Large Roman villa found in England
When I was a newlywed my husband and I took a trip to Europe, spending most of our time in England and France. It was the 70s, and Europe (and the world) was a lot less crowded and traveling not particularly hectic compared to today. We rented a car and drove around the countryside in a leisurely fashion (that is, my husband drove around—I was the happy passenger) wherever the mood took us.
I had studied my history, and so of course I knew that long ago the Romans had gotten around those parts rather extensively. But what I’d never realized, probably because I’d never thought about it, was how much of a mark they left. Roman ruins were all over the place, almost wherever you drove in the countryside, standing in their classic splendor and reminding us of antiquity. In New England we’ve got some old buildings, but nothing quite like that.
And so I find this news very exciting:
It started off as a bit of basic home improvement, but it ended up with the discovery of one of the largest Roman Villas ever found in the UK.
While laying an electricity cable beneath the grounds of his home, near the village of Tisbury, in Wiltshire, Luke Irwin found the remains of what appeared to be an ornate Roman Mosaic.
But what emerged when archaeologists from Historic England and Salisbury Museum began excavating the site was even more of a surprise.
They found the mosaic was part of the floor of a much larger Roman property, similar in size and structure to the great Roman villa at Chedworth.
But in a move that will surprise many, the remains ”“ some of the most important to be found in decades – have now been re-buried, as Historic England cannot afford to fully excavate and preserve such an extensive site.
That last sentence is less exciting. But perhaps some day—
Take a look at how elaborate the villa was, and how it wouldn’t look so out of place today were it to be reconstructed:
The Britons who remained after the Romans gradually left did not favor that type of housing – neither the houses themselves nor how the population was organised around them. Many of them thus were just left empty, with weather, flora, and fauna overtaking them and obscuring them. The roads that led to them were usually abandoned as well, as they no longer went anywhere that people wanted to go, unless they overlapped with some other favored route from hamlet to hamlet. Other invasions from the North and West of Europe were used to similar organisations of villages or defended areas rather than open unprotected low-lying villas, and settled in similar fashion to the previous occupants. They intermarried with them more as well. The Roman Occupation really was a superimposed society, separate from its surroundings.
What once was tall and strong
now lies in ruins, forgotten
these many millenia.
What once symbolized the power
and glory that was mighty Rome,
now but a barn’s floor.
How transitory is youth’s arrogance
vainly imagining itself to be eternal,
forever in denial of its certain fate.
Yet what choice do we have
but to build anew, forever
at war with time’s entropy?
That is youth’s mission, rarely ever understood
to renew civilization and keep barbarism
from our hearth’s door.
A LOT of the ancient structures were leveled by way of the Viking.
Major houses // estates were magnets for Viking raiders.
Hence, their wholesale abandonment once it became clear that the Vikings just could not be stopped.
&&&&
The famous Roman roads have since been revealed to be overlays of Celtic roads of ancient origin — both in France and Eastern Germany.
Astonishingly, the Celtic road could be discovered by merely digging a further meter down into the ground.
It’s now known that the Roman’s advance and conquest basically always followed gold mining. Germany had no gold deposits, whereas France, Spain, England and Romania all had significant gold mines in antiquity.
The Spanish and Romanian and English works are now destinations — for the technological tourist.
“In New England we’ve got some old buildings, but nothing quite like that.”
There’s an old saying: “One of the differences between Europeans and Americans is that Americans think 200 years is old, and Europeans think 200 miles is a long way.”
A metaphor for our times:
“the remains — some of the most important to be found in decades — have now been re-buried, as Historic England cannot afford to fully excavate and preserve such an extensive site.”
Re-buried. Right.
And delete all references as to location, because the coming muslim hordes will dig it up and destroy anything tied to Rome.
Britain doesn’t have the money to excavate this site? How about handing some of the hundreds of thousands (millions?) on the dole brooms and spades and tell them to start — carefully — digging?
