Monument record IPS 421 - Roman Villa, Castle Hill, Ipswich.

2003: Time team evaluation, that aimed to establish the position of the villa as recorded by by Basil Brown within the present landscape, to establish its full extent, including the presence or absence of wings and to evaluate the present condition of the remains. The work included re-evaluation of exising plans, geophysical survey and 12 trial trenches. The evaluation produced no evidence for side wings to the villa, so providing support for browns contention that it was costructed as a single range. However attempts to fix his excavation plan to the present landscape were unsuccessful. The evaluation also confirmed Browns conclusion that the villa had been heavily robbed for building stone in the past. A number of heavily robbed wall trenches were identified on the eastern side of the villa, in one case associated with a layer of burning possibly representing a collapsed wattle and daub wall, while the evaluation trenches of the south of the villa produced a low density of Roman artefacts. The work also provided evidence of the current condion of the site, revealing that most of the stratigraphy on the site has been removed by the earlier excavations and that only isolated patches of undisturbed deposit remain. Most of the west end of the villa has been totally excavated, although unexcavated features do exist at the base of the site (S1, S3).

Included in the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and History annual round up of individual finds and discoveries for 2003 (S4).