Roman Town Walls of Bath
About
A stone wall two meters thick eventually rose around the temple and baths, enclosing 23 acres of sacred and civic ground, though historians still argue whether it served real defense or simply dignified a famous religious site. It came more than a century after Trajan's death; in 117 CE, Aquae Sulis's bathing precinct still stood open and unwalled. Only fragments survive today, folded into Bath's later medieval fortifications.
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
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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 →