The Yeovil villa, situated in the fertile country of south Somerset near the headwaters of the River Yeo, was a Romano-British rural estate centre active broadly between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. It lies within a dense cluster of villas in the Ilchester (Lindinis) hinterland, and like its neighbours would have been a working agricultural establishment, likely combining arable farming with stock-raising on the limestone uplands and clay vales.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site forms part of the prosperous villa landscape surrounding Lindinis, a small civitas centre that may have served as the capital of a sub-territory of the Durotriges in the later Roman period. This region saw a notable florescence of villa building and mosaic-laying in the 4th century, and Yeovil contributes to the picture of intensive estate-based agricultural exploitation in south-western Britain.
Roman remains have been recorded at several locations around Yeovil (notably Westland and at Lufton just to the west, the latter a separately known villa with a celebrated cruciform plunge-bath mosaic), with finds including masonry foundations, tesserae, hypocaust material, coins and pottery indicative of a substantial domestic establishment. The specific Pleiades-listed Yeovil villa is not as fully published as Lufton or Ilchester Mead, and details of plan and chronology remain limited in the literature.
The Yeovil villa, situated in the fertile country of south Somerset near the headwaters of the River Yeo, was a Romano-British rural estate centre active broadly between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a villa site from the Roman period in Britain.
Yeovil 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 remains immediately south of Westland Road (1.1 km), Roman temporary camp at East Farm (2.7 km), Roman villa N of Dunnock's Lane (2.7 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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