The Litlington villa lies on the chalk downland of south Cambridgeshire, near the modern village of Litlington close to the Ashwell–Royston area. It appears to have been a modest Romano-British villa estate active broadly from the 2nd to the 4th century AD, set within a productive agricultural landscape on the Icknield Way corridor.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of a notable cluster of villas and rural settlements along the chalk belt of north Hertfordshire and south Cambridgeshire, an economically productive zone supplying grain and other agricultural goods, and lying within the hinterland of the small Roman towns at Baldock and Great Chesterford.
The site is best known for the Litlington Roman cemetery discovered in 1821 in Limlow Hill field, where a walled cemetery enclosure produced cremations, inhumations, glass vessels, and other grave goods, indicating an associated villa estate nearby; structural remains of the villa itself are less fully recorded, with most evidence coming from antiquarian discovery rather than modern excavation.
The Litlington villa lies on the chalk downland of south Cambridgeshire, near the modern village of Litlington close to the Ashwell–Royston area. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Litlington 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 Guilden Morden (3.4 km), Roman villa 1000yds (910m) NE of Ashwell village (4.1 km), Arrington Bridge Romano-British site (5.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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