Visit: Burgh Castle Roman Fort

July 2021: Restarting history visits after a long autumn, winter and spring of coronavirus restrictions, we have now moved properly onto the Romans (which was initially scheduled to be the second part of Year One, not Year Two). We have already touched on the Romans a little bit by seeing actors at Butser Ancient Farm and going to the Roman Baths in Bath last year, but we ended up cancelling a complicated 2020 train trip to Hadrian’s Wall to see the Ermine Street Guard re-enact there. This year I assumed the same Hadrian’s Wall festival would be cancelled again and therefore annoyingly didn’t look and see that it was actually on until it was too l late and we had already booked other things across the dates.

So! We began 2021 with a look at Romans and the sea. Technically this day out relates to the end of the Roman occupation and so should really be one of the final Roman trips, but we wanted a family trip to the beach. We had a day at the seaside at Gorleston (next to Great Yarmouth) where there is a lovely Grade 3 listed model boating pond and sailed a Playmobil Roman ship in it. After some seaside time we headed off to Burgh Castle Roman Fort, about twenty minutes away by car.

Burgh Castle Roman Fort is an English Heritage site near Great Yarmouth, on the east coast. It is the best-preserved of nine stone forts built as a ring of coastal defences on the South-East of the country by the Romans during the later part of their time in Britain (~AD 300s). They were defending against "Germanic" seafaring raiders, foreshadowing the waves of invasions of the Anglo-Saxons, Jutes etc after the Romans withdrew from the country altogether.

Burgh Castle Roman Fort and Caister Roman Fort four miles away on the opposite bank (which we didn't visit as it has been razed to ground level so there is less to see) were specifically built to guard a large estuary which has now silted up to the point that Great Yarmouth itself is built on the mud that has accrued at the mouth and only a small river remains to run past Burgh Castle ruins.

We arrived at the site expecting a five-minute trip from a layby to look at a single chunk of wall in a field, maybe with an information board if we were lucky, but the site is brilliant! It is quite hard to find and not very well advertised but once you get there it has a manicured coach park and large and busy free carpark, little wooden structures with information in, and a very well cut/mown/litter-picked path to a grass meadow (the site of the original vicus for the fort) with a giant stone Roman Fort beyond it!

Three of the original four walls of the square fort are still largely standing and have their original height (minus any wooden palisading on the top or scaffolding/walkways behind) and you can exactly picture the very large compound inside being full of rows of tents or wooden huts and a entire village of soldiers going about their business there. I do not understand why the site is not full of Roman re-enactors as a major gathering every summer, it would be absolutely perfect for it (or for a fest LARP, just saying).

The walls are all built in the typical Roman style (which I have seen done identically in both York and Rome itself) - a thick layer of local stones embedded in concrete, then a triple layer of red tile, then another remove of local stone, etc - with a gravel/mortar core and foundation if the wall needs to be particularly thick. The delightful reason that the tile layers are always included is supposedly that they help the walls to stay up and not slip in case of an earthquake. The engineering technique was developed in geologically active Italy but exported to the seismically stable UK without change because to the Romans, earthquakes are caused by Gods rather than shifting magma and so everywhere in the mortal world was potentially at risk and could benefit from the structural mitigation measures.

Although the site was colonised repeatedly by later groups of people after the Romans left there isn't really much evidence of this on the stone and the standing walls even seem to have been remarkably untouched by stone-mining - in particular the adjacent and pretty parish church is not obviously made out of concrete and tile fragments from the mysteriously absent fourth wall, which is nice to see.

Burgh Castle Roman Fort would also be a lovely place to take a picnic or even fly a kite (not a place to let your children climb on the walls though, incredibly tempting as that may be!) as the missing side has opened up a truly beautiful pastoral view reminiscent of the Netherlands, with a slow river, low-lying water meadows filled with pied cows and a large windmill in the background. The area around is now a nature reserve and just walking to and from the walls across the mown path through the meadow we saw bees, butterflies and many wild flowers - there are apparently also ground-nesting birds and I would assume that there are probably a few reptiles in the warm grass.