Lee's Rest Earthwork lies in the wooded landscape of Wychwood Forest in west Oxfordshire, roughly 4km south-east of Charlbury, and consists of a small rectilinear enclosure interpreted as a Romano-Celtic temple precinct. Like other rural shrines in this region, it is likely to have been active from the later 1st or 2nd century AD through to the 4th century, serving a dispersed rural population in the Cotswold-edge countryside.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of a notable cluster of Romano-British religious and rural settlement activity within Wychwood Forest, which also includes the temple complex at North Leigh and various villa estates; such forest-edge shrines often marked boundaries, springs, or routeways and integrated indigenous cult with Roman religious architecture. It is one of several scheduled earthworks demonstrating the persistence of Celtic religious traditions under Roman administration in this part of the Dobunni/Catuvellauni borderland.
The site is known principally from its surviving earthworks — a low banked enclosure with traces of internal structures consistent with a typical concentric Romano-Celtic temple plan (cella within an ambulatory) — rather than from modern excavation. No substantial published excavation record exists, and the identification rests largely on morphology, surface finds, and comparison with better-investigated temples such as those at Woodeaton and Frilford in Oxfordshire.
Lee's Rest Earthwork lies in the wooded landscape of Wychwood Forest in west Oxfordshire, roughly 4km south-east of Charlbury, and consists of a small rectilinear enclosure interpreted as a Romano-Celtic temple precinct. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a temple site from the Roman period in Britain.
Lee's Rest Earthwork: a probable Romano-Celtic temple 200m north east of Lee's Rest Farm is classified as a Roman temple — a religious 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 Ditchley (2.2 km), Ditchley Park Roman villa and part of an associated field system 450m ENE of Lodge Farm (2.2 km), Fawler Roman villa (2.6 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Lee's Rest Earthwork: a probable Romano-Celtic temple 200m north east of Lee's Rest Farm