The splendour of a Roman Villa once buried at Lullingstone

This edited article about archaeology originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 629 published on 2 February 1974.

Men digging holes for a park fence found, beneath their spades, a beautiful mosaic floor. Their find was later to set archaeologists on a trail of discovery which was to take them far back into Roman Britain where they were to unravel the intriguing story of a villa’s creation and destruction and of the people who lived and died within its walls.

Once the house had teemed with life and worship. But nothing could save it now. Its weathered timbers changed to black charcoal and then to white ash as flames raced among them, leaving blackened roofless walls standing amid mounds of fallen tiles.

It must have been hard, seeing it then, to realise that the end had come to a house that, for nearly four centuries in Roman Britain, had been the home of a succession of prosperous families who had made it the centre of their lives.

They had lived in it, bathed in its fine bath house, worshipped in its chapel and farmed the lands surrounding it. But now, this fire in the fifth century had destroyed it.

The Roman villa at Lullingstone, Kent, was a shell. In time, even this disappeared beneath the soil washed down upon it from the hills.

Centuries later, some men were building a fence around Lullingstone Park. As they thrust their spades into the soil to make a hole for a timber post, they struck something hard. It was a mosaic floor.

A second hole was dug and revealed a further part of the floor.

This was in the middle of the eighteenth century and a note was made of it in a book published soon afterwards.

In 1949, a group of archaeologists went to the site and began carefully removing the centuries of soil.

For twelve successive years they worked carefully and meticulously. Their efforts brought to light the intricate story of the villa and its surrounding buildings, and of the lives of the people who occupied it.

It is a story, both wonderful and exciting, which begins far back in time in the year of the Roman Conquest, AD 43.

Then, there was a farmhouse in the vicinity occupied by Iron Age farmers. This was followed in about 80-90 by a small but well-built villa constructed by Britons who had adopted Roman ways. Its flint and mortar walls were accurately laid out and carefully rendered with mortar. Its roof was probably of thatch.

Descendants of the same family lived in the house for most of the second century. On a terrace just behind the villa they built a small, circular temple, probably for the worship of some local woodland god. No altar or cult objects were found in it, but ritual fires had been lit on its floor of red and yellow mosaics. The entrance faced east and the inside walls had painted plaster.

Towards the end of the second century, there were important alterations to the villa which suggest a new owner who was not a farmer but a wealthy Roman of Mediterranean origin. Perhaps he was an important government official who used Lullingstone as his country house.

By him, the modest farmhouse was converted into a luxury residence. It was completely re-roofed, this time with heavy red tiles, with a few yellow ones for variation.

On to the south end a well-designed bathing suite was added. It was laid out in the standard Roman manner with warm, cold and hot rooms. It was heated by a furnace with channels to carry the hot air under the floor.

A well just outside supplied water for the hot and cold plunge baths. The walls were richly decorated with painted panels of deep blue and red above a marbled dado.

At the opposite end of the villa was a place now known as the deep room. Originally, it was built for storing corn, but the new owner changed it into a cult room for the worship of a water god.

A small, square well was sunk into the floor in front of a niche in the centre of one wall. In this niche you can still see paintings of two water nymphs. The remainder of the walls were finely decorated, and had panels and date palms in the corners.

We can tell that the owner came from the Mediterranean because the archaeologists found two fine portrait busts of his ancestors carved in Greek marble. His wealth was shown by the large number of imported objects that were found, including fine pottery from Gaul, which comprised what is now France and Belgium and other parts of Europe.

At the same time, west of the villa itself, a new kitchen block with stores and servants’ quarters was built.

Mystery then comes into the story for, in about AD 200, for some unknown cause, perhaps connected with political troubles in Britain at that time, the villa was suddenly abandoned.

Nobody lived in it for most of the third century, when a small tanning industry was carried on in what had been the kitchen block.

Fresh people moved into it in about 280 when it became a farmhouse again. The new people seem to have been Britons who lived in the Roman style.

They made alterations to the house and built a large corn granary beside the river, on which they probably carried their goods to market.

Their descendants seem to have lived in the house for the rest of its history and to have been converted to Christianity.

All this is told in the remains of the ancient house which the archaeologists found. But as the soil was gently removed, it also revealed a tragedy that happened in about AD 300.

A man and a woman in their early twenties died and were buried in lead coffins in a specially built temple-mausoleum (a tomb and monument) on a terrace behind the house. The coffins were put in a chamber excavated beneath the floor together with various grave goods which included a bronze flagon, a glass bottle with dolphin-shaped handles, a complete set of glass gaming pieces (perhaps a form of backgammon, which is a game played with draughts and dice) and a medallion carved out of bone.

The temple was square, with a cult room in the centre where gods were worshipped, and around it was an arcade.

Large chalk blocks were used for the walls, and the temple was roofed with a kind of coarse rock called tufa.

On the walls inside there were painted pictures of human figures taking part in a pagan rite. The two portrait busts, which one of the earlier owners had brought to the house, were put in here.

The most striking improvement made during the fourth century was the laying of two magnificent picture mosaics on the floors of the dining room and the reception room.

These rank among the best to have been found in Britain. The dining room scene shows the goddess Europa and Jupiter, who has changed himself into a bull and persuaded her to ride on his back. They are accompanied by cupids.

The other mosaic scene is more colourful and lively. It shows Bellerophon, a mythological hero, mounted on the winged horse, Pegasus, and slaying the Chimera, a fire-breathing monster, with his spear.

Up to this time, the people living in the villa had worshipped a variety of gods. But in about AD 370, the owner and his family became Christians and built a place for worship in the villa. In the chapel, there was already a room for pagan worship. Over this was another room which was re-plastered and decorated.

On one wall were painted the figures of a child, a youth, a man and a woman and two other characters, perhaps representing the family that was living in the villa. They are standing in prayer between richly decorated columns. On another wall was a wreath three feet in diameter with a monogram in it bearing the first two Greek letters of the word “Christos.”

The strange thing about this is that while Christian worship was taking place in one room, pagan rites continued to be practised in the room below.

The archaeologists found evidence to show that pottery vessels, from which toasts were drunk, were placed in front of the marble busts, which had become objects of worship.

Among the finds which provided evidence about the use of the villa were coins. These indicated that it was used right up to the beginning of the fifth century.

Then came the fire and the encroaching soil – and the total disappearance of the villa for many centuries.

Archaeologists believe that the villa was like an extensive bungalow which consisted of a somewhat rambling wooden framework standing upon low walls of flint and mortar.

Gaps between the wooden beams were filled with clay smoothed to a plain finish and coated with plaster painted in highly-coloured designs.

The importance of this villa as a historical discovery lies in the fact that it lay virtually untouched since its partial destruction by fire in the fifth century.

It is one of about 300 Roman villas found in the last century-and-a-half in Britain. But only a few of these have been preserved for inspection by visitors. And of these few, the one at Lullingstone (seen beneath a protective building) is not only the most spectacular but the one with the most intriguing history.

Pedestrians can reach it from Eynsford railway station. Motorists should approach it from Eynsford village on the A225 road from Dartford to Sevenoaks.

To see it is to live again the fascinating story of the villa and its occupants whose experiences may have been like those our own ancestors shared, so long ago.

Five centuries of life are represented by its marvels in mosaic and stone – five centuries of mystery and magic.