Return to Priors Hall: exploring a Roman villa estate near Corby

Back in CA 370, we described Oxford Archaeology’s excavation of the rare remains of a Romano-British temple-mausoleum associated with an early villa at Priors Hall, near Corby, Northamptonshire. The ceremonial structure was intriguing in its own right, but during the 2nd to 3rd century AD the site’s story had taken an unexpected turn: the mausoleum and surrounding landscape were transformed into a thriving manufacturing centre, whose abundance of kilns produced huge quantities of tiles, brick, pottery vessels, and lime mortar. These features (dubbed Area A during our research) lay some 200m to the west of the villa remains, which spanned the 1st to 4th century in date and had first be