Fragment of a 2nd-century Roman Venus figurine uncovered beneath the walls of Bodiam Castle
Archaeologists from UCL and Archaeology South-East have excavated a fragment of a pipeclay Venus figurine from the 2nd century AD as part of the Bodiam 100 project, with the find attributed to workshops in Central Gaul.
A team of archaeologists from the UCL Institute of Archaeology and the organisation Archaeology South-East announced on 1 May 2026 that excavations in the grounds of the mediaeval Bodiam Castle in East Sussex had yielded a fragment of a Roman ceramic figurine depicting the goddess Venus. The piece was lifted from the trench by volunteer Abigail Winslow, and analysis by Dr Matthew Fittock, a specialist in Roman ceramic figurines, dates the fragment to the 2nd century AD and assigns it to workshops in Central Gaul.
The material the figurine is made of, pipeclay, is a fine white clay that in Roman north-western Europe was the standard material for inexpensive household statuettes and items for domestic shrines. The excavation is part of the Bodiam 100 project, marking a hundred years since the National Trust took over the castle’s stewardship, and is funded by the Roman Society and the Council for British Archaeology South-East. Alongside the figurine, the team has documented tiles stamped Classis Britannica, pointing to a link with the Roman fleet, which at the time had a base on the Sussex coast.
In methodological terms, the fragment is too small to be confident of which specific workshop within Central Gaul produced it, given that pipeclay Venus figurines were mass-produced at several sites in the region. According to Fittock, the depiction “probably comes from the standard design in which Venus holds her drapery in one hand and touches her hair with the other”, an iconographic type widely represented in the north-western provinces of the Roman Empire. The systematic catalogues of Roman Britain to date list only a few hundred similar finds, which makes the Bodiam fragment not exceptional but part of a relatively small corpus.
What the find does NOT prove
The Bodiam site has not, until now, been formally recorded as a Roman settlement. The discovery of the figurine, alongside pottery, glass and building material from the 2nd to 4th centuries, raises the possibility that the surroundings once held a small domestic building or household shrine from the Roman period. The excavations, however, have not produced walls, roof structures or clear stratigraphic evidence that any such building stood permanently on the spot. According to the UCL researchers, “the finds to date demonstrate activity”, but they are not enough to conclude where the building stood or what its precise function was.
A second important limit is that the excavations so far have been confined to small test trenches around the castle, which means the sample of finds does not cover the entire landscape. A single figurine does not document household religious practice with the certainty that the remains of a household shrine, with several objects, would provide. According to the Bodiam 100 project, the team plans to expand the trenches over the 2026 and 2027 seasons toward the Rother River, where a small jetty linked to the Classis Britannica fleet is suspected to have stood in Roman times.
The fragment is currently on display in the Castle Cottage Museum within Bodiam itself. The next scientific report of the project is expected at the end of 2026, when the full finds catalogue will be published, with stratigraphic data and radiocarbon dating of the charcoal residues recorded in the same layer as the figurine.
Historically, what makes Bodiam interesting is its previously documented role as a Classis Britannica naval area, the Roman fleet that between the 1st and 4th centuries controlled the English Channel and part of the coast of what is now England. Tiles stamped Classis Britannica have so far been found at several sites in Sussex and Kent, but mostly within fortified bases or mining centres, not in rural households. The appearance of a Venus figurine in the same context as these stamps may point to the presence of a veteran’s family or a minor administrator who had moved from the fleet into civilian life on a local estate.
It is also notable that the mediaeval Bodiam Castle itself, built in 1385 for the knight Edward Dalyngrigge, stands on a site that was clearly used for much longer than previously assumed. According to the Bodiam 100 project, it is suspected that the choice of site for the mediaeval castle is linked to the fact that, in the Roman period, it was already accessible from the Rother River, which in the Middle Ages remained navigable to the sea. If this hypothesis is borne out, Bodiam would become one of the rare examples of continuous occupation from the Roman period to the late Middle Ages in the Sussex region, with wider implications for the understanding of English rural history.
