Dalkingen Limes Watchtower (Wp 12/81)
About
A square wooden watchtower with a wattle-and-daub fence rose here on the Raetian limes under Trajan, one of the earliest lookout posts anchoring the still-forming frontier between the Rhine and Danube. Roman engineers folded the tower into the continuous timber palisade added a generation later under Hadrian, then replaced it entirely around 190 CE with a monumental stone gatehouse nearly 15 meters square, the only such gate known anywhere on the German limes. In 117 CE it stood as a simple manned lookout, decades before that transformation.
What happened here
A small stone tower with a timber top, sited so that it can see the next one along the line. Half a dozen men live in it. They watch the ground in front, and they watch the tower on either side. A signal — fire and smoke at night, something visible by day — passes a warning down the chain far faster than a rider can, though it can only carry a message that was agreed in advance. The rest of the time it is a lookout post on a road, a river crossing or a frontier line, and the work is boredom punctuated by inspections. Supplies come up from the fort behind. Towers on a frontier stand within sight of each other for hundreds of miles.
Sources
Nearby
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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 →