Qualla: Kings Weston Roman Villa

Kings Weston Roman Villa: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charlesdrakew, Public domain. The bulldozer drivers found the first stones. It was November 1947, and they were grading ground in Lawrence Weston, north-west Bristol, for a new post-war council estate desperately needed to rehouse families bombed out of the city centre. Under the topsoil they hit walls, then tesserae, then a stretch of patterned mosaic that nobody had walked on in 1,500 years. The City Engineer wanted to keep building houses. The University of Bristol wanted archaeologists. A compromise was struck: three months. Twenty volunteers, including local schoolchildren and members of the Clevedon Archaeological Society, would work dawn to dusk to excavate what they could before the diggers returned. The press called it a race against time. They were not exaggerating.

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Image: Charlesdrakew | Public domain

Kings Weston Roman Villa: A Villa Above the Severn

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Owen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Sometime after AD 268-270, a Romano-British landowner built a substantial villa on a slope overlooking the salt marshes of the lower Avon. He chose his ground carefully. The marsh flats fattened cattle. The higher ground grew cereals. A short distance south stood the small Roman ...

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Image: Neil Owen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kings Weston Roman Villa: Mosaics, Hypocaust, and a Buried Pig

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Neil Owen, CC BY-SA 2.0. The eastern building, the part now visible to visitors, is a winged corridor villa: a long central porticus connecting two projecting wings, with a courtyard between. The walls were carboniferous limestone faced with calcareous sandstone and rendered in white stucco. Two fourth-c...

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Image: Neil Owen | CC BY-SA 2.0

Kings Weston Roman Villa: George Boon's Race

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hamburg103a, CC BY-SA 4.0. Excavation began on 23 March 1948 under twenty-year-old George C. Boon, then a Latin student at the University of Bristol, and a local archaeologist named John Clevedon Brown. Boon went on to become one of the leading Romano-British numismatists of his generation, but in 1948 he ...

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Image: Hamburg103a | CC BY-SA 4.0

Kings Weston Roman Villa: Roof, Mural, and a Mural-Sized Question

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lewis Clarke, CC BY-SA 2.0. Numismatic finds show occupation continued into the late fourth century. Coins of the Valentinian and Gratian periods, struck up to AD 381, mark the last identifiable phase. The porticus appears to have collapsed before final abandonment, after which squatters camped in the ruine...

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Image: Lewis Clarke | CC BY-SA 2.0