For the last few summers, CA has paid a visit to the Caistor Roman Project, which has been investigating the remains of a Romano-Celtic temple and associated structures located around 800m outside the walls of Venta Icenorum, a Roman regional capital near modern Norwich. (See CA 344, 356, and 380 for more on findings from these excavations, and CA 270 to read more about the walled town itself.) This year, when CA travelled to the site, the team had moved to the other side of the modern road bordering the temple paddock, to explore archaeological traces in a neighbouring field.
This land lies just outside the temple precinct, and an initial geophysical survey revealed evidence of a concentrated area of activity preserved beneath the surface, including suggestions of an enclosure with a strikingly busy interior scattered with pits and ditches. There was also an intriguing dog-legged line formed from a series of ‘dots’ on the survey plot. To explore these anomalies in more detail, the CRP (working in partnership with the University of Nottingham and supported by Norvic Archaeology) opened four trenches within this area – one of which revealed that the curved line in fact represented the remains of an aqueduct. The ‘dots’ proved to be iron collars that had once encircled a long-decayed wooden pipe, which had been laid in a clay-lined channel to help prevent leakage. The team have not yet identified the aqueduct’s water source (and have only excavated a section of the pipeline), but it will have been upslope from their trenches, possibly in the nearby woods, where it may have tapped into a local spring that, they suggest, could have been considered sacred.
As the line of the aqueduct can be seen turning down towards the temple field, Professor Will Bowden of the University of Nottingham, who collaborated with CRP on the recent excavations and also led investigations within the walled town, suggested that it might have been intended to supply the religious site.
