Great Chesterford
About
One of the earliest Roman military sites in Britain, this 13-hectare fort may have been built as early as 43 CE during Aulus Plautius's first campaign season, guarding the River Cam crossing on the road running north from London. The army abandoned the fort within a few decades as the conquest pushed further from the southeast, and a civilian town grew directly on top of its former ramparts. Archaeologists have only been able to reconstruct the fort's outline by piecing together aerial photographs and excavations dug beneath the later Roman walled town. By 117 CE nothing military remained here, only the streets and buildings of an ordinary small Roman town.
What happened here
A legionary fortress holds five thousand men and is laid out to the same plan everywhere, so a transferred soldier knows his way around on the first day. Two main streets cross at the headquarters building, where the standards and the pay chest are kept in a sunken strongroom under guard. Around it: the commander's house with a courtyard garden, granaries raised on stone piers, a hospital, workshops, and long barrack blocks divided into rooms for eight men who cook and mess together. Training is daily, and building work is constant — soldiers make their own bricks, tiles and boots. A civilian town grows against the walls, with bars, traders and the unofficial families of men who are not legally allowed to marry.
Sources
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Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →