The Clanville Roman villa, located in the parish of Penton Mewsey in northwest Hampshire, was a modest rural villa occupied principally in the later Roman period, with activity attested from at least the 2nd into the 4th century AD. Excavations in the late 19th century revealed a winged corridor or "hall"-type building of stone, with associated outbuildings, indicating a working agricultural estate rather than a high-status residence.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa lies within the densely villa-populated belt of northern Hampshire and the upper Test/Bourne valleys, an agriculturally productive zone supplying nearby small towns such as Sorviodunum (Old Sarum) and Cunetio, and likely connected to wider markets via the road network west of Silchester (Calleva Atrebatum). A noted find of a Constantinian-period sundial fragment marks it out as a site with at least some pretensions to Romanised display.
The site was investigated in 1897 by W. C. Maitland Müller and recorded in archive accounts, exposing flint-and-mortar wall foundations, painted plaster, tile, and a fragmentary inscribed circular sundial bearing the name of a magistrate (one of very few known from Britain). No modern open-area excavation has been undertaken, and details of plan, phasing, and the extent of any bath suite or mosaics remain poorly resolved.
The Clanville Roman villa, located in the parish of Penton Mewsey in northwest Hampshire, was a modest rural villa occupied principally in the later Roman period, with activity attested from at least the 2nd into the 4th century AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Roman villa 500yds (460m) SW of Clanville House 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 Clanville (1.6 km), Roman buildings on Lambourne's Hill (2.4 km), Thruxton (4.1 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Roman villa 500yds (460m) SW of Clanville House