Almost 2,000 years ago, a thriving Roman settlement was founded deep within the territory of the Iron Age Brigantes, in what today is North Yorkshire. Located c.25km north-west of the legionary fortress at Eboracum (York), and lying on a key route to the Roman frontier at Hadrian’s Wall, Isurium Brigantum was the most northerly administrative centre in eastern Britannia. Unlike many of its contemporaries, though, this once-thriving settlement did not develop into a modern town. Instead, the site is today home to the village of Aldborough, and its Roman predecessor now lies partly beneath its houses, and partly beneath open farmland. While this might seem a humble legacy for a once-important urban centre, though, it represents a fantastic archaeological opportunity – and since 2009 Professor Martin Millett and Dr Rose Ferraby of the University of Cambridge have been carrying out extensive geophysical surveys of much of the town and its suburbs, bringing its long-buried streets to light once more (see CA 312).
Millett and Ferraby have now published Isurium Brigantum: an archaeological survey of Roman Aldborough (see ‘Further information’ box on p.41), drawing together the results of centuries of previous excavations and their more-recent Aldborough Roman Town Project to present the latest thinking on Isurium. This synthesis combines an impressive overview of past research on the site and a detailed proposed chronology for how the settlement evolved. Interestingly (and unusually, Millett and Ferraby note), much of what we know about Isurium Brigantum was established before the advent of modern archaeology. The site’s Roman connections were first rediscovered in the 16th century, and its remains attracted antiquarian interest across the 17th to 19th centuries – interest that only grew when these early explorations uncovered a series of elaborate mosaics.
The first half of the 19th century marked something of a golden age for these investigations, after much of the site was purchased by a wealthy local man, Andrew Lawson, in 1834. A keen antiquarian himself, Lawson actively encouraged exploration of Isurium’s remains, and as he redeveloped Aldborough Manor and its estate, he cleared and planned a number of Roman buildings, incorporating some of them into his garden design and organising a number of favourite finds, including stonework and inscriptions, along a special walk where they could be admired. As a result of this enthusiasm, in 1852 Henry Ecroyd Smith published Reliquae Isurianae, one of the earliest accounts of any town in Roman Britain, in which he mapped most of the discoveries made on the site up to that point; and in 1863 the Museum Isuriarum was opened on the site.
