Low Ham is a small courtyard villa in central Somerset, occupied principally in the fourth century A.D. (with construction phases reaching back into the third century) and abandoned probably by the early fifth. It comprised a modest residential range with an attached bath suite, set in the fertile lowlands south of the Polden Hills, and belongs to the dense cluster of late Romano-British villas in the Ilchester (Lindinis) hinterland.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa is celebrated for the Low Ham mosaic, a mid-fourth-century pavement from the frigidarium depicting scenes from Books I and IV of Virgil's Aeneid — Aeneas, Dido, Venus and Cupid — making it one of the very few Romano-British mosaics with a narrative literary programme. It demonstrates the wealth, classical literacy and self-conscious Romanitas of the late villa-owning elite of the Somerset civitas territory, and is generally attributed to a regional workshop linked to the so-called Durnovarian school based at Dorchester.
The villa was identified in 1938, with the principal excavations of the bath-house by C. A. Raleigh Radford and others in 1945–46 recovering the Aeneid mosaic (now displayed at the Museum of Somerset, Taunton) along with other tessellated floors, hypocaust elements and finds consistent with a moderately appointed fourth-century residence. The full plan of the court
Low Ham is a small courtyard villa in central Somerset, occupied principally in the fourth century A.D. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Low Ham 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 Low Ham Roman villa (0.5 km), Pitney (2.1 km), High Ham (2.2 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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