Wroxeter Farm

Archaeological excavations and geophysical surveys carried out at Wroxeter in 2024 have revealed highly significant new evidence for the layout and early history of the Roman city of Viroconium Cornoviorum.

The project focused on the site of Wroxeter Farm, close to the crossroads of the city’s main streets, the cardo (Watling Street) and the decumanus, and opposite the forum-basilica (marketplace and town hall) and the main public baths. Almost nothing was known about the buildings located in this part of the city centre, which is occupied by the buildings and paddocks of the disused Victorian farm built around 1850 and declared redundant in 1999.

Dr Paul Belford of Heritage Innovation undertook the aerial photography and photogrammetry for the excavation. Paul also produced a short video about the Wroxeter Farm project, which is available on YouTube.

Wroxeter Roman City is a Scheduled Monument whose visible remains – its outer earthworks, as well as the exposed ruins of its public baths and a reconstructed townhouse – are cared for as a visitor attraction managed by English Heritage.

Background to the excavation

The only firm evidence from this insula was a short length of a north-south colonnade found in 1854 running along the west side of Watling Street, which it has been suggested may have formed part of the boundary of a major public building, possibly Viroconium’s main civic temple.

New geophysical surveys

A long hall-like building lay on the north side of the main road, the rear wall of which seems to have had buttresses or plinths on its external face. This faced onto a rectangular enclosure defined by walls to the north and west, which continued eastwards beneath the farm buildings. The enclosure appears to have been devoid of buildings except for a single small square anomaly close to the buttressed wall. On the west side of the side street were other structures and buildings that occupied the western end of insula i, including a large building in the northern part of the paddock that looks like an extensive townhouse of some kind.

Reference: Clements, M. Linford, N. and Payne, A. 2024. Wroxeter Farm, Wroxeter and Uppington, Shropshire. Report on Geophysical Surveys, April and May 2024.

 

The report of the geophysical surveys is available online from Historic England’s website (search for 42/2024).

Evaluation excavation

The earliest activity was found in the rectangular enclosure, including a small, almost square, well-built masonry structure with an internal chamber floored with opus signinum (the classic red-coloured Roman concrete) in Trench 1. The structure’s doorway was on its eastern side and the chamber had plastered walls, while painted plaster was also found attached to two sides of the walls’ external face (which is unusual and perhaps indicates the structure originally had a covered portico or ambulatory around it). It is not certain what the structure was for, but a shrine of some kind seems most likely where the chamber would have been the location of an altar or perhaps a statue.

Whatever activities took place in it, the structure was deliberately demolished to its lowest courses before an adjacent building was erected in the early 2nd century. This raises the intriguing possibility that the shrine, if that’s what it was, could have been built when Wroxeter was the site of a legionary fortress (c. 50-80) and before the city’s foundation. If that was the case, its location outside the fortress’s west gate might indicate that the structure was part of a cemetery, perhaps a mausoleum for the cremated remains of an important officer or another type of funerary monument (it was against Roman law to bury or cremate the dead within a city’s boundaries and the same applied to military sites too).

The shrine also proves that this part of Wroxeter was lower-lying than the surrounding ground in the early Roman period, forming a natural hollow on the western side of the city centre. The remains of the demolished shrine-structure were covered with large quantities of garden-like soil with no evidence for later buildings or occupation, suggesting that it remained an open space throughout the city’s history (perhaps a walled garden).

This low-lying area was enclosed in the early 2nd century, on its south side by a long rectangular roadside building on the north side of the decumanus, and on its western and northern sides by a wall. The rectangular building was investigated in Trenches 1 and 2, the latter exposing its front and rear walls, including an external buttress on the rear wall’s exterior, as well as its 7.5 m-wide internal space.

The original ground surface here sloped from south to north by 0.8 m across the length of the trench and the construction of the building involved the raising up and levelling of its interior with large quantities of building debris including stones and broken tiles and bricks (which must have come from an earlier building somewhere). The buttresses reinforced the building’s lower rear wall against the pressure from this make-up and levelling material, above which were several patches of decayed mortar that seem to be the remains of the only internal floor surface (possibly flagged).

It is not clear what the roadside building was for, but the absence of any traces of substantial internal walls indicates that it was a hall-like structure at least 50 m long opening onto the north side of the decumanus. Romans called this kind of building a ‘porticus’ and cities in Italy and around the Mediterranean often had colonnaded portici along their main roads where various public activities would be conducted away from the heat of the sun during summer months, including commerce, lawsuits and council meetings.

