In recent decades, development-led excavations on the outskirts of Cambridge have offered vivid insights into the area’s Roman past, revealing a once-intensively occupied landscape striped with roads and scattered with settlements and cemeteries, farmsteads and villa estates. One of the latest additions to this increasingly detailed map emerged during archaeological investigations immediately to the west of the village of Milton, about 4km (2.5 miles) north-east of Cambridge’s historic core. There, in 2023, Archaeological Research Services Ltd carried out a large, open-area excavation exploring 3.56ha (8.8 acres) ahead of the construction of the new Milton Police Station. As the recently published monograph A Landscape of Plenty: excavations on a Roman estate, Cambridgeshire (see ‘Further reading’) reports, this project uncovered a large and complex network of intercutting enclosures that are thought to represent part of the agricultural working area associated with a late Roman villa estate, as well as giving diverse insights into its inhabitants’ activities.
It is easy to understand why this would have been an appealing location for agricultural activity during the late Roman period. The site nestles on a low, sheltered terrace of the Cam valley, and was well-connected, with the River Cam flowing around 1.75km (1.1 miles) to the east and Akeman Street (a Roman road, also known as the Mere Way, which ran north-east from Cambridge into the Fens) passing about 500m (0.3 miles) to the west. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the wider area has already proven to be rich in archaeological remains. Extensive fieldwork on adjacent sites such as Milton Landfill (in 1994-1998 and 2007-2013) and Milton Park and Ride (2017) revealed evidence of Bronze Age and Iron Age occupation, as well as Roman features including ditches and planting trenches, a barrow containing both inhumation and cremation burials, and building material from a possible villa. As we will explore here, excavation of the Police Station site has been equally illuminating.
An evolving landscape
The site’s story begins long before the Roman period: the earliest hints of a human presence came in the form of seven worked flints – certainly prehistoric, and probably produced during or after the late 4th millennium BC – though these were all residual finds recovered from Roman or later features.
