Roman Excavation

The Roman excavation took place from December 2003 to January 2004. It was a major excavation as houses were sue to be developed on the site as shown in this photograph you can only see just how much need to carry out. The story so far in the 1970 an aerial photography of the Ingleby Barwick was taken this and the discovery was made of a Roman Villa on the land at Quarry Farm. The area was due to be built on and this give the biggest chance yet to fully understand what laid under the earth along with Persimmon Homes who backed an archaeological excavation and study into this significant site.

Most of the site was already built up and archaeologists argued that at least some of this important site should be kept for future investigations. This caused some problems however Persimmon Homes did agree for some of the land not to be built on. The site has greater significance as prior to this finding it was thought that Roman settlements did not stretch this far North. Now all that is left has just about gone for good and leaves the archaeologists now to investigate even further in to the Roman site in the laboratory

The Romans were well known for construction of bath houses and the photograph shows the hyper course of the bath house although as yet we don't know quite why it was disconnected with the main villa which was to the north west it may be the bath house was moved or the villa changed.

The water I was looking at the landscape and thought about the bath house and the supply of water the valley below had a river but it was low to pump up water and no doubt very costly so its can only be a natural spring that supply the villa with daily water. So who lived at the villa one question that we can not answer no documents and we can only say that it must have been a farming community due to the amount of skeletons of sheep found on the site, this also inform us that the sheep were berried where they laid dead we also found a sheep dog but the main villa at this time was going to need much more work.

The site was open for public viewing to see just how important the site was and it was a great success to say the least with some people coming back twice over the weekend of cause it was free and talks with the excavation team to the public was well received.

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