Roman Wall of Verulamium and the London Gate
About
Mortared flint rubble banded with red brick rose five meters high around a two-mile circuit, pierced by the London Gate's four separate passages where Watling Street, the great road from Dover to Chester, entered the city. This fortification belongs to the anxious, embattled Britain of the later 3rd century; in 117 CE, at the height of Trajan's empire, Verulamium had no stone walls at all. Its foundations are still walkable today in Verulamium Park.
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 →