Broughton Roman Villa, Broughton Castle Estate, Oxfordshire

Oxford Archaeology, under the overall management of CgMs Heritage (part
of RPS), was commissioned by Martin Fiennes of the Broughton Castle Estate
to undertake a trial trench evaluation as part of an ongoing research project
aimed at investigating the remains of a Roman villa within arable farmland of
the Broughton Castle Estate.
The site was previously discovered in 2016 following research and field
investigation by Keith Westcott and the collection and locating of artefacts
from the ploughsoil using a metal detector. A geophysical survey was
commissioned in 2017 with the results indicating the presence of a large
courtyard villa.
Five trenches were excavated for this evaluation targeting a possible ditched
access track, the north, east and south ranges of the villa and a possible
detached aisled building to the south of the main complex. The
archaeological remains exposed in the trenches confirmed the results of the
geophysical survey, and demonstrated that ridges in the field that
correspond with the locations of the north and east ranges of the villa
represent the survival of complex stratigraphic sequences up to 0.7m thick.
The villa comprises a quadrangular courtyard c 85m square with ranges of
buildings on the north, east and south sides, and probably also on the west,
set around a central courtyard, although the west wing was not investigated
in this evaluation. It is therefore larger even than the villa at North Leigh (c
80m square), and represents the largest building of its type in Oxfordshire. It
is comparable with the large villa establishments that are characteristic of
the Roman period in the Cotswolds, such as Chedworth and other iconic
courtyard villas such as Bignor in Sussex, Brading on the Isle of Wight and
Woodchester. Placing a date on the construction and abandonment of the
complex is hampered by the small size of the excavated sample, as a result of
which the artefactual assemblage recovered was small and earlier phases
may have remained obscured beneath later deposits; however, the emphasis
of the pottery assemblage was on the later part of the Roman period, with
little evidence for activity before the middle of the 2nd century, and it has
been tentatively suggested that occupation was not intensive during the
later 4th century.
The Broughton villa thus represents a major addition to our knowledge of
Roman rural settlement in the region and beyond.