Workmen digging foundations for a garage struck Roman remains in Newport on 24th March 1926 – 100 years ago today.
The discovery began with a spade hitting something harder than chalk and clay. Tiles surfaced first – flat, unfamiliar, ancient. What should have been routine groundwork on land bordering Cypress Road suddenly felt different. The soil was not giving up rubble. It was giving up history.
A highways surveyor examined the tiles and recognised them as Roman. Word spread quickly. The digging slowed.
Within a day, the ground began to reveal its secret. A patch of coloured tessellated paving emerged. Then came tile pillars – stacked supports that once held up a suspended floor. Beneath them lay the remains of a hypocaust heating chamber. Evidence of a bath room – astonishingly well preserved – soon followed.
Newport had uncovered a Roman villa.
Walls were traced. Rooms took shape. The outline of a substantial farmhouse appeared beneath what was becoming a new housing development. The villa lay partly beneath a neighbouring garden, its foundations stretching further than anyone first imagined.
Architect and antiquarian Percy G. Stone oversaw the dig. He identified the furnace that once heated the hypocausts and described fragments of mosaic flooring edged with a guilloche border. The craftsmanship spoke of comfort and status.
Crowds gathered. Children walked miles to see the site. Scouts mounted guard. Curious Islanders arrived from across the Isle to glimpse heated floors and walls that had last sheltered Roman feet more than 1,600 years earlier.
Excavations continued into the autumn. Coins dating from the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD were found alongside bronze bracelets, spiral rings and heavy iron nails that once held roof timbers together. Four gaming marbles lay buried in the earth.
The villa was no palace. It was a working farm – the home of a landowner who farmed the surrounding land and adopted Roman building styles. Nearby would have stood barns, granaries and stables, though most of that evidence vanished beneath the advancing housing before it could be fully recorded.
Beneath the villa itself lay deeper history. A ditch filled with broken pottery showed people had lived here even before the Roman house was built, and Iron Age fragments still occasionally surface in neighbouring gardens.
Faced with the remarkable preservation, local resident J. C. Millgate purchased the site and funded the construction of a protective cover building. Thanks to his foresight, the villa survived as houses rose around it and streets formed.
Today, the Roman farmhouse lies unexpectedly within a residential part of Newport – a Scheduled Ancient Monument preserved beneath its protective structure. Its future has recently been the subject of debate after Isle of Wight Council draft budget proposals included plans to close Newport Roman Villa to the public as part of savings measures for 2026–27, while continuing to maintain the site, as reported by Island Echo
What began with a single tile struck by a workman’s spade in March 1926 remains one of the Isle of Wight’s most dramatic archaeological discoveries – proof that beneath modern gardens and garages, entire chapters of the Island’s past still lie waiting.
The thing that gets me about this is how was nothing discovered prior to these garages being built? The houses nearby must have disturbed something during their construction? Also the way the work disappears under the nearby gardens, makes me wonder what else is still there? Given the proximity of a relatively straight road north and a local river, one would have thought it a prominent location for ancient Roman ruins.