A Roman bath house and Edwardian folly

A villa or not?
Whitestaunton Manor is over 800 years old, but during the Victorian period the then owners, the Elton family, excavated the remains of what they thought was a Roman villa some distance from the main house. With a mass of finds relating to different building materials and pottery drawn from a wide area, the villa theory remained unchallenged over the years. That was until the young archaeologist Freya Bowles looked again at the site and came to the conclusion that the villa idea didn't stand up because of the suggested plan of the building.

Scheduled site
After clearing the foliage from the boggy site and an initial assessment of the best places to put in any trenches, the excavation begins. The site is a scheduled ancient monument, so a detailed excavation plan has to be approved by English Heritage, and digging is permitted in just 10% of the total area.

Edwardian folly
The three trenches sited within the scheduled area uncover walls that are made of Roman materials – but seem to have been built with modern cement. It turns out that an Edwardian folly had been built on the site that reused original Roman materials from a variety of different sources. Underneath the folly, however, the real Roman building is discovered.

Roman bath house
It eventually becomes clear from the excavations that the Team is looking at a Roman bath house. But where could any associated villa structure be? Further trenches are placed around the manor, but later garden landscaping appears to have wiped out any traces of occupation.

The missing villa
The final prognosis is that the huge range of finds associated with the site relates to the Edwardian import of materials for the folly. Yet enough remains of the original structure to prove that a Roman bath house once stood here. As for the villa, it's probably hiding somewhere under the site currently occupied by the manor house – although that still doesn't explain why no sign of it has been discovered in the surrounding landscape.

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