Roads and Industry: Navigating the Priors Hall Roman Villa by Paddy Lambert

Between 2019 and 2021, a team from Oxford Archaeology completed an excavation over 4.25ha of a Romano-British villa estate at Priors Hall, Corby, Northants. The site is one of the most exciting and extraordinary discoveries from Roman Britain in recent years, the excavations going on to win the Current Archaeology Rescue Project of the Year Award 2022.
The team revealed an exciting array of features connected with the life cycle of the villa, from its beginnings as an Iron Age village, through the construction of two Roman roads to serve it and associated iron-working industry, with the landscape’s tranasformation in the fourth century into a huge industrial complex, which manufactured thousands of tiles and pottery vessels .
and the whole story can be traced along its Roman roads. This talk will journey along the spectacular results of the excavations, highlighting the rare and important example of an excavated stretch of extremely well-preserved Roman road and its idiosyncratic connectivity to the contemporary neural network of villas, forts and towns in the Romano-British landscape.