GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now why should they be attracted to the road?

MARTIN MILLETT
Well I think you've got to remember that it's a very major Roman road, it's the A1 of Roman Britain really.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Now does that mean there's some kind of huge commercial marketing opportunity for the Iron Age people who live here?

MARTIN MILLETT
I think there's an attraction of passing trade, things like soldiers, messengers and so forth, who will be passing along the road. You have to have places for the horses to be fed and watered, people to stay overnight, built all the way along the road along this stretch.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
It sounds a bit like a Wild West American town built along the road?

MARTIN MILLETT
Exactly like that, and I suspect they had big facades just like in the Wild West to really impress people as they went past.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
There’s still so much about this period in history that we don’t fully understand, but it’s clear that just forty years after the invasion the landscape and the cultural life of Britain were being transformed.

Exotic goods were flooding into the country and we know that people from all over the Empire were making their home here. Britain had changed beyond recognition in just a couple of generations.

Perhaps the biggest change was that the Romans - unlike Boudicca and the other tribal leaders - treated Britain as one country, breaking down the old tribal chiefdoms and by doing so laying the foundations of modern Britain.

(At Butser Ancient Farm, helping to build the re-construction of a Roman Villa)

Eugene, I can't think of any more entertaining way to spend my time than messing around with cement and stone walls. But why are you doing that?

EUGENE FRASER
It's a good question. I wonder myself sometimes. The truth of it is that this is the first time, as far as we know, that anyone has ever attempted to build from scratch a copy of a Roman villa or part of a Roman villa. This is a copy of a villa that was discovered in Sparshot.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
How would you contrast the kind of comforts that were available to somebody living in a house like this, compared to an Iron Age house?

EUGENE FRASER
Well quite clearly it's much more comfortable to live in a centrally heated house as this is.

But from my point of view it's far, far less romantic. I sometimes walk though the forest here to work in the mornings, and in the distance I can see those Celtic roundhouses brooding in the distance over there. And they seem by their shape to echo the hills behind them. That appeals to my my my romantic nature, I suppose.

But this house (pointing at the villa walls) built with the kind of materials that it's been built with, and with its rectangular shape, is a statement. And this statement is the Romans saying, "We are here, and we are here forever".

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