Cylchgronau Cymru

Chwiliwch trwy dros 450 o deitlau a 1.2 miliwn o dudalennau

THE ROMAN CAMPS ON LLANDRINDOD COMMON BY C. M. DANIELS, F.S.A., AND G. D. B. JONES, d.phil., F.S.A. with an Appendix by J. P. Wild, PH.D., F.S.A. IF the bill which is intended to be brought into Parliament next sessions for enclosing these (Llandrindod) commons passes the House, all that remains of them will soon disappear and even (as it is) many of them are becoming less discernible every year, from the inhabitants cutting of the surface for fuel and some of the mounds have been completely shovelled away for that purpose So wrote a young but intelligent and zealous antiquary the Rev. Thomas Price, Curate of Llanyre, in 1811.1 The remains whose imminent destruction he was forecasting form the largest known group of practice camps in the Roman Empire. These remains reach upwards of a mile and a half, and are eighteen in number. Each camp is square generally from twenty to thirty yards with the agger, with four entrances, one on each side and opposite each entrance, at four or five yards distance, a kind of mound '2 While Price rightly identified the works as Roman, he could not have been expected to recognize their precise character as practice camps. This was done by Professor Birley in 19363 when he drew attention to similar camps then known on Hadrian's Wall. He too viewed the fate of the camps pessimistically The enclosure of the commons, and the growth of Llandrindod Wells, have completed the destruction begun by moles and turf diggers While Birley elucidated the nature of the camps, his article thus had the effect of discouraging further fieldwork and Price's original map of 1811 passed without further investigation into the nineteenth century antiquarian legacy to Roman Britain. The truth, however, was that fieldwork at any suitable period of the year could have re-located all of Price's camps except those actually destroyed by the construction of Llandrindod Wells at the turn of the century. This was made apparent by a brief comment by Dr. St. Joseph to the effect that most of the camps were still 1 Archaeologia, XVII (1814), 171 hereafter Price. 2 Price, op. cit., 170. 3 E. Birley, Arch. Camb., XCI (1936), 69-73 hereafter Birley.