Most of the great pagan temples of Roman Britain were built in the first two centuries after the conquest, when the province's wealth and confidence in its old gods were near their height. Lydney Park was long read as an extreme outlier, dated by R.E.M. Wheeler's 1920s excavation to the 360s, within a few decades of the last Roman troops leaving Britain, making it look like one of the very last religious building projects the province undertook. Re-excavation and numismatic re-examination published in the Antiquaries Journal, Casey, Hoffmann and Dore, 1999, revised it: the religious buildings had their inception in the second half of the third century, a century earlier than Wheeler proposed, with a genuine fourth-century refurbishment and serious deterioration only after the mid-fourth century. Lydney Park is still a late foundation, only not the near-final one Wheeler's dating implied: a temple built, used and renewed across roughly a hundred years of receding imperial authority, not raised in a single gesture at the end.
That renewal is the clearest evidence for how Nodens was actually approached. A long building attached to the temple is generally read as an abaton, a dormitory where pilgrims slept in hope the god would visit them in a healing dream, a practice more commonly associated with Greek sanctuaries of Asclepius than with native British religion, suggesting Lydney Park's custodians were importing a specific, prestigious form of religious healing rather than simply building a bigger local shrine. Bronze arm and leg models found at the site, votive offerings representing the body part a worshipper hoped to have healed, are exactly the kind of object this dream-incubation practice would be expected to leave behind.