DORCHESTER’S Roman Town House is reopening its doors to visitors this Easter weekend – following a £248,000 revamp.

The cash was made available through the National Lottery Heritage Fund to improve access to the site with a new entrance, as well as creation of new ampitheatre-style seating, installation of lighting and landscaping.

Further work planned at the site, due to start in the summer, will see a range of activities and events introduced at the site.

The villa, one of a kind in the country, is to the rear of County Hall.

Visitors previously said in a survey that they had trouble finding it – and that when they did had difficulty in accessing the site.

There is now a new access route to the site from Dorchester’s Walks on the west side of County Hall, which makes for a shorter journey for most people.

A new ramped entrance has been created, while interpretation boards have been introduced to tell the story of the site to visitors as they go along. New nature-friendly landscaping now surrounds the site with plants that attract bees and hedgehog houses, as well as hibernaculum’s hidden away for local wildlife.

There is also new amphitheatre style seating area where visitors will be able to enjoy the surroundings - and later in the year use to watch ticketed events being organised by the Dorset Arts Development Company.

The cover building has a new paint scheme and the Roman mosaics and other internal features such as the heated room are being repaired and cleaned.

Guided tours and school visits will start soon to allow access inside the cover building allowing visitors to look at and hear about the different features and mosaics, which can be booked through Dorset Museum.

The project has not only received National Lottery funding, but partnership funding has been provided by the Dorchester Heritage Committee, Fine Family Foundation, Dorset Council, Dorset County Museum, the Arts Development Company.

Dorset Council’s Portfolio Holder for Highways, Travel and Environment, Cllr Ray Bryan commented,

“We are pleased to be welcoming the public back and have worked hard with our partners and key stakeholders to transform the Roman Town House. We are looking forward to seeing our site used to provide new activities and productions that welcome new visitors to the site over the coming months.”

The well-preserved Roman Town House with its mosaic floors was discovered in the 1930s when work started on the construction of County Hall, with plans for the office building then changed to allow it to remain on display.

The complex, which developed during the third and fourth centuries AD consisted of two stone ranges and a series of wooden buildings. Each range of buildings contained a hypocaust, a form of underfloor warm air heating, while the western range also had floor mosaics of varying quality that illustrate the different functions of each of the rooms.

The earliest part of the building was expanded and decorated with fine mosaics around AD350 and is thought to have been the home of a local Romano-British family, possibly an industrialist or businessman, whose ancestors had adopted the Roman way of life some 300 years earlier.

In the 1990s the County Council decided to improve the site and its accessibility with a programme of works partly funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund. The most visible element of this was the redisplay of the mosaics and other features of the western range within a large cover building. Further work took place in the later 2000s, again supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.