Time Team - Withington, Gloucestershire - Archaeological Evaluation and Assessment of the Results

Wessex Archaeology

The evaluation concentrated on three areas of investigation: Site A (Manor Court Field), where a local archaeologist had recovered Romano-British finds from molehills; Site B, the Scheduled Ancient Monument of Withington Villa (SM GC200), a complex potentially dating from the 2nd - 4th centuries AD, first excavated in 1811; and Site C, an area between Sites A and B, the site of a spring and potential water management.

The project aimed to investigate the nature of the possible structures situated in Site A, and their relationship, if any, to the known villa complex to the west, while evaluation of the villa aimed to assess the nature of the surviving archaeology nearly 200 years after its 19th century discovery. It was hoped that the work within Site C would establish what type of water management was needed to tap a natural spring in order that it could be used as a well.

The project was successful in the identification of the remains within Manor Court Field as a large range of buildings, including a bath-house with mosaic floors, of such a scale that it is likely to represent a separate villa complex and not ancillary buildings associated with the Withington Villa to the east. One of the mosaic floors was possibly designed and laid by the mosaicist responsible for the Orpheus mosaic from Withington Villa, a member of the Corinian school of Cirencester.

The work in the Scheduled area established that nearly two hundred years of agriculture had greatly damaged the underlying remains of Withington Villa, with severe truncation of the mosaic floors and upstanding walls having occurred since its excavation.

No evidence of the spring or associated structures concerned with water management was identified in Site C.