Park Street villa, located near St Albans (Verulamium) in Hertfordshire, was a modest Romano-British farmstead that developed from a late Iron Age timber and daub roundhouse occupation. The site saw a rectangular timber building erected in the mid-1st century AD (possibly disrupted by the Boudican revolt of AD 60/61), replaced by a small stone-founded winged-corridor villa in the late 1st or early 2nd century, with subsequent rebuilding and continued occupation into the 4th century.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa is significant for demonstrating clear continuity from a pre-Roman Belgic farmstead through to a Romanised stone villa, illustrating how indigenous landholders in the hinterland of Verulamium adopted Roman building forms while retaining their land. Its proximity to Verulamium places it within the suburban agricultural belt supplying the civitas capital of the Catuvellauni.
Excavations by Helen O'Neil (1943-45) revealed the main dwelling with cellar, hypocaust, and evidence of iron-working, while later work in 1954-57 by the Wheelers uncovered subsidiary buildings including a barn and an aisled structure. Finds included pottery spanning the full Roman period, coins, iron slag indicating on-site metalworking, and evidence of a destruction horizon plausibly associated with the Boudican revolt, though this dating has been debated in subs
Park Street villa, located near St Albans (Verulamium) in Hertfordshire, was a modest Romano-British farmstead that developed from a late Iron Age timber and daub roundhouse occupation. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Park Street 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 Radlett (2 km), The Benedictine Priory of St Mary (Sopwell Priory) and the post-medieval mansions known as Sopwell House or Lee Hall (3.4 km), Verulamium, part of wall and ditch of Roman city (3.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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