Silchester Roman Town Walls
About
Builders raised Calleva's first earthen rampart around 200 CE and faced it in flint and stone roughly seventy years later, eventually enclosing 2.4 kilometers of the town in a wall line that still runs almost unbroken through the Hampshire fields today. When Trajan died in 117 CE none of this existed; Calleva sat open and undefended, decades away from its first bank and ditch. Visitors today can walk the near-complete circuit past the recessed sockets where its timber gates once hung.
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
Nearby
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 →