The Keston mausoleum is a circular, drum-shaped masonry tomb built in the early-to-mid 3rd century CE within a small roadside cemetery serving the Keston villa estate in north-west Kent. The structure consisted of a circular flint and mortar wall roughly 8–9 m in external diameter, reinforced externally by six buttresses, almost certainly supporting a solid tower or tumulus-like superstructure in the tradition of monumental Romano-Celtic family tombs.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
It is one of the best-preserved and most architecturally ambitious rural mausolea known from Roman Britain, indicating the wealth and social pretension of the villa-owning family on the fringes of Londinium. Together with a smaller adjacent rectangular tomb and several cremation burials, it shows a planned funerary precinct of the kind more commonly associated with continental estates.
Excavated by Brian Philp and the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit between the 1960s and 1990s, the site produced the circular tomb's foundations and buttresses, a smaller square mausoleum nearby, tile- and lead-lined cremation burials, and later inhumations. Grave goods were modest — pottery vessels, glass, and coins — but the architectural remains themselves, now consolidated and displayed in situ, are the principal find.
The Keston mausoleum is a circular, drum-shaped masonry tomb built in the early-to-mid 3rd century CE within a small roadside cemetery serving the Keston villa estate in north-west Kent. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a tomb site from the Roman period in Britain.
Keston Roman Mausoleum is classified as a Roman tomb — 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 Keston (0 km), Lower Warbank Roman Villa (0.2 km), Romano-British site, Wickham Court Farm, West Wickham (3.1 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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