OSPRINGE

 Our Lady of Elverton Stone Chapel ruins. (off a2 opposite turning to Doddington & Newnham) The ruins of a Saxon chapel stand in a farm field outside Faversham. The chapel is unique in that it is the only known Christian site in Britain to contain within it a 4th-century Roman pagan mausoleum.

The Roman building was excavated during the 19th century and again in the 1960s and 1970s. It was found to be a roughly square structure with each side approximately 6 metres (17 feet) in length, built on a foundation raft of flints.

The walls are 1 metre (3 feet) thick and are constructed of square stone blocks with frequent courses of thin red bricks. The walls were reinforced with external buttresses, two of which survive, at the north-west and south-west corners of the building.  Finds of 3rd and 4th-century Roman coins in this section have confirmed that this section is in fact a Roman mausoleum.

The original entrance is represented by a gap in the centre of the west wall, with the original sill – a slab of greensand stone – still in place. Internally the floor was constructed of 'opus signinum' (a hard waterproof concrete partly composed of, and coloured red with, crushed tiles) and the walls were decorated with red painted plaster.

This building has been interpreted as a Romano-British mausoleum, a tomb standing above ground. Mausolea were constructed to contain and mark high-status burials. They often served as family tombs, in which some form of ceremony could be performed when a new burial was placed in the monument. They are usually located within cemeteries but may also be found singly, associated with villas or in small groups.

The tradition of building mausolea in Britain began in the early 2nd century AD and continued until at least the 4th century.

The Roman Watling Street, now the busy A2, runs adjacent to the field 100 metres (330 feet) south of the site.

It is thought that the Roman settlement of Durolevum was situated on the outskirts of Faversham, and that this mausoleum is all that survives above ground of that settlement. Excavations have revealed a further Roman building about 11 metres (36 feet) to the north-west.

Faversham Stone Chapel is also known as Our Lady of Elverton. Though owned by English Heritage, the site is maintained by the Faversham Society.

There is a single interpretive sign outside the chapel wall, and a handy diagram showing the layout of the Roman mausoleum, the Saxon chapel, and the later medieval extensions.

if you step inside the chapel you can clearly see where the Roman stone and tile construction gives way to rougher Saxon work and again to medieval construction.

There is a raised area of stone inside the Roman mausoleum, which might be a form of altar. And there are several very solid buttresses on the north wall, extending into the wooded area behind the chapel.

The medieval builders used the Roman building as the chancel of the church, while the nave was built to the west. The nave and the chancel were extended in the 13th century. The church is surrounded by a roughly square graveyard, bounded by a flint wall, which survives in ruined form on the north-western side and elsewhere is marked in places by a low bank.

The church was abandoned by the 1530s.