244 The Roman Villa at Box. 
From the thickness of the foundations generally and the abun- 
dance of building stone in the neighbourhood it would appear that 
all the walls were built throughout of stone. 
The plaster of the walls was apparently coloured and painted 
generally, and of this a great number of fragments were found, 
which, when first exposed, were very brilliant. 
The plaster was formed of a yellowish oolitic gravel having 
pebbles of considerable size, and it is difficult to see how it was 
brought up to the smooth surface prepared for the paint. The 
thickness was often as much as 2 inches. 
From the fragments it appeared that the general scheme of 
decoration was of large panels of colour bordered and framed with 
lines of red, green, and white. The chief interest lay in the 
wonderful variety, of imitations of inarble, with which the panels 
of many of the rooms must have been filled. This was produced 
solely by splashings of different colours from a brush, and not by 
any attempt at veining or marbling. 
The roofs were covered with two sorts of tiles. The one, of 
which great quantities were found, being of thick Pennant stones 
of elongated hexagonal form, of two sizes, with a pin-hole at one 
angle by which they were suspended. The other, of which a 
number of fragments were found, being the ordinary red_ flat 
flanged tegule with half-tube shaped imbrices that protected the 
turned-up flanges. 
Of the flat building bricks? only a very few examples were 
found in the recent excavations, and none in situ except round the 
stoke holes of the hypocausts. But in the hypocausts opened in 
1881 “the pile were built of the usual 8 inch square tiles.” 
The tessere ranged in size from 1} inches to % inch square, 
and the materials from which they were made varied with the 
importance of the chambers. 
The best rooms had pavements of small tesserz, the ground 

1 These Pennant tiles doubtless came from the neighbourhood of Bristol. 
* Those found measured 104 x 104 x 14, or 13 x 114 x 1}. Fragments 
only of others larger still and 2in, thick were found. 
