Road versus ruins: how Roman remains lost out to modernity

The site of what is now called Cataractonium, the once bustling Roman town, still has plenty of visitors - even if they are only passing through.

In 1958, the Government announced the construction of the A1 dual carriageway bypass at Catterick in North Yorkshire. The fact that the route of the road went right through the well-preserved remains of the Roman town did not seem to matter.

In those pre-Time Team years, archaeology was much further down the pecking order of priorities than it is today, and a team of workers was given only three months to excavate the site before it was demolished. The archaeologists worked frantically over the winter of 1958-59 to document the life of Cataractonium, often in the shadow of the bulldozers moving up behind them.

English Heritage has collated the results of this and other digs in the area, and the findings are published for the first time in a two-volume set, Cataractonium: A Roman Town and its Hinterland.

The D&S Times spoke to David Miles, chief archaeologist for English Heritage, about the discoveries. "When we think of the Romans, people tend to concentrate on Hadrian's Wall or the major cities," he said. "Catterick shows that there was a real infrastructure in depth to the Roman occupation of Britain."

The original Roman fort at Catterick was built beside what we now call Dere Street, the route for the legions striking north in the decades after their invasion of England in AD 43. It controlled the river and guarded a main thoroughfare from the north to the south. "They had a brilliant knack of focusing on the key positions and had an extremely secure and reliable system of communications,"

Alongside this was a mansio, a staging post or inn used by travellers on official government business. "They were reliant on horses or travelling on foot, but worked a very good pony express system. There was a series of imperial post houses like hotels, where a messenger could change his horse."

The building had grown very grand by the second century, and two panels of painted plaster that were uncovered during the dig are on display in the Yorkshire Museum in York.

The excavations also shed light on how towns sprang up around the forts. "Because the army is here and is well-paid, around the imperial fort and the post house you get the development of the town itself. The finds show it was a very cosmopolitan place."

The town appears to have attracted an influx of foreign visitors and several Continental-style brooches were uncovered. Other well-preserved finds included a statuette of the god Vulcan and a ceramic mask used in religious ceremonies.

The find that stirred the most attention, however, was the body of a young man found buried in a grave at Bainesse, a farm near Catterick and once an outlying settlement of the Roman town.

The man was buried with two stones in his mouth and with women's jewellery such as a necklace and bracelet of Whitby jet, a shale armlet and a bronze anklet. He is thought to have been a priest or worshipper of Cybele, a mother goddess imported from Syria in the third century BC. Her followers castrated themselves in a festival known as the Day of Blood and dressed in women's clothing, jewellery and wigs.

"Catterick is very much a part of the Roman Empire. Not only has it got the army, but along the same roads come religions from the East. It shows how cosmopolitan the town was."

The Romans are famous the world over for their roads, but apparently had not counted on the North Yorkshire weather. As with modern day methods of transport, not everything ran smoothly.

"There is a letter found at Vindolanda on Hadrian's Wall where we have got Romans talking in their own voices. One of the things they wrote is a complaint that a shipment of leather from Catterick has not arrived, because the roads are so bad. They did not have leaves on the line, but they did have mud on the roads.

"It also shows that people in Vindolanda were thinking of Catterick as an industrial centre, from where they got their leather. The excavations showed that leather was produced here, among other industries."

Another characteristic Roman building uncovered along with the leather works and smithies was the bathhouse. Rebuilt several times, its remains still stood 10ft high when the bulldozers moved in to start work on the dual carriageway.

"In those days it was automatically assumed that roads were more important than archaeology, and they just went smashing through the site. All they had to do was give us three months' notice.

"The beneficial side was that in spite of so much of Cataractonium being destroyed, it was quite well excavated for the time.

"There would be absolutely no question of this happening now. It had some of the best-preserved Roman buildings in Britain. If it was a scheduled monument, the road would not be built.

"These days we sit down as relative equals with the Highways Agency and plan roads together. First of all exploratory work would be done to see what was there and if it was as important as Catterick, we would avoid it."

Despite the importance of the finds, the results lay forgotten in English Heritage's archives. "In the Fifties, they were paid to excavate but not necessarily to write up the reports for publication. Over the past few years, English Heritage has had a policy of clearing up this backlog.

"We did a survey of all the unpublished work done since the war and drew up a programme of all the most important results and Catterick was one of those sites. Professional archaeologists knew that Catterick was important and that there had been some important discoveries made, but until this book came out, it wasn't clear just how significant the site was.