This villa lies east of the Rectory at Whitbourne, on the Herefordshire–Worcestershire border in the valley of the River Teme. Like most rural villas in this part of the Welsh Marches, it likely originated as a modest farmstead in the later 1st or 2nd century AD and developed into a stone-built residence during the 3rd–4th centuries, when villa construction in the region peaked.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site sits within a thinly villa-populated zone between the more prosperous Cotswold villa belt to the south-east and the civitas of the Cornovii to the north, and probably represents a working agricultural estate exploiting the fertile Teme valley. Its position near the line of the Roman road between Kenchester (Magnis) and Worcester gave it reasonable access to regional markets.
Little detailed excavation has been published for this specific site; its identification rests largely on surface finds — building stone, tile (including tegulae and imbrices), and Romano-British pottery scatters — recovered from the field east of the rectory. No plan of the building has been recovered, and its dating and extent remain essentially unknown beyond a general Romano-British attribution.
This villa lies east of the Rectory at Whitbourne, on the Herefordshire–Worcestershire border in the valley of the River Teme. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Roman villa E of the Rectory 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 Roman settlement (6.2 km), Roman fort and outworks 550yds (500m) SW of Canon Frome Court (6.3 km), Ariconium (13.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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