Farnham lies in the upper Wey valley of west Surrey, an area of dispersed Romano-British rural settlement on the greensand and chalk margins. The villa here appears to have been a modest farmstead-villa of the type common in the Surrey/north Hampshire borderland, likely occupied from the 2nd to 4th centuries AD, though its full plan and chronology are not well established.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of a notable cluster of villas and pottery-producing settlements in the Farnham–Alice Holt area, lying close to the Alice Holt/Wey kiln complex which supplied much of London and the south-east with greyware from the later 1st century through the 4th. Its significance is primarily economic, tied to this regional pottery industry and to agricultural exploitation of the Wey valley, rather than to any major road or administrative centre.
Roman material from the Farnham district — including building debris, tile, coins, and pottery — has been recovered in antiquarian and 20th-century finds (notably documented in the work of A. G. Wade and the Farnham Museum collections), but no comprehensive modern excavation of the villa structure itself has been published. As such, details of plan, mosaics, or bath-suite are not securely known for this specific site.
Farnham lies in the upper Wey valley of west Surrey, an area of dispersed Romano-British rural settlement on the greensand and chalk margins. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Farnham is classified as a Roman villa — a civilian site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Roman site, Roman Way estate (1.4 km), Alice Holt Forest, Romano-British kiln sites (7.7 km), Romano-Celtic temple complex 385m west of Long Common (8.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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