Excavating the Roman Villa at Fenwick Lees

When a farmer ploughing a sloping field at Fenwick Lees turned up a handful of red tiles and a corroded bronze coin, few people imagined that the discovery would grow into one of the most ambitious community excavations in the region. Six summers later, the outline of a substantial Roman villa has emerged from beneath the turf, and each August several hundred volunteers, most of whom had never held a trowel before, spend a week helping to uncover it. The site is open to the public throughout the digging season, and its organisers have gone to considerable lengths to make a working excavation, which is by nature muddy, fragile and confusing, intelligible to visitors.

The villa occupies a gentle terrace above Fenwick Brook, a shallow stream that forms the northern boundary of the field and that probably supplied the household with water. The Romans who built here seem to have chosen the position with care: the terrace is sheltered from the prevailing wind by rising ground to the north-east, now covered by a dense stand of oak, and it enjoys sunshine for most of the day. Visitors, however, arrive from the opposite direction, along Lees Lane, the narrow road that runs along the southern edge of the site. The car park lies in the south-western corner, a short walk west of the gate, while the Site Office, where volunteers sign in each morning and collect their equipment, stands at the other end of the lane frontage, in the south-eastern corner.

From the gate, a gravel path leads due north across the field. It ends at the viewing platform, a raised wooden structure built along the southern edge of the main excavation, from which visitors can look down on the work without disturbing it. Guides stationed there explain what is being uncovered, and on most afternoons a member of the team brings up the more interesting objects of the day for people to examine at close quarters. The platform overlooks the Courtyard, the largest of the open trenches, which marks the central open space of the villa. Its edges are defined by the stone footings of rooms that once surrounded it on three sides, and in one corner the team has found the base of what may have been an ornamental fountain.

Immediately to the west of the Courtyard lies the Bath House, which has proved to be the most rewarding part of the site. Here the diggers have exposed the stacks of tiles that supported a heated floor, together with the stoke hole through which a fire was fed and a small plunge pool lined with waterproof mortar. Beyond the Courtyard's north-eastern corner, outside the main house, is a separate and much smaller trench containing a corn-drying kiln, a T-shaped stone flue in which grain was dried before storage or milling. Its discovery suggests that the villa was not merely a comfortable country retreat but the centre of a working farm.

Much of what keeps an excavation running happens away from the trenches. Every bucket of soil removed is carried to the spoil heap, which occupies the eastern edge of the field so that it cannot slip back into the excavated areas or block the view from the platform. Before it reaches the heap, however, a proportion of the soil passes through the sieving station, set up just south of the kiln trench, where volunteers shake the soil through fine mesh and search for tiny objects that are easily missed in the trenches, such as beads, fish bones and fragments of glass. Whatever is recovered is taken to the finds tent, which is pitched in the south-western part of the field, between the Bath House and the car park. There every object is washed, labelled, photographed and entered in a register before being packed for specialist study.

The project's directors are frank about the compromises involved in opening an excavation to the public. Supervising inexperienced volunteers is slow, and a careless footstep can destroy evidence that has survived for sixteen centuries. Yet they argue that the benefits outweigh the risks. Local people have developed a strong sense of ownership of the site, the volunteers have recorded far more material than a small professional team could have managed, and several schoolchildren who first came as visitors have since gone on to study archaeology. Above all, the directors believe that seeing the past emerge from the ground, one layer at a time, changes how people think about the landscape around them.

Digging is scheduled to finish within the next two years, after which the trenches will be carefully backfilled to protect the remains from frost and erosion. A detailed report will follow, and there are plans for a permanent display in the village hall, but the organisers admit that nothing will quite replace the experience of standing on the platform on a summer afternoon, watching a mosaic floor appear from beneath the soil.