TVAS South West: Excavations at Somerton Road, Langport

TVAS South West: Excavations at Somerton Road, Langport

Since January 2025 the site at Somerton Road covering roughly 0.58 hectares has been undergoing routine pre-development archaeological excavations, carried out by Thames Valley Archaeological Services’ South West office (TVAS South West, Taunton), with supervision from Armour Heritage (Frome) and funded by Abri. These excavations have uncovered extensive finds and features of archaeological interest from multiple time periods.

The earliest features discovered are the post holes of a single round house, dating to the later Bronze Age (c. 1300–800 BC) or the early Iron Age (c. 800–550 BC).

The highlight of the discoveries is the remains of a stone-built Roman (AD43-410) villa. It consisted of six rooms and a corridor, with noted features such as rain collection pools, drainage and a jumble of mosaic pieces (tesserae) in one room, unfortunately no longer in position. Robbing of large sections of the walls for their stone has left only the cuts for the foundation trenches behind. The villa likely continues outside of the area of excavation. Coinage found during excavation allows the Roman occupation to be dated from late 1st century AD to the 3rd century, with the building probably starting to fall into disuse in the 4th century.

Structures around the villa, including a corn dryer, a barn and the large number of grain storage pits, suggest that the villa was the centre of a farming estate, serving as a residence for the landowner and a place to process harvested crops. Assocaiated finds are for the most part fragments of pottery and animal bones though more personal items include brooches, bone pins, belt buckles, gaming pieces and metal tweezers.

Evidence of one of the occupants of the site themselves comes in the form of a badly damaged human burial but this seems likely to be from a later period than the villa. Other post-Roman activity comes in the form of a small number of ditches and robber trenches from the quarrying of the villa’s building stone for re-use elsewhere.

Excavations at time of writing are still ongoing and fantastic discoveries are still being made, the latest of which includes a horse burial. Discoveries will continue to be made, and information gained during the post-excavation processes culminating in a full publication report.

An open day is being held on Sunday 31st August between 10am and 3:30pm