Why is this Roman fort in the middle of nowhere? - Hardknott Roman Fort

Welcome to Hard Knot Roman Fort which is by far the most isolated fort in Roman Britain. We're in the northwest of England in the Lake District and actually to get here today we had to traverse a really treacherous mountain path with lots of steep incline bends. Alternatively you could have circumnavigated the Lake District and come up from Ravenglass which is down the road there about nine miles but quite frankly we're in the middle of nowhere. So the question I ask you is why on earth did the Romans build a fort here in about 130 AD? To understand this question we really have to go back to 43 AD which is the year that the Emperor Claudius authorized the full-scale invasion and conquest of what they called Britannia or Britain as we call it today. He sent four legions which is about 20,000 men alongside an equal number of auxiliary non-citizen soldiers to conquer and annex these islands and he did originally want to conquer the entire island not just the southern part of it. This conquest and annexation was briefly achieved by someone called Gnaeus Julius Agricola who was the governor of Britain. So in about 90 AD everyone on this British island called Rome their master. However as is typical of Roman history, barbarians invaded the mainland Roman Empire and the Emperor Domitian decided to withdraw one of Britain's legions along with its accompanying auxiliary troops to help defend the core of the Roman Empire on the continent. The later governors of Britain decided that they couldn't hold their northern territories any longer so they decided to withdraw south to a much more defensible position along Hadrian's Wall although it wasn't quite built yet. But when the governor Agricola decided to invade the northern parts of Britain, modern-day Scotland, he completely ignored the Lake District where I am now because quite frankly there was nothing here worth conquering. There were a few people who lived in these valleys that you can see here but they just raised sheep and occasionally did a bit of arable agriculture. But there was nothing really for the Roman army to gain by conquering this place because these kind of valleys and hills are really difficult to control because even if you do put a fort in a valley, what's stopping the locals from just going up into the hills and not paying their taxes? Well the answer is nothing. But these governors soon realized that in order to control all of Britain they really needed to keep in control the Lake District particularly because they could run supplies through these mountain passes to help provide the new frontier along what would become Hadrian's Wall and Hard Knot Fort played a key role in that. What the Romans did learn from their very temporary conquest of Scotland was how to control people who didn't live in towns and who didn't practice agriculture as much as they did. You see although these hill people could take their sheep up into the mountains like these and ignore all the taxes that the Roman soldiers demanded of them, eventually, especially in the winter, they would have to come back down into the valley. And what would be waiting for them in this valley? Well Hard Knot Roman Fort with a garrison of about 500 men who really wanted to earn a lot of money by taxing the local population. Although it is June, the weather is starting to turn here at Hard Knot Fort. The rain is coming in, the cold front is as well, so soon I'm going to have to put on a waterproof jacket and another layer. But don't feel sorry for me, I'm used to it because I'm English, but I feel sorry for the people who are stationed here in Hard Knot Roman Fort. You see the Romans very rarely stationed local soldiers, recruited locally to guard these places because they didn't want them to have any loyalties to the local population. So the ideal situation was that they recruit people from a far-flung province of the empire and bring them to places like this so they'd have absolutely no problem with oppressing the local population. And that was no different for the garrison of this place, which was an auxiliary garrison of about 500 soldiers who weren't citizens. Eventually when they retired they would gain citizenship, which was one of the reasons they decided to fight for Rome, but they started life as non-citizens, a bit like the people of this valley were. I've got my additional layer on by the way, but the unit that stationed Hard Knot Fort was a unit comprised of Dalmatians. Dalmatians were from a place, a Roman province called Dalmatia, which is in modern day Croatia. Now I don't know if any of you have been to Croatia, but I can assure you the weather is much nicer than it is here. I don't know if you can see over the hills there, you've got Scarfell Pike, which is the tallest point in England, that is in the clouds. So these poor Dalmatians came all the way from the Mediterranean to guard some sheep herders and a Roman road here in Hard Knot. Not the vibe. Hard Knot Fort is on a bit of a natural plateau, but it was terraformed by the Roman army. This is because they liked things to be nice and flat to march up and down, and they also didn't want to be sleeping at a decline or an incline, because that's just not very good for their health. But this area behind me is particularly flat, very much unnaturally so, and that's because it is the parade ground for Hard Knot Fort. Yeah, you heard me right, it's a parade ground. The soldiers of Hard Knot would have come out here every day to do their parading, their training, and four times a year they would have also been paid from this position. They would have had to get all their ceremonial gear on, all their armor, they would have to polish it nice and shinily, their arms and armor would have to be ready and presentable, and the camp commander would have stood