Welcome to Chedworth Roman Villa, one of the most amazing villas in the country.
Sadly we're closed to visitors at the moment but we'd like to share with you
some of the wonderful archaeological discoveries we've made in recent years.
Chedworth was one of those archaeological sites which so many people would love to be involved with.
It's a fabulous place and I've been working here for about 10 years.
It feels quite a privilege and it's not a small villa, it's one of the grandest,
One of the top 10 villas that were ever built in the whole country as far as we can tell.
It's going to be a place where someone very significant lived, someone who had great wealth and influence
and we'll be talking about some of the things we've found that prove that.
I was digging in this room here, this is room 27
and the next room over is room 28, and we knew from a little bit of work done in 2000 there was a mosaic there.
So we had a line of volunteers working really carefully taking up the turf
and cleaning the topsoil down and gradually, gradually this beautiful mosaic was emerging.
I was in this trench digging a little hole in this corner and I found a pink mortar floor
but there was just a tiny shred of it left and underneath that was hardcore,
and underneath that was the foundation trench for this wall here.
I took a bit of charcoal from that foundation trench
to give me a date but years later after we've done all our analysis the date came back
and it was fifth century, which isn't expected.
This mosaic has to be fifth century because this wall was built before the mosaic was put there.
Very exciting.
We contacted the mosaic specialist and he said nope, there are no 5th century mosaics in Britain.
So this one is the first one.
I'm now standing in a huge room. There's only one or two other rooms that have been uncovered in Britain
that are the scale of this one and we think of this as a hall, a reception hall
which is where the owner of the villa would have wowed his visitors to the estate and to his house.
People sometimes say to me, "does it take a lot of training to uncover a mosaic?"
Well I've worked as an archaeologist for a very long time
and it's a real rare privilege to uncover one. I've only ever done it here.
We lift carefully the turf and we know that mosaics usually are very shallowly buried.
So once the turf has been lifted, then we have topsoil underneath,
you all work together in a line and it takes a long time to clean properly a mosaic
so we all have a little length of it and as we work back gradually, gradually we use little plastic cleaning tools
that get between the different square blocks of tesserae bit by bit.
And then when we've had a light brush on that, we'll quite often bring a little bowl of water and we'll sponge it,
and when it's done with that moisture on the top of it it has a fabulous sort of
all the colors come out as freshly released from the soil.
The other place we found something really special is right here. Suddenly, Peter who was doing the excavation called me over
and showed me this amazing little fragment of glass.
Quite often they're just thin little clear blue bits but this was multi-coloured. It was green and had an overlay of yellow and white
and they looked like fish scales these little lines of different coloured glass, and I'd never seen anything like it.
It looked very special and so we took it to a glass expert and asked 'what is this thing?'
They said 'Where did you find it?' 'Chedworth!' 'Surely not!'
and this glass apparently was made on the shores of the Black Sea, so this second century piece of glass raises more questions than it answers.
All we can say is that it shows how important the people were who lived here,
both in the second and fourth century.
Thank you for joining me on this tour of Chedworth. It's only down to your support that we're able to care for special places like this.