise the potentially harmful spirit of the dead person, perhaps of someone who had a mental problem.

Photograph from the Roman Society website