This rare piece of painted wall plaster with the partial face of a woman was found on the Hunsbury Villa bathhouse site, Northampton. It is the only depiction of a face from Roman Northamptonshire that has been found.
The interiors of Roman buildings were often decorated using bold colours and designs. Wall paintings or frescoes were commonly seen in public buildings, private homes, temples, tombs and even military structures across the Roman world.
Hunsbury Villa bathhouse consisted of three rooms, two of them heated and the third with a cold plunge bath, which was filled with a large amount of painted wall plaster. It would have been part of a home inhabited by wealthy Romans or local elites who had embraced the Roman way of life to create a luxurious abode.
Roman law defined a villa as a building in the country and they were rather like a farmhouse within a larger compound. It would have comprised of many separate rooms, linked by corridors to kitchens and servants’ quarters. Some of the living rooms and bedrooms were heated by hypocaust, a system of central heating that produced and circulated hot air beneath the floor. Floors would be covered with mosaics or coloured mortar and walls decorated with painted plaster.
Number 26 of the objects selected for the A History of Northamptonshire in 100 Objects exhibition 2025.
This is a rare type of medieval ceramic roof tile, replaced in the 13th century by standard rectangular ceramic or nib tiles used until the 20th century. The rarity of these roof tiles and their association with buildings of high status in Northampton, both religious and secular, is of historical and archaeological significance.
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NMAG
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Andy Chapman