Margaret Bunyard's blog

This season has been full of surprises, and the greatest surprise of all came on the penultimate day. There is another Roman building underlying the bath-house at Truckle Hill. This was a completely unexpected and very exciting discovery.

It had been difficult to explain the painted plaster wall outside the caldarium (hot room) but a new wall immediately outside the wall of the tepidarium (warm room) is clearly part of the same, earlier building. The excavated section includes a window opening, and the masonry work is of very high quality. This wall had also been decorated with painted plaster.

This first building was clearly luxuriously appointed with a mosaic floor (a small section of floor was found in situ at the base of the painted wall).

Work has continued all week in the first frigidarium (cold bath) and the remains of the steps down into the bath have been uncovered. At more than 1.5 m it was much deeper than expected and would have been more of a plunge pool than a bath. Large pieces of roof tile from the collapsed roof lay at the bottom of the frigidarium, together with blocks of tufa which had formed the ceiling.

Groups from the South Wiltshire Young Archaeologists’ Club and from Hardenhuish School have been out to help excavate the area at the end of the valley. It now seems almost certain that this was the building site where large quantities of mortar and plaster were produced for the bath-house, its predecessor and the villa. This is exciting – it is unusual to find evidence of a Roman building site.

We end the season with lots of new questions. What was the connection between the first Roman building, the bath-house and the villa on the top of the hill? How large was the first building, when was it built and what was it used for? These are the questions which we hope to investigate next year.

We have many people to thank at the end of our 2008 season. First of all Mr Antony Little who has so generously allowed us to investigate the site. We would also like to thank Wiltshire County Council Archaeology Service and North Wiltshire District Council Community Awards for helping to fund this project and last but not least, the many volunteers who have helped in the excavation.

Tufa: soft limestone rock which forms beside water saturated with carbonates. Tufa is still produced in streams nearby.

The second week of excavation at Truckle Hill is, if anything, even more rewarding than the first. Some 3m away from the rear wall of the caldarium and running more or less parallel to it, is another wall, in remarkable condition. Interest turned to real excitement when careful trowelling revealed decorated plaster on the wall. This suggests an internal wall beyond what we had thought was the extent of the bath-house. The plaster is painted with a design of red and yellow, imitating exotic foreign marble, with a buff panel framed with black. Only a small section has been uncovered but it is likely that there is more, hidden beneath the soil.

Painted Roman wall plaster

Down the slope from the bath-house we are finding quantities of wall plaster, small fragments, many of them coloured. Pieces of stone roof tile, flue tile and the odd tessera all suggest that this is where building material was dumped when the bath-house was altered or demolished.

Some 100m from the bath-house, work continues on the mysterious mound further up the valley. There is a spring near here and last week it looked as if this might have been the site of a cistern, providing water for the bath-house. Now this seems less likely. Layers of mortar have been uncovered where the ground dips in the centre of the mound. Could this be where the mortar for building the bath-house was produced?

As so often happens, this excavation is not only answering old questions, but raising new, exciting ones as well.

The trees are just beginning to change colour at Truckle Hill and it is the perfect setting for an excavation. This year nearly 40 volunteers have signed up to help investigate a Roman bath-house near the site of a villa discovered in the 19th century, close to the Wiltshire village of North Wraxall.

Work began here last year when English Heritage, Wiltshire County Council and Wessex Archaeology funded a community excavation to find out as much as possible about the building and to conserve it for the future.

Although we will only be here for a fortnight this time, most of last year's volunteers and many new ones have signed up to help.  I visited the site at the end of the first week, on a lovely, autumn day, to find eight volunteers hard at work.

The first trench has been cut at right angles to the outside wall at the rear of the building, to locate the flue which would have fed hot air into the caldarium (hot room). After digging through quantities of sand, a small square was visible in the wall. Too small to be the flue, it looks at the moment like a putlog - a hole for securing scaffolding.   

Inside the caldarium the curved wall was being exposed along with the base of an arch which once spanned that end of the room. One tessera gave a clue as to the floor surface, a suggestion borne out by finds from a trench further down the slope. Here, amongst the rubble of the fallen building were more tesserae and intriguing fragments of painted wall plaster.

Fragment of painted wall plaster, held by its disoverer

Some 100m away from the bath-house, also on the side of the valley, is an area of raised ground. It wasn't clear from an earlier geophysical survey whether this was a pile of rubble or something more interesting. Excavation has uncovered what looks like a collapsed wall here, but whether it's part of a boundary, a building or perhaps a water cistern we have yet to find out.

The collapsed wall during excavation. Is it part of a boundary, a building or perhaps a water cistern?

 Find out more about the Roman bath house at Truckle Hill.