The Withington villa is a Romano-British corridor villa in the Cotswolds, located south of Withington village in Gloucestershire. It appears to have been occupied from the 2nd through 4th centuries AD, developing into a substantial residence of some pretension — characteristic of the prosperous villa estates clustered in the Coln and Churn valleys around Cirencester (Corinium Dobunnorum).
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The villa lay within the agriculturally rich hinterland of Corinium, the second-largest civitas capital in Roman Britain, and reflects the high concentration of wealthy estate centres exploiting the Cotswold uplands for grain and sheep. It is best known for the discovery of a fine polychrome mosaic featuring Orpheus charming the beasts, attributed to the Corinian Orpheus school of mosaicists active in the early-to-mid 4th century.
The site was discovered in 1811 by Samuel Lysons, who recorded the celebrated Orpheus mosaic (with concentric registers of birds and quadrupeds around a central figure) along with elements of a corridor-plan building and a hypocaust; the mosaic was subsequently lifted and lost, surviving chiefly through Lysons' engravings. Beyond this antiquarian record and the identification of a second associated Romano-British building complex nearby, the site has seen little modern excavation, and its full plan and chronology remain imperfectly understood.
The Withington villa is a Romano-British corridor villa in the Cotswolds, located south of Withington village in Gloucestershire. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Withington 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 Romano-British villa at Withington, Romano-British building at Manor Court Field and associated features (0.7 km), Compton Abdale Roman villa (1.9 km), Round barrow N of Chedworth Roman villa (2.6 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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