Not enough money? Unreal. It’s not like socialist governments aren’t frittering away trillions (UK-style) in spending on horrid things. This is like buying truckloads of scratchy brown sweaters (jumpers!) instead of a beautiful satin gown scattered with diamonds….
The archeologists should do a few fund-raising galas and see if they can attract some well-heeled patrons of the arts. SOMEbody must have the money for this!
Geoffrey Britain Says:
April 18th, 2016 at 3:13 pm
What once was tall and strong
now lies in ruins, forgotten
these many millenia.
What once symbolized the power
and glory that was mighty Rome,
now but a barn’s floor.
..
****
That was a lovely poem.
***
Roy Says:
April 18th, 2016 at 5:16 pm..
There’s an old saying: “One of the differences between Europeans and Americans is that Americans think 200 years is old, and Europeans think 200 miles is a long way.”
*** So true!
Actually leaving Roman mosaics buried is standard archaeological practice, because it’s the best way to preserve them. But it’s customary over here to conclude every news story with the pious regret that the Government is not spending more money on something. It’s like saying “Bless you” when somebody sneezes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ruin
The needy! The hurting! The vulnerable! The unloved! The sexually dissatisfied and under-appreciated! And you want to spend precious social funds and capital on selfish knowledge? Our children! Our children! Make all welcome! All!! Alllllllllll!
Yeah, things are tight all over.
There is, to paraphrase that great Canadian patriot, socialist bureaucrat and hand-wringing opportunist, the former Governor of Michigan, Jennifer Granholm, “There is soooo much human need … we have to decide what kind of people we are. Sniff sniff”
Sad for the property owners..
they cant build
they cant modify the land
they wont get a cent for anything found
and no one will want their property, so they cant sell
When the New Islamic Party comes to power, money will be found to uncover the antiquities that they may be methodically destroyed.
The funnier thing is that despite all the hoopla on how pollution is killing the planet, you can barely find traces of prior civilizations who littered more than we do… oh, you can find large piles of bones and so on, but nary much of anything else… same with us… or havent you noticed no one has found much bakelite surviving the ages.. even the pyramids are dissolving in a reality in which permanent is just a concept with no reality in reality
On a lighter note …an early wedding tale.
We honeymooned at a manor in Wales (many years ago) outside Talgarth, and one of the almost visceral delights was driving around the country side (on the wrong side of the road! – an adventure on its own), and coming around a bend, and seeing …a castle, lit by the evening rays through breaking clouds. Often.
(There was an 11th century motte and baily tower out our window – Bronllys Tower – which wasn’t as impressive as the Arthurian castles we came across, but was still pretty damn cool lol.)
The feeling of turning a bend and seeing a structure that Man had built a thousand and more years before never got old.
Anyways. In our travels about the Welsh country-side, we also visited the Roman era ruins at Isca …also called Caerleon.
Yeah. Camelot. The real one (well, maybe …whatever: good enough for me).
…pretty neat experience right there for this child of Okies (with one branch of forebears who’d walked to North America) who’d barely been anywhere at all ever before besides Cali’.
I bring it up to say: the Brits have plenty of Roman sites that are open to the public. They’re not rare. The island is immersed in history and legend and you can be surrounded by it.
So kudos to them for covering up a site until they have the funds to do it right. I don’t think I’d fault them o’er much about keeping the site pristine during the interim.
blert Says: A LOT of the ancient structures were leveled by way of the Viking.
not valid.. sorry…
the area is in the wessex part, way to the west of london, and wasnt even in the danes area… though there were burhs in the area, this was not one of them
Burghal Hidage
they built UP the areas not buried them..
and your talking 700 to 800 years apart…
ceasar invaded england in 50BC…
The fortifications after daneslaw were 800AD…
by 410 they withdrew…
The English conquest of the district now known as Wiltshire began in 552 AD with the victory of Saxon Cynric over the native Britons at Old Sarum, by which the way was opened to Salisbury Plain.
