Roman history near Longforward Lane
Seavington News - September, 94
HISTORY DOWN THE LANE
Energetic villagers may have strayed as far as Longforward Lane this summer and seen a number of small holes dug in one of Mr Rutter’s fields…. A field said to be the site of a Roman Villa.
These small trenches were started by eager evening class students from Yeovil college led by Mr Tom Poole of Yeabridge who had, as a younger investigator, excavated a small trench in the field in 1949. In July and August Alan Graham and Jo Mills (from Seavington) and Chris Copson (from Cerne Abbas) helped the students to record and interpret their discoveries. In 1861 an area some 20 by 30 feet was exposed by the then tenant farmer revealing a hypocaust (underfloor heating system) and an area of tessellated pavement, perhaps part of a corridor. These remains were dated to the Romano British times. The following year the interest shown by Countess Poullet led to workmen uncovering a further two rooms with paved floors. Reports from that time say that the workmen destroyed the remains. Some of the Roman pottery shards and tiles, however, are displayed in Chard museum. Similar discoveries were made in 1949.
The trenches dug this year seem to have located the position of the Roman building excavated and destroyed by the Victorian workmen. In the course of the excavations Roman pottery, roof tiles, wall plaster, opus signimum (a type of Roman concrete), and fragments of coal, bone and stone were found. These finds will be studied during the winter and will help us to understand what the Roman building might have looked like and when it was occupied. The exact positions of the Victorian excavations and the post-war trench sadly are not recorded, but the ones dug this summer help us to located some of this previous work. When the full report is published by the Somerset Natural History and Archaeology Society all the records will be given to Chard or Taunton museum so that they can be referred to in the future.
Jo Mills
Jo and Alan are both professional archaeologists and now work mainly in the south and south-west of Britain.