Excavations on the Roman villa site, Acton Scott 2008

In October 2008 the first excavations for 164 years took place on the site of a Roman villa at Acton Scott . The work was done by volunteers of the Acton Scott Heritage Project with the support of staff from Shropshire County Council Archaeology Service. The project was funded by the Heritage Lottery fund, and Scheduled Monument Consent was given by English Heritage and the Dept. for Culture, Media, and Sport.

The enclosure ditch

Volunteers Phil Cawood and Brian Lewis made it their mission to reach the bottom of the trench cut across the line of the southern arm of the Iron Age enclosure ditch, but didn’t quite get there! Nevertheless they found that the ditch would have been over 4m wide and was filled with gravels and loams, probably representing its gradual silting up. At the top was Roman building rubble, possibly marking the disuse and deliberate demolition of part of the villa structure.

The villa

A trench across the rectangular structure within the enclosure, noted by the geophysics survey, and confirmed as Roman by shovel pit testing, found a sequence of pebble and clay floors or surfaces, and a possible post-pad for a timber post, together with Roman pottery all covered with spreads of stone rubble and Roman roof and wall-flue tiles. The structure represented by these features is likely to have formed part of the Roman villa complex, but perhaps surprisingly, not the building excavated in 1844. Whilst there was disappointment that walls, let alone wall plaster, were not found, it was exciting to find that the 1817 and 1844 excavations had not destroyed the site totally and that there is much left to discover.

The geophysical survey had also identified a number of other possible features which merited further investigation by trial excavation. Amongst these were areas of possible rubble spreads in Clover Bank (the eastern of the two fields). The geophysical survey suggested that these spreads might have marked the remains of a building complex surrounding a courtyard. There had been excited talk of fountains and other high status finds. Sadly the three trenches cut in Clover Bank demonstrated that the spreads in this field were in fact deposits of natural glacial gravel and not man made deposits. Nor was there any sign of the circular feature in the “courtyard” area, other than some larger stones in the gravel which may have suggested this feature and the other rubble spreads. A linear feature, possibly an aqueduct, had been picked up by the survey running across Laundry Meadow but it was not located; a variation in the natural subsoil here may have caused the geophysical anomaly.

Conclusions

The precise location, layout and distribution of the archaeological resource within the study area relating to the villa have not been fully defined, and it will require further investigations to achieve this aim. The archive sources suggest that the Roman building excavated by Frances Stackhouse Acton in 1817 and 1844 probably lies in the eastern side of Laundry Meadow. A sketch plan in her manuscript account of the 1844 excavations may show
the structure she recorded lying to the east or northeast of the remains located by the geophysical survey, shovel-pit testing, and trial excavation. Frances Stackhouse Acton’s record also shows that the structure she recorded also extended both to the east and to north. Altogether this suggests that the Roman remains in Laundry Meadow are more extensive than has previously been thought.
A programme of further investigative fieldwork would provide answers to some of the outstanding issues. Watch this space!

You can download a report on the 2008 trial excavations here: