What they found

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Withington Villa
This lies half a mile south of the village of Withington, six miles from Cheltenham. It was discovered in 1811 by Mr H C Brooke. The remains lies 150 yards from the river Colne, and consist of fifteen rooms and passages. Eight of these had tessellated pavements. One is of great size, measuring 35 feet by 20 feet, and is a very fine specimen of mosaic work, Orpheus being in the centre surrounded by various animals. The villa, like many others in the neighbourhood, appears to have been consumed by fire, as the remains of burnt timber and melted lead were found in several places. Several portions of the pavements are now in the British Museum, a very fine one containing the head of Neptune. The part of the field in which the villa was found is called the Old Town, or Withington-upon-Wall Well, from a fine spring so named which rises near it. The walls of the building were mostly 1 foot 8 inches thick, of different heights up to four feet. They were all built of local stone, plastered on the inside, and painted with stripes of different colours. The eastern part of the building contained the hypocaust, the dimensions of which were 27 feet 6 inches by 19 feet.

-- Description from the Archaeological Handbook of the County of Gloucester by George Witts, published by G Norman, Clarence Street, Cheltenham (1882?). Available online at: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/
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Villas.html

Time Team came to Withington as a result of moles. Or at least it did so because of the fragments of Roman tile and tesserae (mosaic pieces) that mole activity was continually turning up on part of the site. Local archaeologist Roger Box called in the Team to investigate what the moles were disturbing.

There were two distinct areas of investigation: the lower site, in the area formerly known as Withington-upon-Wall Well, and the upper villa site that was originally excavated at the beginning of the 19th century by Samuel Lysons. The objectives of Time Team's visit were to find out what lay beneath the surface on the lower site; and to further investigate and identify the exact location of the Lysons villa. Since the villa is a scheduled site, excavations there were subject to a strict 'project design' and limitations on the extent of trenches.

This proved to be a difficult site, stretching Time Team's resources to the limit as the Team tried to focus on the two principal objectives in turn. The geophysics surveys on the villa site were disappointing but spectacular on the lower site, enabling Time Team geofizz expert John Gater to enjoy a moment of triumph over Phil when he correctly identified the remains that formed the centre of the excavation as those of a former bath house plunge pool. (Phil had become convinced that he was digging a quarry that had been infilled with debris containing Roman stone, tiles and tesserae.)

The Team also uncovered a number of walls, hypocaust features and mosaics still in situ – though none were as fine as those originally discovered by Samuel Lysons. All of these were reburied at the end of the dig, so that they will be preserved for future generations of archaeologists, who may have the resources to investigate this extensive and complex site in greater detail.

Identifying the precise location of the villa excavated by Samuel Lysons involved a number of approaches. These included geophysics, which proved inconclusive, and the use of floor plans, a watercolour showing part of the Lysons dig and other information from Lysons' notes. Eventually, after a number of investigative trenches had been tried, one turned up trumps, enabling the Team to match what they had uncovered on the ground with Lysons' floor plans.

The whole site had clearly been part of an extensive villa complex, with various phases of building. The latest of these dated from the mid to late fourth century AD, but early finds on the lower site suggested that there may have been Roman occupation here since the first century AD.

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