After a brief sojourn down to London, I spent several days in the leafy hills and valleys of the Cotswolds. A few days of zooming around on narrow country roads where no one drove below 60mph and where pavements were minimal to non-existent. Thank God I wasn’t on a cycling trip, though the steep hills would have probably done me in before the speeding cars did.
So, one day while I was out and about, I decided to visit Cirencester, a town I’d been to once before, probably about thirty years ago and had always fancied visiting again. Not that I could really remember anything about the place other than I liked the name. I did have some memory of a huge and ornate bridge, but on wandering around soon found that memory to be either of somewhere else or just something my addled brain had made up.
After walking around the main part of the town and stopping for a bite to eat, I made my way through the Abbey Grounds to the remains of an ancient bit of wall. Remnants of the old Roman town wall that used to circle Cirencester when it was known as Corinium Dobunnorum, now usually just referred to as Corinium.
Corinium began life as a settlement that grew up around a Roman fort after the invasion of Britain in AD 43. The settlement later gave way to a planned town with a grid system of streets. The town included several large public buildings, two marketplaces, numerous shops and houses, and on the outskirts an amphitheatre.
Over the years Corinium grew into the second largest town in Roman Britain covering 240 acres and with a population of around fifteen thousand people.
The town was originally protected by an earth wall which was rebuilt in stone in the third century. The wall was just over two miles long and six metres high with a walkway and parapet at the top. In various places along the wall were stone towers and bastions. Near to what remains of the wall today was a large, fortified gateway into the town – the Verulamium Gate. This gate was used by those travelling to and from London and St. Albans, or to give them their Roman names, Londinium and Verulamium.
Excavations on the site of the Verulamium Gate found that the road there had deep grooves in the surface from the heavy traffic of horses and carts entering and leaving the town.
After the Romans left Britain, the walls were left to crumble and decay and then were incorporated into the Medieval town walls. These walls in turn fell out of use and most of the stone was taken away and used in the construction of other buildings, leaving only the small section that remains today in the Abbey Grounds.
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In the afternoon sunshine I wandered around the walls and down to the River Churn that runs alongside them. A quick paddle was tempting, but when I spotted something that looked suspiciously like a condom bobbing along in the water, I decided against it. Back up by the wall I left the Skulferatu that had accompanied me on my trip to Cirencester in a gap in the stone of the Roman wall.
After that, wanting to see a few more Roman things, I headed off to the Corinium Museum and spent a pleasant couple of hours there. I especially enjoyed resting my weary legs in an upstairs area where I spent some time with several Roman ‘ghosts’ who told me all about how they’d popped their clogs. Who knows, but maybe in a couple of thousand years there’ll be another tourist sitting in almost the same place watching a big screen with a representation of me or you telling them how we died in some long-forgotten war or of a disease long cured.
The coordinates for the location of the Skulferatu are –
Latitude 51.718696
Longitude -1.961795
what3words: worksheet.sharpened.train
I used the following sources for information on the Roman Town Wall –
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