I am Steven Cockings, Chairman of the Bedford Roman Villa Project.

Over the last 16 years we have been responsible for a community project bringing together various organisations, schools, and members of the public, all supervised by professional archaeologists donating their time for free.

This has been with the assistance of the Mayor of Bedford and Bedford Borough Councillors, along with Albion Archaeology, the Gale Family Trust, Bedford School, BizSpace, and, most importantly, the landowners, RCH Care Homes.

Our mission: to excavate one of Bedfordshire’s only known Roman villas located on the outskirts of Bedford. This has involved investigating what may have been the east and west wings of the villa, including the villa’s bath house.

Last year we uncovered what may be part of the northern range of our villa. While there is evidence for some internal rooms, a significant part of the building is made up of a large aisled hall whose roof was supported by columns.

This was attached to a south-facing veranda, fronted by a gravelled courtyard, much of which is still in place.

This was an exciting development, which captured the imagination of the local community, and was also covered by the BBC.

We are now hoping to dig further trenches over this northern range to better understand its internal arrangement.

The dates for this year’s excavations are Saturday, September 26th to Sunday, October 11th.

As to the importance of this site, it has the only known example of bas relief stucco work in the whole of the United Kingdom. As a consequence, it is a unique find of national significance.

This is the type of elaborate, hand-carved plaster decoration that is common in the Roman town houses and thermal baths of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but extremely rare in the Western Roman Empire outside of Italy,

This suggests that Bedford Roman villa was possibly the most lavishly decorated building in late Roman Britain, and is consistent with it being the headquarters of a massive imperial estate centre located along the Ouse valley, growing grain for the armies of Britain and the Rhine during the late 3rd and 4th centuries AD.

Roman writers like Ammianus Marcellinus and Emperor Julian confirm that a massive fleet of up to 800 ships was used to transport British corn to feed the Rhine garrisons,

Such was our villa’s significance that, even with the decline of the Roman empire in the latter 4th century, window glass was still being imported all the way from Egypt to put in its windows.

Given the national and international importance of this site we have a duty to publish our results and make them available to the widest audience possible

As a consequence, funds raised from this campaign will not only help finance this year’s excavations, they will also pay experts to write specialist reports on our archaeological finds covering our 16 years of excavations.

These will then be collated and published in book form, and conclusions drawn about the role of our villa complex within the north-western Roman empire. While academic in origin, this illustrated volume will use language that members of the general public will easily be able to engage with.

All donations are welcome, no matter how small!

I hope that you will be able to support our campaign by sharing our video and link on GoFundMe. This is a crowdfunding platform, so we need to attract hundreds of backers to be able to move forward with this project.

Mr. Steven Cockings MA,

Chairman,

Bedford Roman Villa Project.