The site of Yewden villa was excavated in 1912 by Alfred Heneage Cocks. The work was funded by a very generous donation by Lord Hambleden. Cocks wrote up the work in 1921, but as we are discovering now - he only wrote about the major (whole) finds in a report published in 1921. Many thousands of other finds were never looked at and remained unidentified until Chiltern Archaeology started work on them.

He also put many items on show in the Hambleden museum, which closed during the 1960s, but again he did not use the vast majority of the collections and, indeed, no-one has ever looked through the many hundreds of finds boxes now held at the Bucks County Museum in Aylesbury. Here area few of the photographs from the 1912 excavation archive.

Cocks prepared a very good plan of the site and named every part, making interpretations where he could. This tapering ditch he called the 'V-ditch'. He assumed it to be a Roman ditch, and indeed it does contain much Roman pottery in its upper parts. This no doubt led English Heritage to suggest that this might be a military ditch - maybe an early army encampment defence during the invasion in the early first century AD. However, pottery carefully labelled by Cocks as 'Bottom of V-ditch' is Iron Age pot. So this is an Iron Age enclosure ditch, and nothing to do with the army.

The lady in the picture is Miss Glassbrook

Miss Glassbrook was a local from the village of Hambleden and she noticed a large amount of pottery being brought to the surface in the ploughed field near her home. She took samples to Mr Cocks, who was the curator of the Bucks County Museum, and he immediately recognised it as an important amount of Roman finds.

This is the excavation area of what Cocks calls the 1st House, and it is a large villa building, late in date. This is the central aisle area which is flanked by two tesselated corridors and it has wings added to each end.

Cocks' 1912 photographs are very useful as they show the excavation site (which was covered back over immediately following the work, and they can be used to show relative ages. Here the main building (right, a bathroom) has had a wing added (left) which is an extended bathroom. You can tell this by the 'butting' relationship of the walls.

Here is one of the tesselated corridors of the 1st House.

The corridor is composed of small pieces of terracotta - a very plain mosaic. The villa shows great wealth in the amount of artefacts found on site, so a lack of ornate mosaic must reflect a lack of suitable craftsmen rather than a lack of funds.

The well and the 'Grid iron' furnace. The site contained 16 furnaces and this project is currently assessing what they may all have been used for. It has been suggested that they were all for corn drying, but this is rather a large number. The furnaces are very different sizes and styles. We think the associated artefacts will hold the key (which is what we are working on at this moment). They may also turn out to be different ages.

This furnace Cocks calls the 'T Furnace. Very well preserved flues in place.