Upmarket Roman Villa Found in Cambridge University Grounds

Construction work at Cambridge University has been put on hold as a routine survey of the ear-marked land has shown the presence of Roman ruins. The site, between Girton College and the Huntingdon road – itself an old Roman road known as the via Devenna – is some distance outside the town of Cambridge, which was founded on top of the Roman town of Duroliponte. This is the latest of several archaeological digs on Roman towns taking place in the UK this summer - others include the towns of Venta Icenorum at Caistor St Edmund and Calleva near Silchester.

Snazzy Roman pottery discovered

As luck would have it, the archaeology unit at Cambridge was on hand to direct the initial survey. The executive director at Cambridge's archaeology unit, Chris Evans, told the Guardian's Jon Henley : “What's interesting about Cambridge is that with these tracts of land bequeathed to the university, you have a lot of preserved green space coming in close to the city centre. It hasn't been developed in the intervening centuries. There are iron-age and Roman farmsteads literally every 200-300 metres.”

This discovery may not have come as a complete surprise to Evans, or anyone else at Cambridge's archaeology department. Two Roman cremation burials and a large Anglo-Saxon cemetery have already been found in the grounds of Girton College (under the tennis courts), about 400m north of the present site. The presence of both Duroliponte and the via Devenna are well documented and both were built in the mid first century AD.

The current phase of the project mainly consists of ground examination of the fields and digging exploratory trenches. So far archaeologists have found Iron Age and Romano-British field boundaries, as well as second and third century AD Romano-British pottery, building material, tessarae, animal bone and evidence of a relatively high status farmstead or villa. According to Evans, some of the finds so far have included some “snazzy Roman pottery, basically, quality glass and upmarket Samian ware.”

The tools used at this initial stage of the project? Shovels, mechanical diggers and hoes will all come into play but, according to site director Richard Newman, the perfect implement to clean a Roman wall – that would be the humble potato peeler.

Photo by Mr D. Webb, Cambridge Archaeological Unit.

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