Harpole: The Landscape of a Roman Villa at Panattoni Park, Northamptonshire

Excavations in advance of construction of a complex of logistics and industrial spaces at Panattoni Park, adjacent to Junction 16 of the M1 motorway c 5km west of Northampton, uncovered part of a Roman villa and evidence for preceding prehistoric and early Roman settlement. The development area lay on the north side of the Nene Valley and the sloping topography of the site necessitated the creation of landscaped terraces for construction by cutting some areas of the slope and infilling other regions with soil. Following an extensive geophysical survey and trial-trench evaluation, five areas of open excavation were undertaken where these cut operations would impact on the identified archaeological remains, as well as a watching brief on an area where archaeological features were inadvertently exposed during topsoil stripping in one of the intervening preservation areas. The period before the Iron Age was represented mainly by unstratified flintwork and a small number of pits, but a key find was an in situ knapping cluster dating from the Mesolithic period, where locally available flint cobbles were worked into blanks that were then used to produce a range of tools, some of which were utilised at the site while others may have been taken away for use elsewhere. A pit alignment boundary was constructed during the early Iron Age or at the start of the middle Iron Age, running down the side of the valley perpendicular to the river. The part of the Nene Valley around Northampton is the location of a particularly dense concentration of such boundaries, which may have been used in the context of pastoral farming. Some were particularly long lived, and the boundary at Panattoni Park was no exception, continuing in use into the late Iron Age, when the northern part was recut as a ditch that defined the western limit of an enclosure complex. While the pit alignment boundary was still in use, a settlement comprised of at least seven roundhouses was constructed at the edge of the floodplain 450m to the east. No evidence was found for cultivation of arable crops, either in the form of charred plant remains, quernstones or other processing tools, or storage pits, and the settlement may have been entirely pastoral, engaged in grazing livestock, predominantly cattle, on the grasslands of the floodplain. Occupation may have been seasonal, and the roundhouses may not all have been occupied contemporaneously but instead may represent a longer sequence, with fewer houses in occupation at any one time. An enclosure complex was constructed against the pit alignment boundary during the late Iron Age and occupied into the early part of the Roman period. No certain domestic focus was identified, although two successive enclosures at the south-west corner of the complex were defined by substantially larger ditches and may have served this function. Alternatively, the complex may have been the fields and paddocks of an enclosed settlement that was excavated immediately to the north, at the top of the valley slope, in 1966. This phase exhibited the first evidence for the adoption of a mixed farming regime, with cattle continuing to be the most numerous species but now joined by arable cultivation, and the wider range of activities evidenced probably represent more permanent occupation. Activity here ended c AD 50/70 and a hiatus of about a century passed before occupation resumed with the establishment of the villa. The site was recognised from the outset as having significant archaeological potential due to the proximity of a Roman villa that had been identified during the 1840s, when a mosaic was discovered. Most of the villa building complex was probably destroyed by widening of the A45 (now the A4500) in 1966, when limited trenching recorded the south-east corner of the main building and a stone-lined cistern, as well as a stone-lined drain that indicated the probable presence of a bath house somewhere near the east end of the main house. The Panatton