North Leigh Roman Villa
Another site which is worth a little trek down a country lane and is a bit shady when it comes to parking is North Leigh Roman Villa.
This site is the only visible Roman building in Oxfordshire and reminded us a bit of our local Richborough Roman Fort. The difference is that this one boasts quite the impressive mosaic, not that it was open for us to see!
The villa was made bigger starting from the 1st century right up until the early 5th and ended up as a huge 'villa rustica' that had 19 mosaic floors, a large agricultural estate, and accommodation for farm workers and even slaves. In perspective, this was quite the luxurious site for Roman times, especially if you take into consideration the fact they'd also have imported luxuries from nearby places including Cirencester.
It has been recorded that the first excavation of the site was by Henry Hakewill in 1813. He had the site for three years and then it was left until Professor Francis Haverfield conducted further excavations in 1910. These combined excavations led to findings that the site was first occupied during the Late Iron Age and that the first villa building could be dated to the 1st century, or at least early 2nd AD. There were even photographs of the mosaic from 1895 so in this time span a lot of the the site was uncovered.
However, it wasnt until Aerial archaeology from 1943 that the unknown plan of the southwest wing was discovered. Works by the Ministry of Public Building and Works took place in 1958 and revealed several phases of development and domestic living starting with Iron Age postholes which shows us that the original buildings on site were all wooden, unlike the stone we see today. Excavations were then returned to in the 1970s and pretty much bring us to date.
It appears that this site is famed not just because of its mosaic, but none other than J.R.R Tolkien took an interest in it and it was believed to have inspired some aspects of his novels. What we can say was that we peeped through the glass at the tiles and were pretty impressed.
It didn't take us long to walk through this site and take in all it had to offer, we are a bit shocked to find that it had so many rooms and bathhouses though! It is a very interesting and yet unmanned site which struck us as odd, but it is also in the sticks so we aren't massively surprised.
We'd certainly visit again to get a closer look at that mosaic, but we just wish there was a better place to park!
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