Excavating roman timbers at Whitehall Villa in Northamptonshire.

[oliomedia]

We now know that these are certainly not roof trusses! What they are remains a mystery, although it is confirmed that they have had at least three different uses including the one we found them. It is possible that one of them was part of a mechanism of some sort - perhaps a mill. In spite of their size and survival, the timbers are not of national-level interest, but the way they were cut might demonstrate an interesting local/regional variation on usual Roman practice.

Jeremy Cooper