The Roman Roads of Languedoc

A South-facing villa

The route of the Via Aquitana as very close to today's RN113.  The remains of the villa are 700 metres from the road - a classic situation.  Like us today, the Romans didn't like to live beside main roads, with the noise of the traffic - carts, farm vehicle, chariots - and all the attendant commercial places. They liked to build on a peaceful south-facing slope a little way away.
  The small remains we found confirmed that the villa existed in the first century BC.  It seems it was abandoned in the times of the Visigoths (400AD to 760AD.)  There was not a battle, it was simply that the new masters of Gaul were not numerous enough to have the manpower to maintain all the villas and farms.
  The remains also confirmed that the villa was very rich.  They had frescos on the walls, floors made of small bricks in a herring-bone pattern, and much domestic pottery, some quite fine - sigillee, sigillee Africaine, "poterie noire."   A part of the wall of the villa still remains and plenty of fragments of tegulae - the large heavy roof-tiles used by the Romans - are laying on the ground.
 
Back at the house, we organised our finds.
 
sigillee pottery and the handles of amphores
   
floor-bricks, bases of pottery bowls, and rims.  We did not find two rims that matched, such was the variety of pottery.

A beautiful spot.  Visit in spring before the vegetation hides the ground.