Lockington is the site of a Romano-British villa in north-west Leicestershire, active in the third and fourth centuries A.D., situated in the Trent valley near the confluence with the Soar. The villa lay adjacent to an earlier indigenous (Iron Age/Romano-British native) settlement visible as cropmarks, suggesting continuity of occupation from pre-Roman use of the landscape into the later Roman period.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site illustrates the typical pattern in the East Midlands whereby a Roman-style villa was established alongside, or developed from, a native farmstead, indicating the gradual Romanisation of a productive agricultural landscape within the territory of the Corieltauvi. Its position in the fertile gravels of the middle Trent valley, near the Fosse Way corridor and the small town at Sawley/Red Hill, suggests it formed part of a network of rural estates supplying regional markets.
Knowledge of the villa derives largely from aerial photography and cropmark survey rather than extensive excavation, with the indigenous enclosure complex and villa building both identified from the air; associated work in the wider Lockington area (notably the Bronze Age gold hoard and Iron Age finds) has clarified the longer landscape context, but detailed structural, ceramic, or mosaic evidence specific to the villa itself is limited in the published record.
Lockington is the site of a Romano-British villa in north-west Leicestershire, active in the third and fourth centuries A.D., situated in the Trent valley near the confluence with the Soar. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Lockington 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 Roman villa and enclosures N of Ratcliffe Lane (2.1 km), Roman fort 200yds (182m) E of All Saints' Church (3.6 km), Red Hill Roman Temple (3.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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