A mosaic survived fifteen centuries, then a week

A crowd stripped a Roman floor bare within a week

A crowd stripped a Roman floor bare within a week of finding it. The mosaic had survived underground for around fifteen hundred years, since the North Leigh Roman Villa was abandoned in the 5th century. It came up again in one piece, and it did not stay that way.

The dig was led by Henry Hakewill, an antiquarian working the site between 1813 and 1817. The villa he uncovered had been a large courtyard house, built in the first century AD and expanded for three hundred years. It had sixteen mosaic floors and three sets of baths at its height. Most of that had crumbled or been robbed for stone centuries earlier. One floor had not.

Word of the find spread fast through the parish. Local people came to see the uncovered floor, and within days pieces of it were being carried off. What Hakewill left behind was a careful drawing, made before the floor was picked apart. That drawing is now the only complete record of what the ground had kept safe since Roman families walked out for the last time.

Saxon burials were found generations after the villa fell silent

A second discovery, further off, points to how long people kept coming back to this valley after the villa fell silent. Near the turning to Holly Court on the Wilcote road, workers found eight burials thought to date from the 7th century. The bodies may belong to a Saxon community. This group returned to the ruined villa site generations after Rome left Britain. They reused ground that had already given up one buried world. What remains is the fact of the graves themselves. They were found by chance and only partly explained. The ground here has never stopped giving up what was left in it.

Owners tore down their own Georgian house and rebuilt

A house can be pulled down by its own owners as thoroughly as a mosaic can be pulled apart by a crowd. The Georgian building at Eynsham Hall had stood since the 1770s, added to and altered for over a century. Charles Barry gave it an extra floor in the mid-1800s. Owen Jones added a fourth story in the 1870s.

None of that survived past 1904. The Mason family, who had lived there since 1866, tore the old house down and started again. A new Jacobethan mansion went up in its place between 1906 and 1908, designed by Ernest George. It took four years to erase what four generations had built.

The new building still stands, 150 feet from the old forecourt walls that predate it. Its limestone front and terraced gardens are what visitors see today. The house before it left almost nothing behind, not even a drawing to match Hakewill's.

A hunting estate became a maternity ward and a flak shack

War turned the hunting estate into something its builders never planned for. Rooms fitted out for shooting parties and country weekends became a maternity ward. Expectant mothers evacuated from London gave birth at Eynsham Hall during the Second World War. The artist Anthony J. Batten was born there in 1940.

American airmen used the same rooms differently. Officers from the US Army Air Corps came here for rest between missions, in a program the American Red Cross ran. They called it the flak shack. Men played bridge and snooker where the Masons had once entertained hunting guests.

Peace did not return the house to its original use. In 1946 the Home Office took it over as a police training center, a role it held for decades. The building built to show off a family's wealth spent longer serving the state than it ever spent as a private home.