Brading Roman Villa

Brading Roman Villa is a Roman courtyard villa in Brading on the Isle of Wight, England, now open as a museum. Following the Roman conquest of the island by Vespasian's 2nd Augusta Legion in AD 44, a simple villa was built in the mid-1st century and expanded over the next century into a large stone complex around three sides of a courtyard. It contains some of the finest Roman mosaics in Britain, including depictions of Orpheus, Bacchus, gladiators, and a unique cockerel-headed man found nowhere else in the Roman Empire. Rediscovered in 1879 by a farmer, the villa was occupied until approximately AD 395 despite suffering a 3rd-century fire and frequent pirate raids.