Icklingham, on the River Lark in the Suffolk Breckland, was a small Roman settlement active from the 1st through 4th centuries AD, with peak activity in the later Roman period. It appears to have functioned as a minor nucleated settlement or "small town" serving a fertile agricultural hinterland on the edge of the Fen margin, possibly connected to the Icknield Way and routes linking Cambridge with the East Anglian coast.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Icklingham is notable chiefly for its evidence of late Roman Christianity: it has produced lead tanks and a possible church or baptistery structure, making it one of a small group of East Anglian sites (alongside Hinton St Mary further afield and Water Newton) central to debates about Christianisation in 4th-century Britain. Its location also places it within the wealthy late Roman landscape of the Lark valley, near the major Mildenhall treasure findspot.
Excavations by Stanley West and others have revealed buildings including a rectangular structure interpreted as a church with associated cemetery (east-west burials in lead coffins), two lead tanks bearing Chi-Rho symbols, and substantial assemblages of coins, metalwork, and pottery. The site has also suffered heavily from illicit metal-detecting, with significant quantities of artefacts — including bronze figurines and a notable hoard — having entered private and museum collections through unrecorded discovery.
Icklingham, on the River Lark in the Suffolk Breckland, was a small Roman settlement active from the 1st through 4th centuries AD, with peak activity in the later Roman period. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Icklingham is classified as a Roman settlement — 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 ‘Camborico’? (1.5 km), Mildenhall Roman site (11.8 km), Red Castle: a medieval ringwork castle overlying Mid-Saxon and early medieval churches, Romano-British, Saxon and medieval settlement remains, and a Late Saxon town ditch (13.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
Aubrey Research generates detailed historical reports for any location in Britain, incorporating Roman heritage, Domesday Book records, scheduled monument data, archaeological finds and much more. Enter a nearby address to begin.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any address in Britain — drawing on Roman heritage, Domesday records, scheduled monument data, archaeological finds and medieval history to reveal the complete story of a landscape.
Research the area around Icklingham