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The Roman Villa at St Laurence School, Budbury
Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire
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The central area of the eastern villa building, with threshold of the main entrance and mosaic floors beyond
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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.
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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. The straight mark across the picture is a trench for a drain, but nobody noticed what it passed through when it was dug. On the right is the Wiltshire Music Centre; again, despite knowing the villa was likely to be nearby, no-one seems to have been looking out when it was built in 1998. Luckily building work at the school, in Bear Close to the south and the Old Batch to the north had mostly missed
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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.
Click on the photos for a larger version
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
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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.
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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.
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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
See also:
Corney, Mark 2003. The Roman villa at Bradford on Avon: the investigations of 2002.
Corney, Mark 2004. The Roman villa at Bradford on Avon: the investigations of 2003.
Corney, Mark 2023. The St Laurence School villa, Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire in Martin Henig, Grahame Soffe, Kate Adcock, Anthony King (eds.) 2023. Villas, Sanctuaries and Settlement in the Romano-British Countryside: New Perspectives and Controversies
Catling, Chris 2023. Rural Romanitas: rethinking the role of villas. Current Archaeology 2 May 2023.