Listercombe Bottom is the site of a small Romano-British villa situated in a sheltered Cotswold combe roughly 2.5 km southeast of the major villa complex at Chedworth, on the dipslope of the Cotswold scarp. First noted around 1760 and partially investigated in 1930, the site appears to represent a modest rural establishment most likely active between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD, in line with the broader pattern of villa occupation in this part of Gloucestershire.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa forms part of the unusually dense cluster of rural estates around Chedworth, Withington, Yanworth and Compton Abdale, an area whose wealth in the later Roman period was tied to sheep-rearing, arable farming and possibly a connection to the imperial estate or cult complex at Chedworth itself. As such, Listercombe is significant less as an individual monument than as one component of a tightly packed agrarian landscape supplying nearby Corinium Dobunnorum (Cirencester).
Recorded details are limited: the 18th-century discovery and the 1930 work produced evidence of building remains, tesserae and Roman pottery, but no plan of the structure has been published in detail and the site has not been subject to modern open-area excavation. Its full extent, internal arrangement and chronology therefore remain poorly characterised, and most interpretation rests on analogy with better
Listercombe Bottom is the site of a small Romano-British villa situated in a sheltered Cotswold combe roughly 2.5 km southeast of the major villa complex at Chedworth, on the dipslope of the Cotswold scarp. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Listercombe Bottom 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 Chedworth Woods Roman temple (1.8 km), Chedworth (2.4 km), Round barrow N of Chedworth Roman villa (2.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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