The Frilford villa was a modest 12-room rural residence in the Upper Thames Valley, situated near the better-known Romano-Celtic temple complex and settlement at Frilford/Marcham. Likely occupied from the 2nd through 4th centuries AD, it formed part of the dispersed agricultural landscape characteristic of villa development in the Vale of the White Horse and Oxfordshire region.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Its proximity to the Frilford religious and "small town" complex — one of the most important rural cult centres in southern Britain, with a Romano-Celtic temple, amphitheatre, and ritual focus of pre-Roman origin — suggests the villa's owners may have had economic or social ties to that nucleated settlement, supplying it or drawing wealth from its activity.
The villa was excavated in 1884 by an antiquarian campaign typical of the period, recording a 12-room plan but with limited stratigraphic or dating detail by modern standards; specific finds, mosaic or hypocaust details, and chronology are poorly published. The wider Frilford landscape has since seen significant modern investigation (notably the Marcham/Frilford project of the early 2000s), but the 1884 villa itself has not been the subject of major re-excavation.
The Frilford villa was a modest 12-room rural residence in the Upper Thames Valley, situated near the better-known Romano-Celtic temple complex and settlement at Frilford/Marcham. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Frilford 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 Sutton Courtenay (6.7 km), Barton Court Farm (6.8 km), Gravelly Guy (9.1 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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