Vielbrunn Limes Watchtower "Im Oberen Haspel" (Wp 10/15)
About
Roman soldiers cut watchtower Wp 10/15 out of the Odenwald forest in 98 CE, the year Trajan's engineers opened the building phase that carried a patrol road and its towers through the hills above Vielbrunn. The wooden tower rose about twelve meters over the tree line, tall enough to relay a signal along a forested ridge where sightlines ran short. It anchored a newly cleared stretch of the frontier road that let couriers move faster than the terrain would otherwise allow. Archaeologists later used the excavated tower base as the model for a full-scale timber reconstruction on the same spot.
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.
In ancient writing
- Historia Augusta, Life of Hadrian 12.6
Describes Hadrian separating Roman territory from barbarian lands in regions without a river boundary by driving great timber stakes into the ground and binding them into a continuous palisade, the building program to which this stretch of the Germanic limes belonged.
Sources
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