Roman Town Wall of Colchester

About

Colchester's defenders built Britain's first town wall after Boudica's rebels burned the undefended colonia to the ground in 60-61 CE. Legionary engineers raised a 2.8-kilometer circuit of rubble and brick, standing nearly six meters high in places, over roughly two decades starting around 65 CE. By 117 CE the completed wall had ringed the colony with six gates for a generation, guaranteeing nothing like the Boudican sack could happen again; long stretches still stand today, making it the oldest complete town-wall circuit surviving in Britain.

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.

Sources

• https://colchesterheritage.co.uk/blog/town-wall

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