Little Weldon is a Roman villa in north-east Northamptonshire, located on the limestone uplands near Corby, occupied broadly from the later 1st or 2nd century into the 4th century AD. It is notable for its unusual plan: rather than the typical winged-corridor or courtyard form, excavations revealed a substantial aisled building with an attached bath suite, suggesting a working farm establishment that combined accommodation, storage, and processing under one roof.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa sits within a dense cluster of Roman rural settlement in the Welland and Nene valleys, an agriculturally productive zone supplying grain and likely benefiting from proximity to the major road network and the ironstone industry of the Rockingham Forest area. Its aisled form places it among a regionally distinctive group (compared with sites like Stanwick and Cosgrove) representing prosperous but functionally oriented estate centres rather than elite display villas.
Excavations in the 1950s by Greenfield, and re-examination of the site in subsequent decades, identified the aisled building (c. 35 m long), with internal partitions, a hypocausted room, and an associated bathhouse, together with pottery, coins, and tesserae indicating moderate-status finishes. Detailed phasing remains imperfectly published, and no major recent open-area excavation has refined the chronology.
Little Weldon is a Roman villa in north-east Northamptonshire, located on the limestone uplands near Corby, occupied broadly from the later 1st or 2nd century into the 4th century AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Little Weldon Roman villa 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 Great Weldon (0.4 km), Brigstock (4.8 km), Roman road in Hazel Wood (5.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
Aubrey Research generates detailed historical reports for any location in Britain, incorporating Roman heritage, Domesday Book records, scheduled monument data, archaeological finds and much more. Enter a nearby address to begin.
Aubrey generates in-depth historical research for any address in Britain — drawing on Roman heritage, Domesday records, scheduled monument data, archaeological finds and medieval history to reveal the complete story of a landscape.
Research the area around Little Weldon Roman villa