Folkstone Roman Villa

Folkestone Roman Villa, also referred to as the East Bay Site, is a villa built during the Roman Occupation of Britain, and is located in East Wear Bay near the port town of Folkestone, in Kent, England. The villa is situated on a cliff top overlooking the English Channel, with views of the French coast at Boulogne on a clear day. It is situated near the start of the North Downs Trackway, and the area has been inhabited for thousands of years, with archeological finds in the area and at the villa site dating back to the mesolithic and neolithic ages. The villa was built around A. D. 75, and was almost certainly built within the confines of a preexisting Iron Age settlement.

The villa was rebuilt and expanded in probably the second century A. D., this time as a more substantial structure with mosaics, a bath-house, and a second block, possibly connected by a courtyard. The villa was abandoned sometime in the third century, though archeological evidence suggests that it was briefly reoccupied in the fourth century.

The Roman villa and earlier Iron Age workshop are located on the head of a low, slumped cliff, overlooking a shingle beach. The cliff here is composed of a band of gault clay that is nearly 100 feet thick, which overlies the Lower Greensand stone formation. The greensand is not actually sand: it is a loose, unconsolidated sandstone bed that forms part of the underlying structure of southeast England. The exposed greensand at Folkestone, referred to as the Folkestone Formation or the Folkestone Beds, is a unique geological feature of the area, and is rich with fossils and ichnofauna. The formation extends about 5 miles to the northwest of Folkestone to town of Stanford. At the junction where the gault meets the greensand, the gault is nearly liquid, resulting is major erosion and landslides over the years. This erosion has threatened to destroy the villa site, which was another 400 – 500 meters from the sea during Roman times, but which now sits near the edge of the cliff. The site is crumbling into the sea at about a rate of 6 inches per year. Numerous rescue excavations have been undertaken over the years, as archeologists race to rescue the site from slow destruction.

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