The Early Fort

The most surprising discovery of the excavations was that the defences of an early turf-and-timber fort lay under the site, consisting of a west-facing ditch and rampart on a north-south alignment. The turf-built rampart survived only to a height of around 10cm beneath the road of the later fort, but a series of postholes marked the line of a palisade. In some places, the individual compressed turves could still be seen in cross-section. The U-shaped ditch that accompanied the rampart had been deliberately backfilled with stiff clay at some point, possibly immediately before the later fort was built, although this is by no means certain.

Roman soldiers were highly trained in the construction of fortifications and digging ditches, and some sources even record the ideal size to which turves for use in a rampart should be cut.

A datable piece of pottery (of a type known as Black Burnished 2) was recovered from within the turves of the rampart which indicates that the rampart was probably constructed in the first half of the 2nd century A.D.

[PREVIOUS] [MORE DETAIL] [CONTENTS] [NEXT]