Outside the walls of Venta Icenorum, a Roman town and regional capital near Norwich (see CA 270), the line of an early 2nd-century road can be traced about a kilometre north-east to what today is an open paddock on the outskirts of Caistor St Edmund. There, on exceptionally dry days, parchmarks preserve the outlines of two Roman buildings within a large precinct. In the 1950s, one of these was revealed to be a temple, and in more recent years this structure has formed the focus of the Caistor Roman Project (a volunteer-led initiative with professional assistance from Professor Will Bowden of the University of Nottingham and Giles Emery of Norvic Archaeology, and including students from the Universities of Nottingham and East Anglia, and from Lowestoft Sixth Form College). When CA visited the project in 2019, the team had identified at least two – possibly three – phases of construction for the temple, which was of typical Romano-Celtic design with a square ‘cella’ building surrounded by an ‘ambulatory’ veranda (CA 356). During our visit this summer, however, the project was targeting the other structure on the site, a large building measuring some 20m by 30m, whose purpose is less immediately apparent.
Local tradition dubs this building the ‘Priest’s House’ because of its proximity to the temple, but when the Caistor Roman Project excavated some of its substantial foundations in 2018 they suggested that it could have been a corridor villa, built to take advantage of the temple’s lofty location as the religious complex went out of use (see CA 344). In this new season of excavations, however, a third possibility was taking shape: that this was some kind of ancillary building associated with the daily running of the temple site and its ceremonies.
In previous seasons, a combination of radar surveys, magnetometry, and aerial photos had helped to pick out the enigmatic building’s footprint, and further radar undertaken during the latest investigation has revealed previously unknown features including a possible apsidal structure at the back of the building. This only raised further questions for the team, as the placement of this curve was not what you might expect for a typical villa design. ‘It was unusual,’ Will Bowden said, ‘as it seemed to be leading off the back of a corridor rather than the audience chamber you might expect if this were a villa.’ Rather, Will now suggests that the building may have had a more practical function. Both the temple and the neighbouring building sit within a large and reasonably empty precinct, or temenos – an open space for crowds to gather and where festivals and outdoor ceremonies might have been held. These people would have needed facilities, and Will wonders if the ‘ancillary’ building might have been related to the functioning of the temple, ‘the equivalent of what you might expect as the toilets/café/gift shop area if visiting a modern religious site today’.
