Haltwhistle Burn Fortlet

Fortlet ad Haltwhistle Burn

Auxiliary FortBritannia · near Haltwhistle, Northumberland, EnglandBuilt 105 CE

About

This small fortlet guarded the crossing where the Stanegate road forded Haltwhistle Burn, holding a single century of about eighty men behind an earth rampart faced with a stone wall roughly three feet thick. Antiquarians J. P. Gibson and F. G. Simpson excavated it carefully in 1907-08, measuring the interior at about 212 feet long by a mean 185 feet wide, wider at its east end than its west. It was one of the first fortlets built anywhere in Roman Britain, part of a new tactic of splitting garrisons into small posts to watch the frontier road closely.

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.