The Chatley Farm bath house, near Cobham in Surrey, is a small detached late Roman bath suite excavated in 1942 by S.S. Frere and dated principally to the 4th century, with construction likely in the early-to-mid 4th century and use continuing into the later part of that century. It comprised the standard sequence of cold, warm and hot rooms with a hypocaust and a small plunge bath, serving what was probably a modest villa or farmstead estate beside the River Mole.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is significant as a clearly late example of a rural bath house in the North Downs/Mole valley landscape, an area of dispersed villa estates south-west of Londinium, illustrating the persistence of Romanised domestic amenities into the 4th century in a relatively unremarkable agricultural setting.
Frere's excavation (published in the Surrey Archaeological Collections, 1949) revealed flint-and-mortar walls, surviving hypocaust pilae, fragments of painted wall plaster and a coin and pottery assemblage that anchored the chronology firmly in the 4th century; the associated villa building itself was not located, and the site has seen no major subsequent excavation.
The Chatley Farm bath house, near Cobham in Surrey, is a small detached late Roman bath suite excavated in 1942 by S.S. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a bath house site from the Roman period in Britain.
Late Roman bath house at Chatley Farm is classified as a Roman bath house — 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 Ashtead Roman villa (8.9 km), Old Manor House (site of) W of Roman Catholic church, Sutton Park (10.1 km), Roman camp, Matthew Arnold School's playing field, Staines (11.6 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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