Villas out of molehills

Withington, in the Cotswolds, Gloucestershire, sits in an officially designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is an area of rich farmland and, as Tony Robinson put it in this programme, 'very classy houses'.

It was clearly not very much different in Roman times. The landscape locally is littered with the evidence of the numerous villas that stood here during the Roman occupation of Britain – several dozen of them are known in Gloucestershire, including one at Withington itself.

Two hundred years before Time Team visited, the Withington villa was excavated by the antiquarian, Samuel Lysons, after a ploughman had discovered extensive remains in a field on which he was working. Excavations revealed some exquisite mosaics (now preserved in the British Museum) but no one was able to date the villa; and although it is a scheduled site protected by English Heritage there is no record today of exactly where it is located.

Time Team's interest in the site didn't stop with this villa. Two hundred metres below the villa field is a spring and stream (the area was formerly known as Withington-upon-Wall Well), together with an adjoining field in which large quantities of Roman tile and tesserae (mosaic pieces) have been found. Many of these finds have been brought to the surface in recent years by mole activity, and local archaeologist Roger Box (who originally drew Time Team's attention to the spectacular Turkdean villa site) called in the Team to investigate.

No one had ever excavated the lower site previously, but the proximity to the villa excavated by Samuel Lysons suggested a connection between the two. Could the lower site have been a bathhouse serving the villa or even a temple? Or was it an earlier site for the villa, which was later moved to a site on higher ground, perhaps as a result of flooding? Time Team investigated both sites in an attempt to find out.

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