Ambleside Roman Fort

Half a mile south of the church and half-way from Rothay Bridge to the Waterhead steamer pier is Borrans Field, the site of the Roman fort now called Borrans Ring — a “borran” is a ruin or heap of stones — but anciently, it seems, Galava. Here the road which led from Lancaster to the Cumberland coast passed round the head of Windermere on its way from the fort whose outlines can still be traced at Watercrook, near Kendal, to other similar forts at Hardknot and Ravenglass. Little was known of this fort till 1913, when the field was bought for the National Trust to preserve it from being built over, and diggings were begun which, interrupted the war, were finished in 1920. The foundations of some of the chief buildings have been left open; and the public, which has free access to the field, may here see, more clearly than anywhere in England except on the Roman Wall, what such a fort was like.

The fort is visible as an oblong grass-grown platform, 100 by 150 yards, raised slightly above the general level of the field. Approaching it from the road, one comes to the main gateway, a double opening flanked by guard chambers on either side and originally covered with two barrel vaults and surmounted by a tower. This gateway faces due east, and here the road from Kendal entered by a bridge over the double ditch, now filled in and hardly visible. Following the line of the main street of the fort, the via prætoria, westward for 50 yards, we are confronted by a row of buildings whose foundations are exposed to view. In front of us, and in the exact centre of the fort, is the prætorium or principia, the chief building in the fort, its administrative and religious centre. A passage leads into a central courtyard surrounded on three sides by a cloister whose roof, supported on columns, drained into a gutter running round the court and draining away south-westward. On the fourth or west side, adjoining this courtyard, was a space 60 by 20 feet in extent, which may have been a roofed hall or an open yard: it is not known which: and beyond this again was a range of three small rooms. The central room was the sacellum or regimental chapel; here the standards were kept, altars set up to the official deities and the divine emperors, and a strong-room under the floor, reached by a flight of steps, contained the pay-chest and savings-bank. The strong-room exists as it was found, with certain repairs necessary for its preservation. A line of red paint marks the place above which the walls have had to be rebuilt; below that the original Roman work is untouched. We found the flagstone treads of the stair worn by the hobnailed boots of Roman soldiers to such an extent that we were compelled to cover them up with new treads made of similar flags. To north and south of this chamber are others in which the office work of the fort was carried on, the regimental archives kept, and so forth.

North of this building are the granaries. The Roman army regarded wheaten bread as its staple food, and we are told that the great general Agricola, who conquered the north of England for Rome, always kept a year’s wheat-supply in the forts under his command, in case of siege. It may be due to his influence that all the known forts in Britain are provided with vast granaries, massively built and designed to resist fire, damp and vermin. The floors were raised off the ground either on numerous little pillars or (as here) on a gridiron of low walls; and the space above the floor was ventilated by little windows, of which a good specimen may be seen in the south-west corner of the building. The walls are always very thick and strengthened by frequent buttresses, which suggest that the roof, externally covered with large slates, was internally vaulted so as to be incapable of injury from flaming arrows. At Ambleside there were two granaries side by side with a space between them in which there may have been kilns for drying grain.

South of the central building was a large house, built in the Roman fashion round a courtyard into which its rooms opened. This was probably the residence of the commanding officer. It was a single-story building containing about twelve rooms.

These three main buildings opened on a transverse street, the via principalis, running north and south and leading to a gate at each end. The south gate is remarkable for its sill, a huge single stone 10½ by 4½ feet and about a foot thick, its upper surface being worked flat with a raised moulding along its edge to act as a stop for the double gates which turned in pivot-holes cut at the two ends. This extraordinary sill is even more surprising when we remember that this gate led straight into a marsh across which, as was proved by digging, the Romans had no road, so that it was probably never used, and certainly shows no sign of wear. At the north gate there is nothing to remark.

The west gate was exactly opposite the east, but was single. It opened immediately upon a depression in the ground which marks the old course of the river Rothay, a depression which in wet weather still contains standing water; and it is probable that the Romans brought boats up to this gate, though there are also traces of what may have been a Roman quay in the lake south of the fort, and visible in summer when the water is low.

At each corner of the fort was a turret, remains of which can still be seen at three corners: that on the south-east had been completely destroyed by earlier explorers. The best-preserved is the north-eastern: but the visitor here must not mistake for Roman work a piece of wall made of yellowish sandstone. This we built with the double purpose of holding up the side of the cutting and exhibiting a quantity of the freestone which the Romans brought here from Lancaster, a distance of thirty miles, for use where a finer stone was required than what could be found locally. Other specimens of this freestone may be seen at the east gate and in the buttresses of the granaries. A great quantity of it must have been used originally for quoins, vaults and arches, and the whole east gate was probably built of it; but a great part of Ambleside village has been built of stones taken from the fort, and it is not surprising that little is left.

