Wroxeter Town Defences

Vallum Viroconii (conventional)

WallBritannia · Wroxeter, EnglandBuilt 200 CE

Not standing in 117 CE

About

Around 200 CE, Viroconium's residents dug a bank-and-ditch circuit roughly 4 kilometers long around their town, built from earth and timber rather than faced in stone. No trace of any boundary defence existed when Trajan died in 117; for its first eight decades as a civilian town, Viroconium sat completely open. Historians read the later earthwork less as a response to any actual attack than as a statement of civic status, since no evidence of warfare near the town has ever surfaced.

What happened here

A town wall is a claim as much as a defence. It is faced in stone, cored with rubble and concrete, and pierced by gates that are more decorated than the rest of it put together. Towers project so that anyone at the base can be shot from the side. In most of the empire in this century the walls are old, unmanned, and half built over — shops lean against them and houses are cut into them — because the frontier is a long way off and the danger is not here. On the frontier itself a wall is something else entirely: a continuous barrier with ditches, gates at intervals, patrol tracks and manned turrets, built to control movement rather than to stop an army.