Great Tew is the site of a Romano-British villa in north Oxfordshire, lying in the Cotswold fringe between the Akeman Street corridor and the upper Cherwell valley. Like other villas in this region, it was likely established in the 2nd century and occupied into the 4th century, functioning as the residence and working centre of an estate exploiting the productive limestone-belt agricultural land.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of the dense cluster of villas in the northern Cotswolds and Oxfordshire uplands, an area of intensive estate-based agriculture supplying nearby small towns such as Alchester and the wider regional economy. It is not individually prominent, but contributes to the picture of a prosperous, heavily villa-occupied countryside in this part of Roman Britain.
Recorded finds include building debris, tesserae, and pottery indicative of a substantial masonry building with at least some tessellated flooring, but the villa has not been the subject of major modern excavation and its plan is not well established. Detailed published archaeology for Great Tew is limited, and most knowledge derives from antiquarian reports and surface scatters rather than systematic investigation.
Great Tew is the site of a Romano-British villa in north Oxfordshire, lying in the Cotswold fringe between the Akeman Street corridor and the upper Cherwell valley. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Great Tew 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 Beaconsfield Farm Roman villa (2.1 km), Wigginton Roman villa and Iron Age enclosure, 300m north east of the Church of St Giles (4.1 km), Romano-British rural settlement and Iron Age remains, on the eastern edge of Chipping Norton (7.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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