An archaeological investigation at Stone Chapel Field, Syndale, Faversham, Kent

The religious complex called Stone Chapel, a Scheduled Ancient Monument, managed by English Heritage, is located in Church Field in a valley on the outer western reaches of Faversham in Kent. Stone Chapel lies within a landscape rich in the remains of prehistoric and Roman activity clustered along Watling Street and the Swale estuary and lies adjacent to the Roman town of Durolevum at Syndale.

It is considered to be the only Christian building in England to incorporate within its fabric the remains of a 4th century Romano-British pagan mausoleum.

Above ground remains survive and the site is accessible via a public footpath 110m north of the A2. There are very few remains of Roman temples converted to Christianity use in the UK.

[fg]jpg|Fig. 1 – Stone Chapel as seen today.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Fig. 2 – Site location.|Image[/fg]

The Roman building was excavated during the 19th century and again in the 1960s and 1970s. This building has been interpreted as a Romano-British mausoleum, a tomb standing above ground. Mausolea were built to contain and mark high-status burials. They often served as family tombs. Overlying this Roman building, but making use of its surviving walls, are the ruins of a mainly flint-built medieval church. The medieval builders used the Roman building as the chancel of the church, while a new nave was built to the west. There may even have been an earlier timber-built Saxon church on the site.

The Kent Archaeological Society excavated the site in 1872 and considered the remains to include original Roman masonry, forming a nearly square Roman building. Though by 1875, J.T. Irvine following an examination of the ruins, wrote that the masonry was “far too Roman to be Roman.”[fn1]

Lt. Colonel Hawley FSA, and Canon G Livett FSA, excavated the site in 1926. Both men were emphatic that the exposed ‘Roman’ building was in fact Saxon. They based their assumption on the fact that no Roman artefacts or pottery had been retrieved whilst excavating the internal ‘Roman’ floors of the building.[fn2]

Historic England summarise that there are five phases: Phase I: a late Roman square building, possibly a mausoleum or Martyrium; Phase II: A stone chancel and wooden nave built, possibly 600–650 incorporating the Roman building; Phase III: The wooden nave replaced by a stone nave in the 10th or 11th century; Phase IV: The chancel extended in the 13th century, although possibly in the 12th century; Phase V: The nave extended westward in the 13th or 14th century, but after the chancel extension. The church was abandoned by the 1530s.[fn4]

Archaeological investigations by the Kent Archaeological Field School in 2005[fn4] revealed a late Roman perimeter stone wall surrounding a temenos or sacred precinct with two known Roman buildings within the precinct, one of which was probably mis-interpreted by Fletcher and Meates in 1969, and is more likely to be the remains of a Romano-Celtic temple, albeit much rebuilt and altered.

The function of the Scheduled Monument is not as perceived but is of a Romano-Celtic temple complex probably rebuilt in the sixth century on the earlier Roman foundations as a Christian church and as such is unique in Britain. The layout of the upstanding ‘Roman’ building (Building A) as it survives at Stone Chapel is not the usual layout of a Romano-Celtic temple. The west doorway is on the wrong side for a pagan religious building but on the more usual side for a Christian religious building. The internal altar is out of place for a pagan temple but probably correct for a Christian church. The topographic layout of the complex, the perimeter wall, the buildings not aligned to each other are the norm for a Romano-Celtic temple layout as seen on hundreds of sites across northern Europe.

The field in which the Roman buildings stand is not as previously thought, sterile, but has archaeological features from Prehistoric, Iron Age, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and up to and beyond the Medieval period.

Analytical work on the upstanding ‘Roman’ structure suggests that the ‘Roman’ monument, as Scheduled, is not Roman but post-dates the Roman period and is likely to have been rebuilt, albeit on Roman foundations, by St Augustine in the sixth century as a Christian church, again of a type not unknown in Kent and continental Europe.

[fg]jpg|Fig. 3 – Hawley and Livett showing their excavations of 1926 and the earlier excavations of the KAS to an interested group. The photograph was taken looking east to where Watling Street climbs up the hill through the Roman town of Durolevum.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Fig. 4 – The Romano-Celtic temple complex at Stone Chapel Field as revealed by excavation by the KAFS in 2005. The black lines are the exposed perimeter wall, the grey lines the hypothetical location of the perimeter wall and the (dotted line) the position of the medieval nave.|Image[/fg]

The Roman perimeter flint wall material was utilised by medieval builders to build the chancel and nave which may have been attached to the surviving ‘Roman’ building (Building A) which itself is not part of the original Roman build and may date from post-Roman Britain.

A ditch running diagonally under a Roman cobbled surface was dated by pottery retrieved from its lower levels to the Middle to Late Iron-Age, infilled in about AD120–150 (dated by a fresh sherd of Samain ware – Dr 18/31). This ditch seems to follow the alignment of the Roman perimeter wall and could suggest an earlier Iron-Age sacred area as noted at other Romano-Celtic temple sites[fn6].

Evaluation trenches further to the south exposed intensive Roman activity with the cobbled surface of a Roman road, running north/south. A Roman coin of Valentinian retrieved from the matrix of the road surface dates the use of the road to AD364–378 and later. Two trenches alongside Watling Street exposed numerous Roman features and cobbled internal floor surfaces with a hearth being exposed. The vast quantity of Roman pottery retrieved is late, dating from AD300–400+.

The hand trowling and sieving of exposed features enabled large quantities of coins, pottery, bone, and burnt daub to be retrieved, but the paucity of Roman building ceramics suggest these Roman buildings fronting onto Watling Street, are probably a continuation of the Roman town of Durolevum, and were of low-status, timber built, with thatched roofs, daub walls, and of domestic and industrial usage.

The success of this campaign was due to the generosity and kindness of the landowner, History Today magazine, Friends of the British Museum and the students from the Kent Archaeological Field School, directed by Dr Paul Wilkinson.

Dr Paul Wilkinson is the director of Swale and Thames Archaeology, the founder of The Kent Archaeological Field School and a published author on topics including Pompeii, Beowulf and Archaeological practice.

[fg]jpg|Fig. 5 – Plan of Stone Chapel.|Image[/fg]

[fg]jpg|Fig. 6 – Trench 13, looking south toward Watling Street, with metal-detecting survey prior to excavation.|Image[/fg]

[fn]1|Arch. Cant. Vol IX 1874. IXXviii–IXXix[/fn]

[fn]2|Irvine, J.T. 1875 Journal of the British Archaeological Association No 31: 255[/fn]

[fn]3|East Kent News, Saturday May 22nd, 1926.[/fn]

[fn]4|Kent Heritage Environment Record: Stone (Our Lady of Eylwarton) Chapel, Faversham (TQ 96 SE 2). This scheduled site consists of the remains of a small chapel, disused since 1547. The chancel incorporates courses of Roman brick and Kentish ragstone. It was extended in the eleventh century with the nave added in the fourteenth century. The Roman element may be part of a surviving Roman mausoleum, incorporated into the later structure, or may come from the re-use of Roman building debris in the mid-Saxon period. The chapel lies on an east facing valley slope, between 15–20m contours. NGR: TQ 9916 6133.[/fn]

[fn]5|The interim results of an archaeological investigation at Stone Chapel Field, Syndale, Faversham, Kent. 2008. The Kent Archaeological Field School, Paul Wilkinson, Faversham, Kent.[/fn]

[fn]6|Rodwell, W.J. 1980 Temple archaeology: Problems of the present and portents for the future, in W. Rodwell, W.J. (ed) Temples, Churches and Religion: Recent research in Roman Britain.[/fn]

All images courtesy of Paul Wilkinson, permissions obtained, 2025.