This is a rather unusual article for me to write, for a start off it is about somewhere I have never actually been and, in addition to that, it is somewhere you can’t visit either! But the Roman Villa at Magor Farm is so rarely written about that when I discovered that my grandmother had photographed it in 1931 it seemed really wonderful opportunity (excuse?) to research this story.
For just six days, from the 3rd to the 9th October 1931, the excavations near to Camborne were opened to the public. This brief chance to visit the site followed a month of intense work on the farm that had revealed what was at the time considered one of the most important archaeological discoveries in decades. It was a dig that would pose many questions that still remain unanswered, change our understanding of the Roman occupation of Cornwall, and that autumn the local newspaper columns regularly buzzed with the latest developments at the site.
After that short window of public viewing, and rather astonishingly given its significance, the Roman villa at Magor Farm was reburied and it has never been seen again.
My 14 year old grandmother, Muriel Leona Johns, was one of the lucky few who got to see it and she took her Box Brownie camera with her.
The Discovery
In the spring of 1931 farmer Benjamin Mitchell was ploughing a field ready for planting close to Magor farmhouse when the plough turned up something so strange that he reined in his horse and stooped to take a closer look. What he saw were rows and rows of tiny neat blocks of stone. Fortunately Mitchell thought that the stones were curious enough that before he continued his work he should show them to the Reverend Canon James Sims Carah at Penponds a couple of miles away from the farm. Carah was not only the local vicar he was also an avid antiquarian, a bard of Gorsedh Kernow and the founder of the Camborne Old Cornwall Society.
And he recognised immediately what Mitchell had found.
It was part of a Roman tessellated pavement and nothing like it had ever been seen anywhere in Cornwall before!
We can imagine a hum of excitement and disbelief running through the archaeological community in Cornwall when the word got out, after all besides the odd coin hoard and some milestones evidence of the Romans in the west was thin on the ground to say the least. It was decided that an excavation of the site was essential to try and understand what had just been uncovered at Magor Farm.
Money to pay for the work was hastily gathered through subscription and Mr Bryan Hugh St John O’Neil, Assistant Inspector of Ancient Monuments, was brought in to run the dig.
The Excavations
Work began on the 8th September 1931 with O’Neil using local men to do the heavy work of peeling back the layers of earth. But what they found did not disappoint, within just a few days the newspapers were reporting that the first Roman villa ever found in Cornwall had been discovered.
As the days passed more and more details were published in the press describing what the unprecedented excavations were revealing.
And at first the most impressive find was that amazing tessellated pavement (No 5 on the plan below) which was shown to be nearly 8ft wide by some 40ft in length (2.5m x 12.1m), with the tiny blocks set into a “concrete bedding” six inches thick. Rooms began to appear leading off from this corridor and gradually a picture of what this building must have looked like began to emerge.
“This pavement appears to have been a corridor and to formed part of the central block of a medium sized winged corridor villa of the standard type common in other parts of Southern England during the Roman period.” – West Briton, 17th September 1931
The dig revealed low walls that were constructed from local stone and then topped with wood that was then coated with plaster. This plaster was brightly painted in strips of red, brown, blue on some walls and green, yellow and red on others. There were painted designs too, of what looked like leaves and flowers, possibly tulips. One of the rooms had a floor made of “a layer of quartz blocks on a bedding of white mortar and covered with a layer of rammed plaster”.
“The roof was of slate and many of the slates are found lying on top of the fallen plaster in all the rooms. They are pierced with a hole, sometimes two holes, and in many cases the iron nail is still to be seen fixed in the hole . . . ” – West Briton, 17th September 1931
Of the dig O’Neil wrote:
“The excavation occupied four weeks in September and disclosed a small Roman villa of the common winged-corridor type . . . The villa was found to have suffered from the plough and deliberate robbing, probably late in the 18th century, especially in the north wing of which only a few fragments remain, sufficient to indicate that it would no doubt compare in plan and history with the south wing.
The tessellated floor formed the verandah of the villa, facing westwards down the valley of the Red River. The tesserae are of buff coloured quartz porphyry, locally called elvan, from a short distance away. They vary greatly in size but average 1 inch square and are laid carefully in strips on concrete and fixed with cement. There is no attempt at producing a pattern. The walls of this part of the house and of the south wing, as originally planned, are of local slate. In one of the rooms during this period two successive floors can be identified, the later one being of the type usual in the house, rammed plaster on quartz blocks with or without a cement crust in all 6 inches thick. At a still later period two gaps were made in the outside wall and three rooms added with granite walls and in one case a fine brick dust concrete floor, 4 to 6 inches thick. All the walls were plastered and decorated with a variety of colours and patterns, including a leaf and tulip design, many of them decidedly more artistic according to modern ideas than those on Romano—British sites.”
