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.
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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.