CHESTERS ROMAN FORT

We will arrive late this afternoon in Edinburgh, but on the way, we'll stop to explore Chesters Roman Fort built during the construction of Hadrian's Wall. Our time-frame this morning is about 124 CE.   Early on, Hadrian's wall was simply that--a wall.  It marked the northern limit of the Roman Empire, and also served as a defensive fortification.  It doesn't divide England from Scotland--it varies in distance from the actual border, but was designed to separate the Romans from the Barbarians in the north.  I'm learning there are some tensions between Scotland and England that, no doubt, date back millenia...

Chesters Roman Fort seems large to me, but we are only seeing a small portion.  Much of it has been carted away as stones for other buildings, and much remains underground.  It was originally constructed to guard a bridge that carried the Military Way Roman Road across the River Tyne.  It housed up to 500 cavalrymen, plus supporting staff and civilians.  The troops who garrisoned here weren't Roman troops.  They were called Auxiliary Troops and were gathered from across Europe including Northern Spain, the Rhineland in Germany, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

The view above is the area of the fort closest to the river and the remains of the Roman bridge.  This area primarily housed the baths.

It takes a squint, but you can see ruins across the River Tyne that are the remains of what are called "massive" abutments.  The Saxons dismantled the Roman bridge in the late 600's in order to use the stones in the building of a church--today's Hexham Abbey in nearby Hexham., Northumberland.

Farther from the river, we find the stable-barracks in which the men and their horses lived.  I'm not exactly sure how they divided up the square footage, but it seemed to work for them.  These barracks were probably built in the second century when a new group of cavalry arrived.  By this time, the numbers had been reduced to about 360 or so.  Plus their horses, of course.

Peter is demonstrating the width of this bit of Hadrian's Wall that still remains.  When it was originally built, the wall varied from nine feet wide in the east, where the wall was built entirely of stone, to as much as twenty feet wide in the west, where the wall was mainly constructed of dirt.  The height also varied from twenty feet high down to eleven feet.  Much of that seemed to depend on materials at hand.  Wikipedia mentioned that when Hadrian's Wall was completed, it might have been plastered and then white-washed as an example of the sophistication and glory of the Roman Empire.

This is an oven--or the remains of an oven--used to bake bread for the soldiers.  If I understood correctly, this was a kind of bee-hive oven in which a fire would be built.  As that fire died down, the dough  was placed inside and baked by the heat dissipating from the rocks.  Really, it's a pretty simple concept, but I can imagine, over time, the sophistication (and competition) that arose from individual bakers and their take on perfect dough, right-sized fires, temperature variations outside and inside the oven and all of the many etc's. that go with the baking and breaking of bread.

Not to mention the variations of millstones.  We saw dozens of millstones, all of which were discovered here at Chesters Fort.  My son is a miller (How many mothers can say that?), so I have some interest in millstones and the magic they create.  This photo came from the little museum nearby which contains all sorts of artifacts from the excavations at Chesters Fort.  It's a tiny museum, over one-hundred years old, and well worth the look...as are all Quintessential British sites!