Althorp House, Lady Di's family home, has been the subject of extensive excavations in recent weeks as the Earl of Spencer, Lady Di's younger brother, is trying to get more information about the remains of the Roman villa that it was discovered on the property grounds a century ago.
As Charles Spencer posted on his Instagram, the archaeologists are preparing an end-of-dig party tonight in Althorp. "They've been here for three weeks, excavating the Roman Villa that was here perhaps from AD 100 for what seems like several hundred years. It's amazing to think of those long-ago people who enjoyed Althorp, about 1,000 years before my family first farmed here in the 1480s."
Althorp House, according to its own website, "was built in 1508, by the Spencers, for the Spencers, and that's how it has stood for over 500 years." 75 miles from London, this mansion in the English countryside holds most of Diana of Wales's secrets before she became a royal, but it wasn't her birthplace. That was Park House, a property that adjoins Sandringham House, the mansion where the Windsors spend Christmas and long weekends in winter.
Earl Spencer has been the forerunner of the resumption of these excavations: "Since I was a child, I have been fascinated by the story of an ancient Roman villa found under a field in Althorp. Discovered a century ago, it remains an enigma. Thank you to a brilliant team of experts, we are now one step closer to unlocking the secrets of the people who lived in Althorp for over a millennium," he wrote a few months ago.
This is not the only peculiarity of Althorp, as the mortal remains of Diana of Wales rest there. Wreckage of a Vickers Wellington (a long-range fighter plane created in the mid-1930s) that fell from the sky during World War II was also found.
