Bignor Roman Villa
About
Bignor grew into a sprawling 65-room courtyard villa famed for the longest Roman mosaic corridor in Britain, a 24-metre run of Greek-key pattern leading to floors of Ganymede, Venus, and gladiator cupids. The first confirmed building on the site was a plain timber farmhouse raised around 190 CE, replaced by a four-room masonry house by 250 CE and then transformed by 350 CE into the lavish estate visitors see today. Nothing about grandeur marked this stretch of the South Downs early on; it stayed unbuilt farmland for the better part of a century before that first timber farmhouse appeared. In 117 CE, decades before any structure went up, the Bignor site was open Sussex countryside with no Roman building on it.
What happened here
A working estate with a comfortable house attached, and the proportions vary with how rich the owner is and how often he visits. The farm side has presses for oil and wine, threshing floors, storage sunk into the ground, stables and quarters for the workforce. The residential side has baths, dining rooms sited for the view, mosaics, and a garden with water in it. A manager runs the place year-round and reports; the owner arrives for the vintage and for the summer. Produce goes to market or to the owner's town house, and the accounts are kept in detail. Some villas are pure retreat with no farm at all, built on a cliff or a lake specifically to be looked at from a boat.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →