England #19 - Chedworth Roman Villa in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Tuesday September 17, 2025)

Tuesday was another very full day although with a lot less driving, which was a welcome change. We went to the ruins of a Roman villa, and then to Bourton-on-the-Water yet again. Because clearly you cannot have too many trips to Bourton-on-the-Water! And there’s scads of stuff to do - this time we went to the Miniature Village, which we’d wanted to see earlier but ran out of time for on both previous days. 

Our first stop was the Chedworth Roman Villa. We could have walked to it - it was only about a mile from our Airbnb via one of the many trails, although it’s more like five miles by road. We drove so we’d have plenty of time and to keep from doing Kim’s knee in. Of course driving five miles took something like 20 minutes with the tiny little meandering one-lane roads, but it’s a gorgeous drive and there was very little traffic.

The villa is really fascinating. It was originally built in the year 120, then added to and renovated until the 5th century. It’s one of the largest Roman villas discovered in England, and was also occupied for the longest time. In 2017 they discovered that several walls and a mosaic were constructed at least 50 years after the Romans left Britain in 410, revealing that rich Romans had been in Britain much later than initially thought. The remains of twenty two Roman villas have been found within a ten mile radius of Chedworth, so it was a popular spot for the Romans. This one is definitely the biggie. They don’t know who lived there but it was a VERY luxurious place. 

It seemed way out in the countryside but was close to the Fosse Way and Cirencester. The land slopes down to a river so the villa inhabitants  had beautiful views. 

   

Originally it was a rectangle of buildings, and most of them had mosaic floors. 

   

This building was constructed where one of the wings had been to protect the mosaics. There are some floors that are still buried to protect them from the elements.

There are a lot of foundations left from the original rooms. 

     

  The mosaics were beautiful! I can’t imagine how long it took to create them.

 

    

You could see the longest mosaic in Brittain from a walkway above it.

You also looked down into the Grand Dining Room from above. Unfortunately I was really confused by the audio guide, which had both a basic overview of each area and a more in-depth account of what it would have been like to live there. You had to keep switching back and forth between recordings and it never seemed to be playing the audio for what I was standing in front of. I kept having to go back because I’d missed things. And it wasn’t just me being dim/unable to operate an audio guide — I heard a number of other people talking about how confused they were! So there were lots of really interesting details about life there, but it was hard to process thanks to dueling audio and visuals. 

The thing on the wall is an animated projection of Romans having dinner and admiring the fancy floors. 

I am not sure what exactly this was! I think the dolls and earthenware are reproductions of what would have been used in the villa during Roman times. This was a fairly big room with displays and I didn’t get any other pictures, oddly enough. I think I was so baffled by my audio guide that I missed a chunk of it!

There were quite a lot of steam bath rooms, as well as rooms for warming up and cooling down. 

 

   

 

 

Gardeners working on the Water Shrine. 

This was a really interesting interactive display which unfortunately does not translate at all well in a photo! It showed where the buried mosaic floor is. You could look at the display and see where you were standing on it and how it would have looked. I believe National Heritage is planning for another protective building so that it can be uncovered. 

The other side of the interactive display. I think the floor extended beyond the rock remains. 

They had a number of displays of jewelry and tools, along with kitchenware.