Known as ‘Banna’ to the soldiers who garrisoned it almost 2,000 years ago, Birdoswald Roman fort has long been a key focus for Hadrian’s Wall research. In fact, it is one of the most-extensively excavated forts on the line of the Wall. The area immediately outside its fortifications has seen virtually no digging, however, although extensive geophysical surveys by Alan Biggins and David Taylor in the 1990s revealed an impressive extra-mural settlement that, at its peak, was two-to-three times the size of the fort itself.
Now a new project headed by Newcastle University and Historic England (facilitated by English Heritage, who care for the site) has set out to learn more about this external settlement, and how it related to the military community based inside the fort. Leading the project are Tony Wilmott, who has been directing excavations at Birdoswald for over 30 years, and Professor Ian Haynes – and, on a hot early August day this summer, they kindly welcomed CA to the Roman frontier and told us about what they had found so far.
The project is scheduled to run for five digging seasons spread over four years, and the initial 2021 phase saw three trenches opened outside the fort. Two of these were located to investigate different parts of the extra-mural area to the east, while a third was placed a short distance away to explore the northern side of Hadrian’s Wall. This latter trench aimed to shed light on the flat area between the foot of the Wall and its outer ditch, known as the berm. Far to the east, previous excavations at several sites in Tyneside have found the berm there to be peppered with pits that are thought to have held sharpened stakes creating an obstacle almost like barbed wire (see CA 195). Did this barrier feature more widely along the frontier fortifications, and might similar traces be found at Birdoswald?
Don’t underestimate Archaeology