The High Wycombe villa, situated in the Wye valley at the foot of the Chiltern dip-slope, was a modest winged-corridor villa active from the later 2nd century into the 4th century AD. It belonged to the dense network of small to middling rural estates that occupied the well-watered valleys of southern Buckinghamshire, exploiting arable land on the river terraces and the surrounding chalk downland.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site lay within the economic hinterland of Verulamium and on routes connecting the Thames valley with the Chilterns, contributing to the agricultural surplus that supplied those markets. It is one of a cluster of Chiltern-edge villas (with Saunderton, Hambleden, and Yewden) that illustrate the relatively prosperous Romano-British countryside of the region.
Excavations in the 1950s and 1960s recorded a masonry building with a bath suite, tessellated floors, painted wall plaster, and a hypocaust, along with coins and pottery indicating occupation from c. AD 170 through the 4th century. Evidence for an earlier timber phase was noted, but the full plan and extent of the estate remain only partially understood.
The High Wycombe villa, situated in the Wye valley at the foot of the Chiltern dip-slope, was a modest winged-corridor villa active from the later 2nd century into the 4th century AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
High Wycombe 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 Saunderton (7.4 km), Roman villa east of Lodge Hill Farm (9.1 km), Hurley Priory: A moated Benedictine priory and fishponds and the remains of Ladye Place Mansion (9.7 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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