To image the fort as it was sixteen to eighteen hundred years ago we must think of its oblong platform as rising out of swamps and surrounded to landward by a double ditch. Its walls would be 12 to 15 feet high and embattled along the top; behind the battlements was a walk reached by stairs or ladders at the gates and corner turrets, and these structures rose another story above the top of the wall. Inside, the wall was strengthened by an earth bank piled up steeply against it, and within this again were blocks of wooden and slate-roofed hutments for the soldiers, to east and west of the central stone buildings. South of the fort all was marsh; west ran the Rothay; and on the north a little shelf of dry ground was covered with cottages in which lived the soldiers’ wives and children. Somewhere close by was the bath-house which the whole garrison used as a gymnasium and club and casino; and the ground east and north-east of the fort was freely dotted over with buildings, forming a little town that had grown up round the fort. To south-east ran the road to Kendal and Lancaster; north-east another road climbed Stock Gill to join the great road which can still be seen running along the top of High Street to Penrith and the north; and almost due north from the fort a “corduroy” road crossed the swampy flats to Rothay Bridge, where it crossed the Rothay and made for Skelwith and Wrynose and the sea.

Such was Galava from the days of Hadrian when the fort was built — perhaps about A.D. 120 — till close on 400 when, at some date not precisely known, it was finally abandoned. In that time it was certainly attacked and destroyed more than once: perhaps three times, about the years 155, 180 and 270; but for the most part its history was peaceful and its garrison, a cohort 500 strong, lived on good terms with their neighbours, who soon learnt to fall in with Roman ways and took a pride in calling themselves, like St. Paul, Romans. We can still point out the ruins of villages in which these neighbours lived, and see how in little ways Roman fashions affected them and influenced their household furnishings and even their fashion of building. Nor were the men of the cohort always strangers from Italy or elsewhere. A garrison settling down in a place like this made itself very much at home; it married with the people of the neighbourhood and to a considerable extent recruited from them as well. It was not Britons from the neighbouring fellsides that endangered the pax Romana when once the conquest was complete, but wild Picts and Scots from districts beyond the frontier and foes from countries across the sea.

But Hadrian’s fort, though it is all that can now be seen, is not the oldest Roman relic here. Hadrian’s engineers built their large stone fort on the top of a smaller and slighter work, built forty years earlier by Agricola. It was about A.D. 79 that Agricola came here, in the course of his amazingly rapid conquest of the whole country between Chester and Perth. As he conquered the country he sprinkled it with a network of forts, strongly built in carefully chosen sites: and one of these was at Ambleside. It was only half the size of Hadrian’s, and its rampart was not of stone but of clay; outside this was a double ditch, and inside were wooden buildings for a small garrison, perhaps only 200 men or less. It is not certain how long this fort was held. Probably the site was found uncomfortably wet and given up before long; though the fort which Agricola built ten miles away at Hardknot seems to have been held right down to the time of Hadrian. But in Hadrian’s time it was decided to reoccupy Ambleside. The deserted ramparts and ditches of Agricola’s old fort were carefully levelled, and as a precaution against damp the oblong platform which is still so conspicuous when seen from the south was formed of dredged gravel, and on the top of this the new fort was built, completely obliterating the old, which was only discovered when the later structures overlying it were being explored by the spade. Of its arrangements we cannot say very much. Its east gate was in exactly the same place as the east gate of the later fort, and it also had a north gate leading to the shelf of dry ground mentioned above; its rampart was reinforced by a number of turrets, and ran up against the isolated rock at its north-west corner in such a way that this rock could be used as a turret. The only building which was located with certainty was a granary, whose floor was covered with a solid deposit of wheat several inches thick. But the abundance of scattered leaden sling-bullets, which were no longer issued to troops in Hadrian’s time, suggest that the fort saw fighting in the days of Agricola. If we can trust Tacitus, none of Agricola’s forts were ever either stormed or forced to surrender; so that the abandonment of this earliest Roman work at Ambleside must have been voluntary.

The fort is now the property of the National Trust, and is therefore open to the public without restriction or fee. But constant attention is necessary to prevent the remains from falling into decay, not so much through the carelessness of visitors — though it is easy damage such remains by accidentally displacing stones in walking upon them — as through the action of the weather; and any visitor wishing to help in the upkeep of the site so instructive and educationally valuable may send a donation to the local Secretary of the Trust, G.G.Wordsworth, Esq., The Stepping Stones, Ambleside. Further details about the fort are contained in the four well-illustrated excavation report published by Messrs. T.Wilson & Son, Kendal, for the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archæological Society at a shilling each; and general information about such forts and their builders may be found in the present writer’s Roman Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2/6; 104 pages and 54 illustrations and maps).