Saunderton is the site of a Romano-British villa in the Chiltern dip-slope of Buckinghamshire, lying in a small dry valley near the line of the Icknield Way. Two adjacent villa buildings have been identified here, broadly active from the later 1st or 2nd century through to the 4th century AD, representing a modest farming establishment typical of the agriculturally productive Chiltern fringe.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa is one of a dense cluster of small to middling rural estates exploiting the chalkland and clay-with-flints of the Chilterns, part of the hinterland supplying Verulamium and the wider south-eastern market. It is unremarkable in scale but contributes to understanding the pattern of dispersed villa-based agriculture along the Icknield corridor.
Excavations in 1932 (Hugh Branigan/later summarised by Branigan in his Chiltern villa studies, with earlier work by F. C. Mountford) revealed a winged-corridor house with tessellated floors, painted wall plaster, a hypocaust, and an associated bath suite, alongside a second, simpler building nearby interpreted as an aisled structure or ancillary range. Finds included coarse and fine pottery, coins spanning the 2nd–4th centuries, and iron objects, though no full modern excavation report exists and the site is known mainly from these interwar interventions.
Saunderton is the site of a Romano-British villa in the Chiltern dip-slope of Buckinghamshire, lying in a small dry valley near the line of the Icknield Way. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Saunderton 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 villa east of Lodge Hill Farm (1.8 km), Roman villa 140m east of St Mary and St Nicholas' Church (4.1 km), High Wycombe (7.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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