By the 9th century the district had acquired a definite administrative and territorial organisation, Walstan, ealdorman of the Wilsaetan, being mentioned as early as 800 as repelling an attempted invasion by the Mercians. Moreover, Wiltunscire is mentioned by Asser in 878, in which year the Danes established their headquarters at Chippenham and remained there a year, plundering the surrounding country. In the time of Athelstan mints existed at Old Sarum, Malmesbury, Wilton, Cricklade and Marlborough. Wilton and Salisbury were destroyed by the Danish invaders under Sweyn I of Denmark in 1003, and in 1015 the district was harried by Canute.
List of Roman villas in England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_villas_in_England
usually people just built over them… often taking parts of them for local housing once abandoned long enough. nothing more complicated than that… in this case, they were probably buried for aesthetic reasons given that prior to the modern era people had little respect for ancient grounds and areas of rubble.
heck… want to know where the missing parts of the collesium are? they are all around the area as people took marble and stone and used that as part of their foundations.
under london and other cities are huge vaults of properties that they just built over… this is expecially so in france where these ways used to be used. WWII forced lots of them to be boarded up and separated rather than connected as they were, often with bars and warehouses so that deliveries happened underground privately and were harder to rob.
The Britons, within a few generations, had been exposed to urban institutions and facilities that would have been unthinkable before the invasion. For rural people in parts of the remote north their world had now become overrun with forts and roads that carved up the landscape and transformed it into a part of an economic and social system that stretched to Egypt, and even further beyond. Even Chinese silk made it to Colchester. The most obscure locations had access to the Roman economic system. In parts of the southwest, Scotland, Northumberland and Cumbria there would be nothing like this again until the arrival of the railways in the nineteenth century.
This is absolutely no exaggeration. The Roman ‘achievement’ was unparalleled in the ancient world and would have been remarkable by any historical standards until electricity and mechanization arrived. Britain in many respects is where the results were most dramatic, simply because there was so little to build on in the first place
The Boudican Revolt offered only chaos and disorder. (so much for being a feminist hero)
the bulk of the population found it easy enough to accept an alternative that offered stability, security and economic well-being. Most people prefer governments that protect them from violent deaths and which create a sense of stability in an uncertain world. It is easy to say the Britons had no choice, but this credits Rome with the ability to impose and sustain brutal oppression without quarter. This is simply not true. The Roman army was not big enough to do that, however large the garrison of Britain, and nor did the Roman government consider this a desirable way to rule. Inclusion through patronage, however insidious and cynical, was the way Rome maintained her power, not by the sword.
When the theatre at St Albans fell out of use and became a rubbish dump in the late fourth century, it did so probably because the outlawing of paganism made it a redundant part of town life and not because town life had fallen apart.
Owners run out of money, people run out of skills, property is abandoned, pieces are taken for other things, dirt is put on them to form a new foundation for new buildings, and so on and so forth…
not as romantic as viking seiges, but this is how it is ALL over the world mostly… even the great roman and greek buildings were not destroyed by even WWI or WWII… they just sat around and rotted… their stones being taken for foundations, others being cut up for gravestones… others left to sit
in fact, you might notice that the things that survived tended to be too big to fill in, or on hills, in which you had to dismantle and level the land, not heap crap on it to level it then rebuild.
its all economic… to cover something and rebuild is cheap and the prior edifices often add a strength to the new… whole cities have done this.. (heck, a few egyptian cities were wholly moved)… however, when on a hill, you now had to remove stuff. that took money and resources away from what was being built and it was easier just to build someplace else without that cost.
same in newark or detroit.. an empty cleared lot will more likely have something rebuilt on it than one with a rotting building that requires expense before you can even start.
the way the palestinians destroyed the green houses that israel left them is a great example… the new residents could not operate or maintain, so they just tore them apart… left the crap in place then whined how they didnt live as well as the isrealis.