Lower Warbank, near Keston in the London Borough of Bromley, was a Romano-British villa estate occupied from the later 1st century AD into the 4th century, developing over an earlier Iron Age settlement on the dip slope of the North Downs. The site comprised a modest aisled/winged villa building with associated agricultural ranges and, most distinctively, a substantial walled cemetery containing two circular mausolea and a rectangular tomb, indicating a landowning family of some standing.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa sits within the dense pattern of agricultural estates supplying Londinium, lying close to the road south from the provincial capital, and its monumental funerary complex makes it one of the more significant villa cemeteries in the South-East. The tombstone RIB 3025, recovered here, provides rare epigraphic evidence for the inhabitants of a rural Kentish villa.
Excavations by Brian Philp and the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit from the 1960s onward exposed the main circular mausoleum (still partly upstanding, with massive flint walls and external buttresses), a smaller circular tomb, the rectangular tomb, and traces of the villa buildings, along with Iron Age round-houses beneath. Finds include cremation burials, coinage spanning the Roman period, pottery, and the inscribed funerary fragment RIB 3025; the cemetery enclosure and main mausoleum remain visible as a sc
Lower Warbank, near Keston in the London Borough of Bromley, was a Romano-British villa estate occupied from the later 1st century AD into the 4th century, developing over an earlier Iron Age settlement on the dip slope of the North Downs. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Lower Warbank 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 Keston Roman Mausoleum (0.2 km), Keston (0.2 km), Romano-British site, Wickham Court Farm, West Wickham (2.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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