Remains of Roman villa found in Marske-by-the-Sea building site

Yorkshire Post

A building site in Marske-by-the-Sea where the remains of a Roman villa have been found. An application to list it as a Scheduled Ancient Monument has been made.

Transcript

00:00 Right, I'm Dr. Kendra Quinn and I'm a voluntary archaeologist. I've been working with Tristan

00:08 and some of the local residents to explain what's been going on on this site.

00:12 By the looks of it, it could be quite an exciting site. Can you just tell us?

00:19 So, yes. Well, basically there's a Roman ladder settlement that's been found, which is an

00:23 unusual sort of feature in this area. The nearest one's been at Loftus at Street House.

00:29 There's not much in the way of Roman settlement, Roman roads found in this area, so when this

00:33 was uncovered, this was really interesting. And it's been a site that's been occupied

00:37 for quite a long time, so it'll be able to tell the archaeologists and us quite a lot

00:42 about that era in our history.

00:45 Do you know what's been found thus far?

00:48 Thus far, a number of enclosures and houses from Iron Age, Romano-British period, pottery,

00:56 gaming pieces, you know, like counters for playing Scrabble or something like that, bones,

01:02 flint tools. It's been quite interesting, I think.

01:05 Quite a significant site.

01:07 Yeah, I would say so. It's so big and so unusual. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:13 People like yourself must be getting quite excited.

01:16 It's not just me getting excited. I've been in to speak to about 170 schoolchildren so

01:20 far. I've been booked up by a couple of the other schools in the area, and a lot of the

01:24 local people are really interested in their heritage, really interested.

01:28 What would you like to see happen with the site?

01:33 I think it's a bit unfortunate that it's, you know, earmarked for planning, because

01:38 if it gets built on, it's all going to be lost forever. And I really hope that it can

01:44 be preserved, or at least parts of it can be preserved, with the scheduling application.

01:48 And what do you know about settlements in this area?

01:53 Right, not an awful lot, really. If you look at a map of the Roman roads, for instance,

01:58 of Britain, there's a whole great white area where there's nothing around Redcar and Cleveland

02:03 and the top part of North Yorkshire. So anything like this that we find can fill in those gaps

02:07 in our history, nationally, never mind locally.

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