Fragments of flue tiles were found too, indicating that there would have been some kind of underfloor heating somewhere in the villa. And there were small finds too – pieces of pottery, sherds of glass, amphorae fragments, twenty two Roman coins, a copper brooch and piles of oyster and limpet shells.
A few of these objects are on display in Truro Museum & Art Gallery . . .
The excavation revealed that a large section of the villa had already been destroyed by the plough in previous years as it lay just inches beneath the surface of the soil but it was estimated that the whole house would once have measured 56ft (17m) from front to back and 100ft (30m) in length.
Who would live in a house like this . . .?
The villa was built on a coastal ridge overlooking the Reskajeage Downs and the Red River valley. The dating evidence, the pottery and coins, that were uncovered during the dig revealed that the initial building had been constructed in the second half of the 2nd century and that it had been enlarged and then later abandoned. The villa was reoccupied around 270 – 280AD and people had lived there until roughly the 4th century. The discovery of medieval tiles also suggested another reuse of the site many years later again.
From very early on in the discovery of the villa there was much speculation as to who the possible owner of the house might be. Was it a Roman who was working in Cornwall, a Roman who had retired for a quiet life in the countryside, was it a wealthy local individual copying the Romans or a local person who had perhaps lived and worked amongst Romans and had decided to build himself a Romanised home when he returned to his native Cornwall?
The excavation occurred the same year that Hencken was going to print with his book – The Archaeology of Cornwall and Scilly – and he added the following Appendix:
“ROMAN HOUSE – MAGOR, ILLOGAN
This was partially excavated in 1931 by the Royal Institution of Cornwall under the direction of Mr B.H.St J. O’Neil, to whom the author is indebted for the following information. It proved to be a small house or ‘villa’ of Roman type and construction but lacking many of the appointments usual in such buildings. It was in use from the 2nd or early 3rd century, though its occupation may have been interrupted by a period of desertion. No evidence of a connexion with mining was found, but this is not surprising, since it was occupied mainly during the time when the Romans were paying little attention to Cornish tin, and since at the very time of the revival of that industry the house seems to have been permanently abandoned. The excavator’s view that it was the residence of a semi-Romanised Dumnonian is the most likely explanation of its presence in so remote a place.”
For many years, as Hencken suggests, it has been theorised that the Magor Farm villa was perhaps built for someone who wanted to recreate the Roman lifestyle here in Cornwall but that what they had built was not as sophisticated as a ‘proper’ Roman villa. However, after consulting with James Gossip, Senior Archaeologist at CAU, it seems that thinking is less popular these days:
“The generally accepted thinking is that the ‘ordo’ in Exeter (Isca Dumnoniorum, the Civitas of the Dumnonii) – that is, the governing council or senate for controlling (probably) the whole of Dumnonia, comprised the wealthy local elite gathered from across Devon and Cornwall. These would have been the prosperous and powerful tribal leaders with land and status, perhaps largely controlling their estates from rounds (annoyingly we still don’t know enough about rounds despite having so many of them), such as Trethurgy (near St Austell) and maybe sites like Chysauster, Carn Euny, Goldherring, Crane, Godrevy . . . How much they were aware, or accepting of, or how much they adopted a more ‘Roman’ way of life, is unknown, but clearly plenty of Roman finds show up on these sites other than just those produced locally (although these still predominates). There’s no need to assume these are people had travelled too far beyond Exeter- It’s possible, but maybe more likely that these items were being accrued by means of trade . . . Were these things brought back by a ‘Romanised’ individual, or did they arrive via a trader, aware of just how exotic these items must have seemed . . .
The villa of course is something different altogether to anything we see as the common forms of Late Iron Age/Romano-British housing . . . Entirely different to any other site in Cornwall from this period – unique, in fact. But I take issue with the argument that it is ‘unrefined’. It seems to me like the kind of colonial speak that was directing contemporaries of O’Neil (writing in the 30s) to describe the houses of our prehistoric communities as ‘hut circles’ as opposed to roundhouses – the ‘hut’ terminology is straight out of the notebook of Victorian explorers which plenty of archaeologists, including those at Historic England, still use today. Anyway, that’s a pet peeve. It’s worth noting that the HE Listing also quotes O’Neil’s assumption: “The villa was probably built by a Romanised native”. I don’t think they need to have been that ‘Romanised’ to want to emulate the living standards of the wealthy. Perhaps a socially mobile landowner/trader who was individual enough to like the new trends?
There’s nothing about the Magor Villa that looks anything other than ‘refined’ or ‘proper’ – only that its construction has been dictated by some locally available materials. The Cotswolds has clay for roof tiles, and limestone for walls – Cornwall has slate for roofs and slate rubble for walls. Magor villa has straight-walled ranges, tessellated pavements, brick-earth floors and painted wall plaster, much like the finest Roman buildings.”
