Newport Roman Villa - History

History

Newport Roman Villa was built around 280 AD with local stone including flint, chalk, limestone and greensand with the walls remaining almost at their original height. The building was roofed with massive slabs of Bembridge limestone which needed large roof timbers to support them. Many of these roof slabs had a distinctive shape, pierced with a single hole to take a nail, were found on the site. It is likely the building was the centre of a wealthy estate.

The discovery of fragments of window glass on the site shows that the building had some glazed windows, and remains of painted wall plaster during excavation show that at least some of the rooms had brightly coloured interior walls.

It features one of the best preserved Roman bath suites with hypocaust underfloor heating. The furnace for heating the bath suite was outside the back wall of the villa at the end of the bath wing, and a servant would have been responsible for providing it with fuel. The hot air from the furnace passed through an arch at the base of the villa's back wall and circulated under the raised floors of the three rooms.

It remains unknown when life at the villa ended. During excavation, the skull of a woman in her early thirties was found in the corner of one of the rooms. It has been suggested that she was killed during a raid in an abandoned building. However it is also viewed that the abandonment of the island's villas by the middle of the fourth century could be due to economic hardship rather than the threat of attacks by Anglo-saxon raiders.