Folkestone Roman Villa
The villa is situated on a cliff top overlooking the English Channel, with views of the French coast at Boulogne on a clear day.
[1] The villa was rebuilt and expanded in probably the second century A. D., this time as a more substantial structure with mosaics, a bath-house, and a second block, possibly connected by a courtyard.
[1] The Roman villa and earlier Iron Age workshop are located on the head of a low, slumped cliff, overlooking a shingle beach.
The cliff here is composed of a band of gault clay that is nearly 100 feet thick, which overlies the Lower Greensand stone formation.
[2] The greensand is not actually sand: it is a loose, unconsolidated sandstone bed that forms part of the underlying structure of southeast England.
[2] This erosion has threatened to destroy the villa site, which was another 400 – 500 meters from the sea during Roman times, but which now sits near the edge of the cliff.
Scattered evidence of human habitation near the Villa site has been uncovered during archeological digs, suggesting that the area was lived in or traveled through since Mesolithic times.
[5] Although these flints probably originated from a nearby location and were washed into the villa site, they do establish human presence in the area during the Mesolithic period.
[6] On the outskirts of Folkestone, an important early Bronze Age settlement was discovered at Holywell Coombe in 1987 and 1988 during archeological excavations in advance of the construction of the Channel Tunnel.
Remains beneath the Roman villa suggest that querns, or stones used to grind cereal crops into flour, were produced here during the Iron Age on an almost industrial scale.
[2] The querns are made of the local greensand stone, most likely collected or cut from nearby Copt Point and taken to the headland to be worked.
The majority of the found querns are unfinished, with partially worked surfaces, or incomplete hoppers and spindle holes.
[1] Archeological evidence suggests that in return for the querns, fine pottery from Gaul and wine from Italy were imported through the bay.
Instead of tufa blocks, it was rebuilt with quarried and faced greensand stone, and on footings of rounded sea-stones laid on the gault clay.
40, had a tessellated mosaic floor, and a magnificent view overlooking the courtyard and the sea, and is where the villa owner might have entertained guests.
The site was open to the public, and was a popular tourist and national heritage attraction, until the onset of World War II.
During the war, the site formed part of a series of gun emplacements along the cliffs, and was closed to the public (When archeologists excavated in 2010, they observed tank tracks across the Roman walls).
With funds for restoration or protection lacking due to post-war austerity measures, the decision was reluctantly made by the then Corporation of Folkestone[12] to recover the site with clinker from the nearby municipal incineration unit.
