As well as the two buried villas, characterised on the scan by their highly distinctive shape, and eight prehistoric farms, archaeologists also found evidence of a Roman cemetery, Roman road network and new features associated with a previously identified Anglo Saxon great hall.
The National Trust, which owns the land, said the “one of a kind” survey was carried out to help it plan for future nature conservation and tree-planting schemes across the landscape, as part of its ambitious targets to address climate change., or Wroxeter, was the fourth most important city in Roman Britain and experts fully expected the grounds of its stately home,, near to the city’s ruins to be archaeologically significant, said Janine Young, an archaeologist with the trust.
However, she identified the iron age farmstead enclosures, which had shown up particularly clearly in the ground scan, as her personal favourite discovery. “We picked up a lovely little circular feature which represents a roundhouse, which will have been lived in by an iron age family. You are homing right into the personal level, where we can see the outline of the house that would have been occupied.
The trust says a fuller understanding of the landscape will help it “ land use changes with its tenants to help capture carbon, build climate resilience and support nature restoration”. Young said: “We can protect the archaeology, and also learn from the way the land was used in the past, in order to come up with the best possible use in the future.