Northchurch Roman Villa is a ruined

Roman villa A Roman villa was typically a farmhouse or country house built in the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, sometimes reaching extravagant proportions. Typology and distribution Pliny the Elder (23–79 AD) distinguished two kinds of villas n ...

Northchurch Northchurch is a village and civil parish in the Bulbourne valley in the county of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. It lies between the towns of Berkhamsted and Tring. Situated on the Roman road Akeman Street, a major Roman villa dating from ...

, Hertfordshire. The site was excavated in 1973 due to new housing developments on the site. The excavations uncovered four building phases of a large Roman country estate. First settlement remains come from the middle of the first century BC. No architectural remains were found, but pottery and other finds indicate that there was already a villa at this place. At the beginning of the first century AD, a stone building was erected. At the beginning it consisted of just four rooms with a veranda. In Phase 3 the building was enlarged and received several further rooms and most likely also a second storey. It seems that around AD 170 the villa was abandoned. In the mid third century, the villa was again occupied. In Phase 4 a bath was added on the south side of the complex. The villa was occupied till the end of the Fourth Century. Some rooms of the villa were decorated with wall paintings. The excavator found one plaster wall fragment with the letter ''A'' and was wondering whether these were Christian painting showing once a

chi-rho The Chi Rho (☧, English pronunciation ; also known as ''chrismon'') is one of the earliest forms of Christogram, formed by superimposing the first two (capital) letters—chi (letter), chi and rho (ΧΡ)—of the Greek word (Christ (title), ...

. Stones belonging to a mosaic were found too. An evaluation of animals found showed that in the second century mainly sheep were kept.Alison Gebbels. inː Neal: ''Northchurch, Boxmoor, and Hemel Hempstead Station'', 48

Conservation

The site is a scheduled monument, but it lies beneath a housing development.

References

Literature

*David S. Neal: ''Northchurch, Boxmoor, and Hemel Hempstead Station: The Excavation of Three Roman Buildings in the Bulbourne Valley'', in: Hertfordshire Archaeology 4 (1974), 1–135, pp. especially pages 53–110 *David S. Neal, Stephen R. Coshː ''Roman Mosaics of Britain, Volume III: South-East Britain, Part 2'', London 2009 , pp. 296–298 {{Coordinate, NS=51.773374, EW=-0.591206, type=landmark, region=GB-HRT Roman villas in Hertfordshire 4th-century disestablishments in Roman Britain Scheduled monuments in Hertfordshire