For detailed guidance on how to visit Roman Britain there is no substitute for Roger Wilson’s Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain (2002). This marvellously indispensable pocket-sized volume includes excellent descriptions of sites and museums, made all the more useful with detailed directions on how to get to any one, including guiding the reader through a provincial town or across the hills of Northumberland. The book also provides all opening times and contact details, particularly useful in the winter. However, at the time of writing (2013) the book is still only available in its 2002 manifestation, so readers are urged to check access details with any site before making a special journey.
Compared to the rest of the Roman Empire, Britain has relatively unimpressive Roman monuments. The ravages of a northern maritime climate and a lack of durable building stone in the south haven’t helped, but it has really been Britain’s exceptionally varied history and explosive development that have put paid to so much of what the Romans left behind. Tantalizing descriptions from the Middle Ages and even early modern times can only make us wonder at what we have lost.
However, most of Roman Britain’s principal towns are represented by museum collections. Undoubtedly the most varied collection is in the Museum of London, but other highly recommended museums are to be found at Cirencester, Colchester, Exeter, Gloucester, Leicester, Peterborough (for Water Newton), Reading (for Silchester), St Albans and Wroxeter.
As far as the physical remains of towns are concerned the most instructive site today is probably Caerwent in South Wales. Small and insignificant in its own time, this diminutive civitas capital today has the only example of a basilica and forum open to visitors as well as a temple, townhouses and magnificent defences. Wroxeter’s baths and baths-basilica are some of the most upstanding remains of any Roman town, as is Leicester’s Jewry Wall, once part of the town baths and now forming a backdrop to the museum. Other sites have their own individual appeal. St Albans has its theatre, the only one visitable in any coherent form today, while Silchester and Caistor by Norwich have the only defences that can be walked round in their entirety. But it is also worth mentioning Lincoln’s
Remarkable basilican rear wall, and city gates, London’s amphitheatre by the Guildhall, as well as Dorchester’s townhouse.
Despite the fact that Roman Britain is known to have had considerably more than a thousand significant rural houses, most of which might reasonably be called villas, little more than a few are exposed to public view today. The most interesting of all is at Lullingstone, a short distance from the village of Eynsford in Kent and not far from the M20/M25 junction. This remarkably compact house is only one of two in Britain to enjoy the luxury of a complete cover building and features an upper storey so that visitors can appreciate the mosaic pavement that dominates the middle of the building. Lullingstone’s cover building has been renovated and now features an audiovisual presentation of the house’s history.
The other villa house to be so equipped is at Brading in the Isle of Wight. Remarkable for its array of sophisticated mosaic floors it is perhaps most easily compared with Bignor, not so very far away in West Sussex. Bignor’s beautiful floors are now displayed under a series of early nineteenth-century huts which give little sense of the building’s original appearance but which make for a charming visit. A trip to Bignor is best combined with the remarkable, and unique, site at Fishbourne not far away and close to Chichester. Fishbourne of course includes the unparalleled early series of mosaics laid in the palace that has been traditionally identified as the home of the client king Tiberius Claudius Togidubnus. Of other villas in Roman Britain the other most important sites that can be seen today are probably Chedworth and Great Witcombe, not far from one another in the Cotswolds. Chedworth is extremely popular but its visitor centre, museum and mosaics make for an extremely interesting place to visit. There is far less to see at Great Witcombe but the beauty of the setting makes for a reminder that villa owners chose the places for their houses carefully.
Villas and towns aside, Britain boasts a unique Roman site in the form of the spa baths and temple complex at Bath. The baths themselves form a magnificent centrepiece to the site but visitors today now also have an opportunity to walk through the dramatic subterranean remains of the temple precinct. The finds on display include the temple’s pediment sculptures as well as curse tablets and other offerings from the sacred spring.
It is the Roman army in Britain though that has left the greatest quantity of physical remains, even in the south. The late shore ‘forts’ at
Richborough, Pevensey and Portchester all survive to considerable heights, the latter two because they were used by the Normans as castle walls. Dover had a fort too, though now just a fragment is visible. Here the most astonishing survival is the lighthouse in the grounds of Dover Castle, once a member of a pair that guided ships into this key Roman port.
Further north and west, the forts and fortresses of Roman Britain remain the most potent reminders of this island’s Roman past. In South Wales the II legion’s fortress at Caerleon has not only barracks, defences and a fine museum, but also a complete amphitheatre. Chester, home to the XX legion, has half an amphitheatre, impressive defences and an equally remarkable museum as well as a shrine to Minerva still visible in its original location nearby across the river.
Of Roman York relatively little is visible apart from some of the defences, but the museum is one of the most important in the country. It is further to the north that the really exciting sites are now. On the west coast in Cumbria the museum at Maryport contains an important collection of Roman altars from the fort, and further south at Ravenglass is one of the most upstanding pieces of a Roman building in Britain - the fort bathhouse. To the east in Hardknott Pass is Hardknott fort, still with defences and some of its buildings, erected to control the route across the hills.
To the east the alpha sites have to be Wallsend and South Shields. With pioneering zeal and foresight the archaeologists and local authority here have done extraordinary things and erected magnificent replicated buildings to add to the excellent museums. South Shields now has a wonderful replicated gate, commandant’s house and barracks, while Wallsend has a complete working Roman baths suite.
Nothing, however, can compare with the remains of the Roman frontiers themselves. In Scotland the weathered turf Antonine Wall is of comparatively limited appeal but the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow and the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, at either end of the Wall, more than make up for that. Hadrian’s Wall is a different matter. Although much has been destroyed, and none stands to its original height, the forts of the central sector and some of the Wall that connected them at Chesters, Carrawburgh, Housesteads and Birdoswald can all be visited today and appreciated as magnificent testimony to the power of the Romans. Since 2003 the i35-km/84-miIe long Hadrian’s Wall Path National Trail has made it possible for enthusiasts to make their way from one end of the Wall, now a World Heritage Site, to the other.
Not far to the rear is the extraordinary site of Vindolanda, with one of the richest collections of any in the country. So it is only appropriate here to mention the British Museum, which houses Vindolanda’s writing tablets. As the principal collection of finds it is without parallel. Here are the Thetford, Hoxne, Mildenhall and Water Newton treasures as well as Lullingstone’s main finds: the Christian paintings and the marble busts, alongside a host of other material and set beside the remains of prehistoric Britain and post-Roman Britain - a reminder that the 360 years of Britain’s time as a Roman province was just one episode in her rich and turbulent history.
260. Caerleon (Monmouthshire).
The remains of the amphitheatre outside the southwest corner of the legiona ry fortress walls form one of the most impressive relics of Britain’s Roman past and can be visited at any time. Gladiatorial bouts and military displays took place here.
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