The Brading Roman Villa, Isle of Wight

Laid at the height of Wight's Roman era prosperity during the 3rd century AD, they show an owner who was cultured, educated, and a possibly well-travelled provincial Romano-Briton. His two storied villa, with its under-floor heating, was designed to enable him to enjoy to the full a sophisticated Roman lifestyle of both casual and formal entertaining, and public business within its walls.

A particularly spectacular mosaic of the head of Medusa, Neptune's snake haired consort, decorates the centre of one large room. She is surrounded by eight panels featuring treatments of various farming scenes and cornered by panels of the Four Winds. Medusa appears to have held special significance for the Celtic tribes of southern England. Tincomarus, the late Iron Age king in this region chose her head as the reverse emblem on his issue of gold coins and Medusa's head appears in a number of other mosaics finds in the area.

This Medusa appears to be an early example of off-the-shelf mass production; prefabricated as a ready made flatpack kit, perhaps, and shipped to the site for a local builder to lay. He botched the job and laid it slightly askew, no doubt causing the rich patron to grumble bitterly about the poor quality of local workmanship! Some things never change!

The farming scene panels are interesting in that they show a high degree of sophistication in the Celtic owner's knowledge of classical Greek and Roman myth. We see an allusion to arable farming with Ceres, Roman goddess of corn, handing an ear of wheat to Triptolemus, mythical inventor of the plough. Another panel, which bears remarkable similarity with a wall painting in Pompeii, refers to pastoral farming, featuring a shepherd with panpipes and crook together with a water nymph; identified as either Attis and the water nymph Sangaritis, or possibly Paris and Oenone. A further panel shows us Lycurgus, the king of Thrace, (now modern Bulgaria), chasing the nymph Ambrosia with his double-headed axe. The story goes that Ambrosia called Mother Earth for help and was transformed into a vine. In the mosaic we see the transformed nymph strangling Lycurgus with her coiling branches.

There are many who posit that the island Celts took up viticulture during Roman times. Could the owner of this remarkable villa also have owned a vineyard?

You can read more about the Isle of Wight, my island idyll, at Rosemary Lane, my weekly chronicle of the changing

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