Piddington Roman Villa

Piddington Roman Villa is the remains of a large Roman villa at Piddington, Northamptonshire, about 6 miles south-east of Northampton [1]. The villa is on the site of an earlier late Iron Age settlement [1]. A late Iron Age settlement originated around the middle of the 1st century BC where people lived in round houses inside an enclosure with an outer ditch for protection [1]. The site was occupied from about 50 BC, with circular buildings followed by a proto-villa of ca.70 AD and then a sequence of rectangular stone-built structures, culminating in a simple cottage type villa [1]. From the 2nd century this became an increasingly large winged-corridor-type villa with courtyard (indeed, a 2nd-century well on the site is probably the largest stone-lined well in Roman Britain and has produced a wealth of environmental and other evidence) [1]. The site was rediscovered by workmen digging for limestone in 1781 [1].