Huntsham is a Romano-British villa situated on a low terrace within a meander of the River Wye, just east of Goodrich in Herefordshire. The site was occupied from at least the 2nd century into the 4th century AD, developing from earlier Iron Age and timber-phase activity into a modest masonry winged-corridor villa typical of the lower Wye valley.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa lay within the hinterland of the iron-producing settlement at Ariconium (Weston-under-Penyard) and likely participated in the regional economy of the Forest of Dean iron industry, as well as exploiting fertile riverside arable and pasture. Its position close to the conjectured Blestium (Monmouth) to Ariconium road placed it in a well-connected rural landscape on the western fringe of the civitas of the Dobunni or Silures.
Excavations by Bridgewater and later Taylor in the 1960s and 1980s revealed a rectangular stone-built range with associated outbuildings, hypocaust fragments, painted wall plaster, and a substantial assemblage of pottery, iron slag and animal bone indicating mixed farming alongside some iron working. Finds of late Roman coinage and Black Burnished and Severn Valley wares confirm occupation continuing into the later 4th century, though no full structural plan has been published.
Huntsham is a Romano-British villa situated on a low terrace within a meander of the River Wye, just east of Goodrich in Herefordshire. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Huntsham 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 Ariconium (7.6 km), Blestium (9.7 km), Roman Villa at Clearwell Farm (11.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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