Lockleys is a small Romano-British villa near Welwyn, Hertfordshire, built around AD 60–70 directly over a Late Iron Age Belgic farmstead, demonstrating continuity of settlement across the Conquest. The villa went through five structural phases from the later first to the fourth century CE, beginning as a modest rectangular cottage-type house with a corridor and projecting wings and being progressively enlarged and remodelled.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Lockleys is significant for showing the rapid Romanisation of a native farmstead in the territory of the Catuvellauni, just south of Verulamium, and as one of the type-sites for the development of the simple "winged corridor" villa in lowland Britain.
Excavated by J.B. Ward-Perkins in 1937, the site revealed Belgic huts and ditches sealed beneath the Roman building, the successive villa plans, painted wall plaster, tessellated floors, and pottery spanning the full Roman period. The sequence Ward-Perkins published became a standard reference for villa development in the Verulamium hinterland, though the site was only partially excavated and has not been subject to large-scale modern re-investigation.
Lockleys is a small Romano-British villa near Welwyn, Hertfordshire, built around AD 60–70 directly over a Late Iron Age Belgic farmstead, demonstrating continuity of settlement across the Conquest. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Lockleys 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 Welwyn (0.6 km), Lockleys Roman villa (0.7 km), Roman barrow and Bronze Age bowl barrow in Graffridge Wood, 250m east of Wintergreen Cottages (4.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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