gov.uk/heritage/museum. * Chester Roman amphitheatre (SJ 404660), Vicars Lane, Chester Grosvenor Museum is in Grosvenor Street; 01244 402008. Enter the grid reference and you’re off.* Birdoswald (NY 615663), 3 miles west of Greenhead; 01697 747602. Roman Remains For maps, visit survey.gov.uk and take the Get-a-map option. In the end the greatest empires of all are just quarries for the next episode in history.Guy de la Bedoyere’s website is at .uk. His book, ‘Eagles over Britannia: The Roman Army in Britain’, was published by Tempus last year. The granaries were turned into timber halls, perhaps for a local warlord.Nearby at Lanercost Priory, the carefully worked stones used by the monks tell their own story Many come from the Wall and its forts.
When the tide’s out you can almost walk, which made it necessary to stretch the Wall all the way to Bowness-on-Solway.Birdoswald is one of the few places where excavations have shown what happened when the Roman military world fell apart in the fifth century. The remains are a bit hard to make sense of, but it’s astonishing to be able to walk around Roman ruins in Britain that aren’t knee-high to a weasel.The point of these forts was that the tribes beyond Hadrian’s Wall had an unfortunate habit of getting into boats and sneaking across the Solway Firth. This is the fort bathhouse and incredibly it’s still nearly 4 metres in height. None of this remote fort is visible but a few yards away is what locals call Walls Castle. No-one knows who manned this fort, but it would have been one of the array of Gaulish, German, or Thracian units that made up the Roman army’s collection of hired provincials.At Ravenglass, for the keenest visitors of all is the most upstanding set of Roman remains in the whole of Britain. Ribchester is half-consumed by the river Ribble but if you can clamber up into the Hardknott Pass in the Lake District, the reward is the fort of Mediobogdum.
Up the west coast a straggle of forts, like Ribchester and Lancaster, marked the military way into Cumbria. Half the arena, the largest ever built in Roman Britain, is exposed to public view and now local interests are taking sides over whether to demolish a listed 18th-century building to excavate the other half.Chester was about as sophisticated as it got. The most interesting bit is the amphitheatre near Newgate, where a modern controversy rages. Not much remains today, but scraps of the fortress wall can be found here and there.
Few had even been to Rome.Chester became one of the most magnificent legionary bases in Britain. Officers and their families managed to maintain some style and comfort, but like the ordinary troops most came from the lands around the Mediterranean. Its job was to secure north Wales, north-western England and before long even help build Hadrian’s Wall.From Carlisle to Chester, the North-west was part of the Roman military world, not the land of villas, mosaics and polite educated society. By the end of the first century it was busy in its permanent headquarters at Chester. The XX arrived in Britain during or soon after the invasion of AD 43. He died aged 35 after having given 21 years of his life to the army.