So not as lacking in refinement after all . . . What is very clear is that this building would have seemed completely alien to anything that people in Cornwall had seen before, assuming that it was the first to be built and there were not lots of other villas in these parts that we just haven’t found yet that is. It would have seemed strange and revolutionary, entirely new and cutting-edge – like a Porsche to compared to a Polo, as James explains:
“When it comes to how different would this have looked to just about everything else in the occupied landscape, the answer is massively. There appears to be a fundamental change in the architecture of Romano-British Cornwall, where oval buildings start to take over from the roundhouses of the Iron Age and before. This maximises the available space internally (i.e. it doesn’t have to be taken up by loads of vertical posts) and in theory is simpler to build, with rafters springing from load-bearing walls (look up the ‘blackhouses’ of Skye and northern Scotland and you’re not far off), and this type of shift in building style was well-evidenced at Trethurgy. Roofs seem to remain thatched until at least the post-Roman period. BUT – long rectangular buildings don’t appear until the medieval longhouse cAD 900 onwards. So, as far as Cornwall goes, it is the only example of painted plaster, slate roofs and tessellated paving from the Roman period.”
But James does point out that there is a fundamental problem with some of this discussion, namely the assumption that Magor was a one off, that it was the only Roman style villa ever constructed in Cornwall. It seems entirely possible, and actually pretty likely, that it is just that it is the only one we have found to date . . . Tantalisingly there have been clues that there could be others out there – for example at Lower Rosewarne near Camborne tesserae were found in a garden in 1980 when a water pipe was being laid. After this discovery it was revealed that years earlier in the 1970s a chunk of tessellated floor had been found in an adjacent garden, along with some Samian pottery and a Roman coin. These finds are considered to be similar to those found at Magor Farm. Sadly no excavation has been carried out to prove one way or another if Lower Rosewarne is indeed another Cornish villa site!
The simple fact is that there is just so much that we don’t know and perhaps never will given that the villa at Magor has had no further investigation for nearly a century since it was found.
Never to be seen again?
From the 3rd October 1931 the public were allowed to come and view the villa. Lt. Col. Fred C.Hirst of Zennor, who had been involved in the work from the start, was the one tasked with guiding visitors around the site.
It is unclear exactly how many members of the public came to see the villa, a number of the Old Cornwall Societies organised trips I believe, but it can’t have been more than a few hundred people. And since the excavation in the autumn of 1931 the Roman Villa at Magor Farm has never been uncovered again.
At the time some of the newspapers mentioned that there were plans to continue investigations the following season but as far as I can gather for some reason this never happened. In 1933 the farmer who had first ploughed up the remains, Benjamin Mitchell, sold Magor Farm. It was advertised as 146 acres of good arable land and a dwelling house with ten rooms – no mention of a Roman villa buried in one of the fields!
In the 1980s the landowners did agree to let CAU complete a geophysical survey of the site and this is said to have shown “a number of enclosures” close to the villa. Sadly however, from what I understand, whoever owns the site now is not open to the idea of any further archaeological investigation, which would surely be able to reveal much more about this villa today, using techniques not available in the 1930s. Given that access to the site is not an option, perhaps just simply revisiting the finds from the dig, which are all stored at Truro Museum, with fresh, modern eyes would add to our understanding . . .
Canon Carah is said to have believed that the villa was “the most important discovery of his career” and it must be said that the find challenged previously held beliefs that the Romans “never came to Cornwall” or had had very little influence here. It is still the only Romanised structure ever to be found west of Exeter and it seems sad that such a rare and unique find was seen by so few before being buried beneath the soil once again.
Final Thoughts
From what I understand photographs of the site (apart from those taken by the archaeologists or by the press) are rare and I have been told that the close up of the tessellated floor and my granny’s feet might actually be unique.
My grandmother, Muriel Leona Johns, was just 14 years old when she visited the site with her father in 1931.
And some time after her visit she developed the pictures she had taken that day and stuck them all neatly into an album, entitling the page – ‘A Roman Villa in Cornwall’. I only came across the photos by accident while I was looking for something else, she never mentioned her visit to the dig to me and I wonder now what she must have thought . . . perhaps the Romans seemed very exotic and exciting for a teenager growing up in Falmouth! Given her age and her simple camera I think we must forgive how blurry some of the images are and value them for what they are – a rare snapshot of a forgotten treasure!
And of course my granny could not have known then that she would be one of just a lucky few, those who made the effort to travel to Camborne for that week in October, who would see this rare villa with their own eyes!
I have always thought that I had inherited my love of Cornwall’s ancient past from my father but it seems that that curiosity was also present on my maternal grandmother’s side too, so perhaps my interests and my work was inevitable.
Further Reading:
Neolithic Greenstone Axe ‘Factory’, Polstrong Valley, Camborne
Maen Cadoar – The Battle Stone of Camborne