The Roman villa on Little Barton Hill lies in the Dorset/south Somerset borderland, in an area densely settled with rural villas during the Roman period. Likely active from the later 2nd through the 4th century AD, it would have been a modest agricultural estate centre exploiting the fertile limestone country south of the Mendips, in a region transformed by villa-based farming following the suppression of the Durotrigian frontier.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of the dense rural villa pattern of the civitas Durotrigum, in a landscape dominated by mixed arable and pastoral production tied to local market centres such as Ilchester (Lindinis) and the wider villa-rich corridor running west toward Somerton. It has no recorded outstanding status — its importance is as one element in the prosperous late Roman countryside of southern Somerset/north Dorset.
The Roman villa on Little Barton Hill lies in the Dorset/south Somerset borderland, in an area densely settled with rural villas during the Roman period. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Roman villa on Little Barton Hill 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 Two Late Iron Age or Romano-British enclosed settlements with part of an associated field system 420m NNW of South Farm (1.1 km), Tarrant Hinton (1.6 km), Romano-British settlement and two bowl barrows on Blandford Race Down 450m south east of Telegraph Clump (2.7 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 on Little Barton Hill