What they found

Chance discovery
Time Team's involvement with the site at Dinnington began with a chance discovery. Farmer's daughter Trudy Ridgers had discovered a small piece of mosaic in one of her father's fields; later she found a number of other fragments. Time Team was called in to investigate.

An aerial photograph taken during one of the hot, dry summers in the mid-1970s revealed the clear outlines of what looked like a huge Roman villa, some 150 metres across. Time Team opened a few test pits in what turned out to be its west wing, and within a short time had revealed the first of a series of mosaics just a few inches beneath the surface. On the second day, 'the mosaics just kept on coming', as Tony Robinson put it, and Phil Harding also uncovered the remains of a hypocaust underfloor heating system with very fine mosaic tesserae that had collapsed into it. Another trench in the central range revealed the foundations of some very substantial walls – large enough to tell the archaeologists that they had supported a two-storey structure. This was clearly no ordinary building.

Finest found in Britain
The quality of some of the mosaic finds (some of the tesserae were just 5mm square) turned out to be as fine as anything ever found in Britain. But the site was too big and complex to be dealt with in an ordinary three-day Time Team dig. That would have to wait for a fuller excavation – an opportunity for which was to be provided by the Big Roman Dig three years later.

As well as uncovering what was left of the villa and its mosaics, Time Team wanted to find out how it had evolved over the centuries. The earliest Roman finds included a brooch dated at about 40-60 AD. This suggested that the first Roman building on the site – a farmhouse – was erected soon after the Roman conquest in 43 AD. Geophysics surveys revealed the existence of what turned out to be a driveway constructed later to connect a new villa complex with the Fosse Way, the ancient trackway serving the area.

Several phases of improvement
The first phase of the villa building was found to have been a timber construction, and the villa went through several phases of reconstruction and improvement before it reached its heyday. This was in the fourth century AD, which was when the best-quality mosaics were laid. Bone finds showed that the occupants of the villa enjoyed a luxury diet by the standards of the day that included beef and venison. Fine glass fragments and pottery finds revealed that they would have drunk and eaten from the best tableware. And pieces of elaborately decorated wall plaster gave an indication of the sumptuous surroundings in which they would have dined – even if Tony did describe it as 'fundamentally naff', or 'a bit Footballers' Wives', in the words of Time Team Roman expert Guy de la Bédoyère.

Stewart Ainsworth's investigation of the landscape around the villa, meanwhile, suggested that during this period the villa owners had turned a large area – more or less the entire area that could be seen from the villa – into private parkland. The occupants were clearly among the super rich of their day.

Decline and fall
It didn't last. The finest mosaics were found to have been laid around 320 AD. But in less than a century, the decline of Roman imperial power and the withdrawal of the legions from Britain had brought their good life to an end. The villa buildings continued to be used after the Romans left – there is evidence of activities including the storage of grain and brewing on the site. Towards the end of the fifth century AD, however, (radio carbon dating of burnt grain dates it to about 490 AD), a catastrophic fire destroyed the main buildings, bringing the roof and timbers crashing down.

Later Saxon settlers made use of what was left (there are post holes from a wooden partition driven through one of the mosaics), but the grandeur of the Roman villa complex was never regained. Instead, the remains were buried and forgotten – until a 20th-century farmer's daughter realised the significance of fragments that were turning up in her father's fields and called in Time Team to investigate what lay just beneath the surface.

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