of a much bigger roman villa complex from the third or fourth centuries. excavations were carried out this summer in a farmer s field in rutland, but the discovery was made in 2020 by the farmer s son, jim irvine. it was amazing, really. i mean, the level of preservation. he found some pottery fragments, then checked satellite imagery and noticed the outline of what looked like ancient buildings. and this is the the mosaics in this section, all of this. so the family came back on a sunny day with some spades and started digging. you can only tell so much from a map and from some crop marks. until you actually dig a hole, you don t really know what s in it, so that was a good day out. we didn t really know what we had. so i expanded the hole up a bit until we came across what was obviously rare roman mosaic tiles, at which point things went a bit silent in the group and we realised what we had. late roman pottery gives us a date of third,