This is the first monumental porticus known from a city in Roman Britain (where they are more likely to have afforded shelter from the British wind and rain than the beating sun) and its location directly opposite Viroconium’s forum-basilica is unlikely to be a coincidence. The porticus’s buttressed rear wall also passed through the southern end of Trench 1, though here the wall itself had been robbed down to its foundations while a second buttress survived to at least three stone courses. The wall’s deep footings were partially excavated, which produced pottery confirming its construction no later than the early 2nd century.

The opposite side of the hollow area was demarcated by the enclosure wall identified on the GPR survey results, which was also targeted by an evaluation trench. Trench 6 showed that although this wall was as well-built as the porticus, it was much narrower than the roadside building’s buttressed wall on the enclosure’s southern side and that the ground within the enclosure was also significantly lower than outside it.

As with the situation in Trench 1 after the demolition of the shrine, the low-lying southern area of Trench 6 had been raised with deposits of dark humic soils that could have accumulated during horticultural cultivation (the lowest of these layers produced the earliest pottery from the excavation, including 1st century vessels known from the site’s legionary-fortress phase).

These dark soils were then sealed by layers of mortared stones set on their sides that also extended northwards of the enclosure wall, perhaps evidence for a building platform or the collapsed walls of buildings beyond the trench edges. These rubbly layers were not excavated and although it is most likely that they date to the later Roman period, it is also possible that they could be evidence for post-Roman buildings.

Trenches 5 and 7 were located inside Wroxeter Farm and both proved that Roman-period archaeological remains survive in this part of insula i closer to Watling Street too. Trench 5 produced considerable evidence for a sequence of Roman buildings and occupation, including walls, floors and demolition or abandonment deposits. These Roman remains were only just below the floor of the sunken cattle shed where Trench 5 was located, and it is highly likely that the digging out of the shed’s interior in the 1880s had removed the uppermost Roman remains. Trench 7 was located to the south of the projected location of the enclosure wall found in Trench 6 and it contained part of a well-built wall as well as a small stone-covered pit that produced a complete jar and sherds of an unparalleled flagon-like vessel probably made in northern Gaul. The pit suggests this was an external space and the pots hint at votive offerings, perhaps associated with the putative temple.

The most spectacular find from the evaluation excavation came from the trench furthest away from the decumanus and the enclosure. Trench 3 investigated a geophysical anomaly that appeared to be a room within a much larger building, possibly a domestic townhouse. The building had a long and complicated history involving at least two episodes of remodelling, the last of which significantly changed the building’s layout.

This is the first figurative mosaic from Wroxeter and, although there is no independent dating for this phase of the building, the mosaic’s style suggests it could have been laid in the later 1st and 2nd centuries. The wall south of the mosaic survived to at least eight courses, of which the lowest were covered with red-painted plaster, and a doorway in it shows that this room could be accessed from other parts of the building / bath-suite, which suggests it served as an antechamber for the possible plunge pool.

The quality of the mosaic and the architecture of the bath-suite, together with the townhouse’s city-centre location, all indicate this must have been the residence of someone of the highest status who may have well lived during the first decades after Viroconium’s foundation in the early 2nd century.

At some point after the late 3rd century, however, the building / bath-suite was radically remodelled. The mosaic room was demolished and levelled with large quantities of building debris (especially stone, mortar and plaster), while the possible plunge pool was raised by at least 0.5 m before a new pebbled opus signinum floor was laid. The presence of such a hard-wearing floor perhaps indicates that this space became a corridor rather than a room, whereas the absence of evidence for a floor surface of any kind above the demolition deposits sealing the mosaic room shows this area became an external space.

The porticus was also remodelled in the later Roman period, when its floor was deliberately removed and a beam slot (or gully) and a sub-oval pit some 0.8 m wide and 0.35 m deep were cut into its bedding layers. The pit’s primary fill contained large quantities of metalworking residues mixed with charcoal, as well as two coins that show this activity cannot have occurred earlier than 330.

Post-excavation Assessment and Analysis

The excavation at Wroxeter Farm, although relatively modest in scale, has produced significant new information about Viroconium’s city centre. The month at Wroxeter in 2024 proves that well-planned, targeted evaluations have an important role to play in the study of archaeological sites – even such a well-known one as Wroxeter.

The post-excavation assessment stage of the evaluation has now been completed, including proposals for analysis and writing-up.

The project’s formal Assessment Report is available to download here.