← Back to the map Grooved stone block (Carreg Pumsaint) used by Roman miners to crush gold ore near Pumsaint

Carreg Pumsaint, the grooved Roman stone anvil block used for crushing gold ore at the Dolaucothi mines near the Luentinum fort, via Geograph/Wikimedia Commons

Pumsaint

Luentinum

Auxiliary FortBritannia · Pumsaint, Carmarthenshire, WalesBuilt 78 CE · Destroyed 140 CE

About

Rome planted this fort beside the Dolaucothi gold mines around 78 CE, one of very few garrisons in Britain built explicitly to guard a mining operation. Turf ramparts within double ditches enclosed nearly five acres, holding soldiers who oversaw labor working the underground galleries and hydraulic sluices. The fort remained manned through Trajan's reign and into Hadrian's, finally standing down around 140 CE as the mine's richest seams were worked out. Sections of the aqueduct channels the garrison built to power ore-crushing survive in the surrounding hillsides.

What happened here

Five hundred men, sometimes a thousand, recruited from a province rather than from citizens, and often stationed a long way from where they were raised. Cavalry units get a bigger fort and far more stabling; the smell tells you which kind you are in before the plan does. The layout copies a legionary fortress at a quarter of the size — headquarters, commander's house, granaries, barracks, a bath house usually built outside the walls because of the fire risk. Duties are patrolling, escorting, customs, and policing rather than pitched battle. After twenty-five years a man is discharged with citizenship for himself and his children, recorded on a bronze diploma he keeps for life. A village grows outside the gate within a decade.

In ancient writing

Ptolemy, Geography 2.3
Assigns the town Luentinum, alongside Moridunum, to the Demetae tribe of south-west Wales; the name (from a Brittonic root for 'washing') is conventionally linked to the gold-washing works at the adjoining Dolaucothi mines this fort guarded.