Bodiam Castle rises from its broad moat in the East Sussex countryside like a textbook illustration of medieval England. Built in 1385 by Sir Edward Dallingridge, a knight who had made his fortune during the Hundred Years’ War, the castle has drawn visitors for centuries and has belonged to the National Trust since 1925. Its history, as far as anyone knew, began and ended in the Middle Ages.
That timeline is now in question. During excavations carried out in spring 2026 as part of a joint research program between University College London and the National Trust, archaeologists recovered a small fragment of a pipeclay figurine depicting Venus, the Roman goddess of love. If the object’s archaeological context confirms a Roman date, it would push evidence of human activity at Bodiam back more than a thousand years before Dallingridge laid his first stone.
A Roman devotional object in medieval ground
Pipeclay Venus figurines are a well-documented class of artifact from Roman Britain. Small, mass-produced, and manufactured primarily in Central Gaul (modern-day France), they circulated widely across the Roman province of Britannia. As archaeologist Matthew G. Fittock documented in a 2015 study published in Internet Archaeology, these figurines are best understood as devotional objects tied to domestic or communal religious practice. Fittock’s analysis of pipeclay figurines at Elms Farm in Heybridge, Essex, situates them within broader patterns of ritual behavior across Romano-British settlements, where incomplete examples have turned up repeatedly.
Finding one at Bodiam is unexpected. The Rother Valley, where the castle sits, has not previously been considered a significant Roman-period landscape, and no substantial Roman remains have been recorded at the castle site itself. The fragment does not prove continuous occupation, but it does suggest that the ground beneath and around the castle holds layers of activity that predate the medieval period.
The excavation behind the discovery
The figurine fragment emerged from trial trenching conducted under the Bodiam 100 project, a three-year research initiative launched in 2024 by UCL’s Archaeology South-East unit in partnership with the National Trust. The project’s stated goals center on establishing the chronology and character of the castle’s broader landscape, not just the standing structure. National Trust archaeologist Nathalie Cohen leads the heritage side of the collaboration.
“The aim is to understand the full biography of this landscape, not just the castle you see today,” the Bodiam 100 project page states, describing the initiative as one that pairs professional archaeologists with community volunteers to investigate features across the surrounding terrain.
Geophysical surveys preceded the trenching, and trench locations were mapped in advance, meaning the Venus fragment came from a controlled excavation area rather than a chance surface find. An earlier evaluation report produced by Archaeology South-East, catalogued with DOI 10.5284/1075194 at the Archaeology Data Service, documents previous professional trial trenching at or near the castle site in Robertsbridge. The Bodiam 100 team is building directly on that earlier work.
What remains uncertain
No peer-reviewed analysis of this specific Venus fragment has been published. The figurine’s stratigraphic context, the soil layer it came from, and any associated artifacts found alongside it have not been detailed in any publicly available report. Without that information, it is not yet possible to assign a firm date to the object or to determine whether it was deposited during the Roman period or arrived at the site through later soil movement.
The question of where exactly the fragment was found also matters. Bodiam Castle is surrounded by its famous moat, and some Romano-British sites show evidence of ritual deposition near water features, a pattern documented in broader scholarship on votive practices in Roman Britain. Whether the Venus fragment was recovered near the moat or in an area with no obvious water connection has not been disclosed. That spatial detail could shape interpretation significantly.
Conservation plans for the fragment are also unconfirmed. Pipeclay is fragile and porous, and Roman-era examples often require careful stabilization before they can be studied in detail or put on display.
Why this find could reshape Bodiam’s story
The strongest evidence supporting the discovery comes from institutional sources with clear accountability. The Bodiam 100 project page at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology establishes the excavation’s objectives and governance. The Archaeology Data Service record for the earlier evaluation report provides a citable, DOI-registered document confirming that professional trenching has occurred at Bodiam before, commissioned by the same organization now partnering on the current dig.
The scholarly context for Venus figurines in Roman Britain rests on published, peer-reviewed research. Fittock’s Internet Archaeology study of Central Gaulish pipeclay figurines at Elms Farm offers a direct parallel for how specialists interpret incomplete examples of these objects. That source does not describe the Bodiam find, but it supplies the interpretive framework that makes the fragment significant rather than merely curious.
What the available sources do not yet provide is any direct, on-the-record statement from the excavation team about the figurine’s archaeological context. Until the Bodiam 100 team publishes interim findings or a formal site report, the Venus fragment sits in a gap between confirmed recovery and confirmed interpretation.
What to watch for as the Bodiam 100 program reaches its final year
The Bodiam 100 program is expected to reach its final planned year in 2026. If the fragment’s stratigraphic position confirms a Roman date, the castle’s story will need rewriting. Bodiam would no longer be understood solely as a product of Sir Edward Dallingridge’s late-medieval ambitions but as a place with far deeper roots, a location where people lived, worshipped, or passed through during the centuries when Britain was a province of Rome. That conclusion, though, depends on evidence the excavation team has not yet made public.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
