Barnsley Park is a Romano-British villa in the Cotswolds, roughly 4 km north-east of Cirencester (Corinium), occupied from the late 1st or early 2nd century through to the late 4th or early 5th century. It began as a modest timber farmstead, was rebuilt in stone in the 3rd century, and reached its developed form as a small winged-corridor villa surrounded by an extensive enclosed field system, paddocks, and ancillary buildings indicative of a working mixed agricultural estate.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is significant as one of the better-understood lower-status villas in the hinterland of Corinium, illustrating the agricultural intensification of the Cotswold limestone uplands and providing evidence for pastoral and arable production supplying the regional market. Unusually, it shows clear evidence of continued, if modified, occupation into the sub-Roman period.
Excavations by Graham Webster and others between 1961 and 1979 revealed the villa house, yards, a probable byre or barn, and the surrounding earthwork field system, with finds including coarse and fine pottery, coins, querns, and substantial animal bone assemblages dominated by sheep. The associated rectilinear enclosures, still partly visible as earthworks, make it one of the most completely mapped villa-and-field-system complexes in the Cotswolds.
Barnsley Park is a Romano-British villa in the Cotswolds, roughly 4 km north-east of Cirencester (Corinium), occupied from the late 1st or early 2nd century through to the late 4th or early 5th century. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Roman villa and associated field system, Barnsley Park 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 Barnsley Park (1.3 km), Bibury Roman villa near Bibury Mill (4.4 km), Listercombe Bottom (5.4 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 and associated field system, Barnsley Park