Balkerne Gate, Colchester
About
Britain's largest surviving Roman gateway opened where the road from Londinium met the town's western wall. A freestanding triumphal arch marked the new colonia around 50 CE, then was folded into a far bigger structure, two carriageways and two footways spanning 33 meters, once the town wall rose after the Boudican revolt. By 117 CE the gate had carried traffic in and out of Colonia Claudia Victricensis for decades, and its western arches still stand today as the best-preserved Roman gateway in Britain.
What happened here
The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.
Sources
Nearby
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