This month’s cover feature focuses on the largest-known hoard of Late Roman hacksilver, found at Traprain Law, an Iron Age hillfort in East Lothian. With a new study exploring its eclectic contents, what can we learn about the artistic interests of people on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall?

From Hadrian’s Wall to Hampshire, we next visit Silchester and Little London, which are the only places in Britain that have yielded tiles marked with the names and titles of the emperor Nero. What do these fragmentary finds mean?
Our next feature reports on a recent site visit to Caistor St Edmund, near Norwich. There, close to the known remains of a Romano-Celtic temple, other traces of enigmatic activity are emerging from the Norfolk soil.

We then cut across the country to Gloucestershire, to hear the latest news from Chedworth Roman Villa, which was discovered more than 150 years ago but has only recently received the first formal academic publication of its finds.

Villas represent a distinctly privileged lifestyle – and so our next feature provides a complete contrast, as we delve into the period of around 700 years when public executions were an inescapable part of London life – and on such a scale that the capital was nicknamed the ‘City of Gallows’. A new exhibition shares powerful and poignant stories about those condemned under this system, those who made their living from it, and those who campaigned for its abolition.

Our final feature also concerns matters of life and death, as we travel to Ambleside Roman fort in the Lake District. There, analysis of lead sling bullets found scattered around the site is revealing clues about a long-forgotten battle.