Monument record TR 36 SW 484 - Bath House - Minster Roman Villa

A detached bath-house was located within the walled villa enclosure, immediately to the west of the main house. Although there was less than a 2m gap between the buildings, they represent separate structures. No clear stratigraphic relationship could be established but the bath-house had been placed in line with the end of an added corridor around the west wing of the main house, implying that the main house was already in existence. Because of their close proximity, some sort of roofed connecting passage could easily have been constructed between the two buildings so that the baths would have effectively formed part of the same overall complex. The bath-house comprised a comparatively small, rectangular building, measuring 9.55m (N-S) by 7.15m (E-W), with an external apse on the west side. It was first discovered during the 1997 season and was fully excavated the following year. The pottery and coin evidence suggest that the structure was first erected sometime during the late first or early second century and it was probably abandoned in the early third century. Subsequently, it was extensively robbed and later suffered from plough damage, so that no upper floors or occupation levels survived and all the walls had been removed to foundation level. No evidence for the position of any doorways survived. The demolition deposits infilling the deeper, hypocausted rooms produced quantities of painted plaster and tesserae, demonstrating that parts of the bath-house originally had brightly painted walls and plain red tessellated floors. Around thirty pieces of glass must have come from windows in the building. Although the preservation of the building was relatively poor, analysis of the surviving fabric indicated that there had been several phases of development, with the original building subsequently undergoing some major refurbishments and modifications. Phase 2A saw the rebuilding of the hypocaust system and the enlargement of the main Hot Room. At about the same time a new external, stone-lined drain connected to a latrine pit was added along the north and part of the east side of the building. In Phase 3 this drain channel was extended westwards through the villa boundary wall.

In its earliest form the bath-house contained seven rooms arranged in two rows on either side of a longitudinal dividing wall (Rooms 20-26), with a small projecting apsidal room on the west side (Room 27). Rooms 21, 24, 25 and 26, on the south and west sides of the main block, were all basemented and associated with the remains of a hypocaust system. Room 24 was the furnace room. Rooms 22 and 23, on the east side, had never been hypocausted but no original floor levels survived. Although sunken, Room 20 did not seem to be connected to the hypocausted rooms and was probably a cold plunge-bath. All the walls associated with the main Phase 1 construction were well built of large flint cobbles with occasional blocks of tufa and tile levelling courses (?discontinuous), set in a white-pink gritty mortar. Sub-floors of opus signinum survived in the base of hypocausted Rooms 21, 25 and 26 and these are also likely to have been laid in Phase 1.

At some stage, the bath-house underwent major alterations and modifications. The hypocaust system was rebuilt in Phase 2A, leaving the details of the original arrangement less than clear in many places. The drainage from the building was improved when a new latrine was added in Room 23 during Phase 2B. Whether all these changes occurred at the same time remains uncertain but it seems quite likely.

Sometime after the external drain had been added in Phase 2B, the channel was further extended by almost 7m, beyond the villa boundary wall. This later extension was represented by two mortared flint walls, set 0.47m apart, butted onto the end of the original channel. They stood to a height of about 0.64m (5-6 courses). As with the Phase 2B channel, it would seem that the drain extension had been built into what had originally been an open ditch. Exploratory excavation below the base of the drain walls revealed a layer of clay which must represent back-filling of the earlier ditch. This pre-drain in-fill produced some painted plaster and tile but no pottery. Beyond the villa boundary wall, the drain remained as an open ditch heading northwards. The shallow drainage gully leading away from the west side of the baths must have originally discharged into the main ditch but in Phase 3 it was cut across by the new stone drain channel. This served to block it and must have rendered it inoperable. The final filling of the gully produced tile and fourteen pot-sherds broadly datable to the second century.

Eventually the bath-house was abandoned. The drainage system became blocked with silt, building debris and domestic rubbish and the building's walls and hypocausts were robbed. The available evidence combines to suggest that the use of the building came to an end sometime in the early third century. The main house seems to have been given up at about the same time. The final filling of the latrine pit in Room 23 and adjacent stone channel produced a coin of Faustina II, dated AD 145-161 and thirty pot-sherds datable to the period c. AD 120-170. These included three pieces of samian ware. A quantity of tesserae were recovered from the upper filling of the latrine pit and these may be derived from the adjacent floor of Room 23. The filling of the main drainage channel yielded a bone needle, painted wall plaster, tile, a few tesserae and seventy-one pot-sherds, all late second-century in date. The pottery includes three stamped samian vessels. The soil and rubble filling the unlined ditch outside the villa enclosure, to the north of the stone channel produced over 120 sherds of pottery datable to the second half of the second century and a quantity of animal bone. (information summarised from saource) (1)

<1> D.R.J Perkins, 2004, The Roman villa at Minster in Thanet. Part 1 Introduction and report on the bath-house (Article in serial). SKE51649.