Ancient history continues to surface in England, as the only Roman villa known to have stood in the country’s Chalke Valley has come to light.

The villa was discovered after metal detectorists alerted Wiltshire firm Teffont Archaeology to a high number of finds in the area. These were being reported to Salisbury Museum, around ten miles away from the Chalke Valley, and new discoveries from the dig will be donated to the museum after they have been analyzed.

The team that unearthed the villa was made up of both professional archaeologists and 60 local volunteers who, according to the pros, did a “fantastic job.” The dig took place over two weeks in October, led in partnership with Cardiff University and funded by the National Heritage Lottery Fund through the Cranborne Chase National Landscape’s Chase & Chalke Landscape Partnership Scheme. Cranborne Chase is a protected “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” that crosses over four counties in the region and encompasses over 380 square miles of ecologically and historically significant land, including the Chalke Valley.

Image courtesy of Teffont Archaeology.

Chalke Valley has been occupied since the Bronze Age, and the region, in southwest England, was home to multiple Roman settlements. The River Chalke, a tributary of the River Ebble, runs through the valley. The villa walls were constructed from local flint mined nearby, and its roof tiles were made from limestone.

The villa measured around 115 feet long and featured grand columns, decorative mosaics, and murals, as well as a barn and a bathhouse that may have had an outdoor pool. The villa also boasted a hypocaust (an underground heating system powered by a furnace, which moved heat into the walls and floor through a series of pipes), a caldarium (a room with a heated plunge pool), and a tepidarium (a room containing lukewarm bathing water).

David Roberts, the co-director of the dig and senior lecturer in Roman archaeology and history at Cardiff University, told the BBC that “the site was likely the center of a significant estate in the later Roman period, and its owners must have extracted a great deal of labor and surplus from the local farming communities to fund their luxury lifestyle.”

Denise Wilding, a freelance archaeologist in charge of the dig, told the BBC that “they’ve put some time and money into making it quite a nice place to be.”

“The owners of the Chalke Valley villa were likely local, but over time successive generations had become part of a wider network of the Roman elite, and had used their wealth to invest in Roman material culture,” according to a statement by Teffont.

Image courtesy of Teffont Archaeology.

Britain was part of the Roman Empire between the 1st and early 5th centuries C.E., following the Roman invasion of 43 C.E. by the emperor Claudius. High-ranking members of Roman British society would have gone to great lengths to demonstrate their cultural ties to Rome, something which Wilding said the owners of this villa, whom she described as “local elites,” were “clearly trying” to do.

The stone buildings were discovered several years ago, but the work conducted this October discovered the purpose of each of the buildings and unearthed luxurious details, including painted plaster on the walls and a mosaic on the villa floor. The villa’s mosaics were made in a “latchkey meander” style, a design that was common for Roman villas discovered in the south and southwest of Britain.

Teffont said the firm was “proud of the work the Chase and Chalke volunteers have carried out on this excavation run by Teffont Archaeology, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. They have made an important contribution to our wider understanding of life in Roman Wiltshire.”

In April, around 60 miles away from the Chalke Valley, in Oxfordshire, archaeologists discovered another Roman villa complex that also featured a hypocaust system. Artifacts discovered on the site, unearthed during a housing development project, included jewelry, mosaic tiles, lead scrolls, and a hoard of Roman coins.

Image courtesy of Teffont Archaeology.