on this tribune over there. He would have done the appropriate sacrifices to the appropriate gods, and he would have paid everyone in a ceremony that was full of pomp. At this ground level it's really difficult to see the tribunal, but we know it was terraformed from aerial photography. Luckily I also have a drone, so you can really clearly see the tribunal and flat parade ground right adjacent to Hard Knot Roman Fort. One of the reasons Hard Knot Roman Fort is so well preserved is because it is in the middle of nowhere. Normally what happens to Roman buildings like cities or forts is that later people who occupy the same places as the Romans did would reuse the building materials. For example at Borough Castle in Norfolk the stones and bricks of the Roman forts were reused to build this Anglo-Saxon church, and that makes sense, you know, why not use a dilapidated fort to rebuild something new? But here at Hard Knot Fort there was no one who decided to live in this valley to any great capacity for the next few hundred years, so most of these stones were left in situ. Now of course wind, rain, bioturbation has knocked over some of these stones. You see this slate marks the original in situ wall. Anything above it is what later conservationists have put in place to protect the cap of the Roman stone wall, which is original and is originally in its place. This wall would have been much taller in antiquity and it may have been covered in white plaster to make climbing it much more difficult, but that is not guaranteed. It's very unlikely that the Romans came across many people trying to attack this fort head-on, and actually this fort wasn't really meant to repel enemy invaders like a medieval castle was, it was different. In the early Roman Empire when this fort at Hard Knot was built, Roman fortifications weren't really meant to defend against enemy attacks, they were mainly meant to operate as a forward operating base for the Roman army to live in. So this was a place where the army lived in and then they sent detachments out to patrol the local area. It wasn't meant to withstand a siege from an army. That explains why the walls weren't that tall, that explains why they didn't have any towers on them. If you compare this to later Roman fortifications like the forts of the Saxon shore, like Borough Castle again, or perhaps the famous walls of Constantinople which are much much taller, much more forbiddable, had much higher towers, they're totally different because they represented a change in the Roman ethos. This was about attacking whereas these fortifications, the ones at Borough and Constantinople were about defending. So I'm walking around the perimeter of the wall at Hard Knot Fort and it's quite boggy. That's because the Lake District is the wettest place in England but I'm quite fortunate because I've got some really nice waterproof hiking boots on. It's important to remember though that the Dalmatians who were stationed here at Hard Knot did not have these lovely waterproof hiking boots, in fact they probably wore sandals most of the year round. Of course if it got cold they could wear these nice woolen socks. We actually have a really well preserved one from Roman Egypt dyed a really beautiful red colour. There are some letters that Roman soldiers wrote home demanding that their family sent them some more woolen socks because they were really cold. One thing that people often ask me is they say how did the Romans get on in conditions like this in England because these are quite horrible. If I was wearing sandals with socks in these conditions I'd get a horrible trench foot, I'd probably get ill. Living in close quarters conditions with a bunch of men, 500 of them, I'd probably get conjunctivitis as well and the answer to that question is they didn't get on very well. They did get conjunctivitis, they did get trench foot, many of them were ill, many of them died way before their time. This is not conjecture by the way. We have a strength report written up on Hadrian's Wall at a fort called Vindolanda where a Roman centurion writes how many men are off sick, how many have died, how many have deserted and actually what we find is a lot of these people who were stationed in this fort, so normally 500 of them, would have been off on other missions. They would have been off sick, some of them would have died and one or two of them may have deserted because they may have been thinking to themselves what the hell am I doing in the wettest place in especially if they're from a place like Croatia. Most Roman forts are a playing card shape, they're rectangular but not this one at Hard Knot. It's actually almost a perfect square and the theory as to why is that the Romans couldn't be bothered to terraform any more of this natural plateau and they gave up and just called it quits but they didn't compromise on a number of other things as well. The walls have their distinctive rounded corners and the central range of buildings is almost identical to every other fort in the Roman Empire. It's one of the easiest ways to tell that you're dealing with a Roman fort if it has these buildings in this order. You have the granaries which of course stored grain, you had the headquarters building which would have been used for the day-to-day running of site, that's also where the money would have been kept and the legionary eagles which would have been very important for morale and that building down the far end would have been the camp commander's house and this camp commander not only would he have his own house made of stone but he would have also been allowed his wife and children if he had any to stay with him within the walls of the camp which is a privilege not afforded to the other soldiers who on paper weren't allowed to marry even though a lot of them did. They had these unofficial wives that lived outside of the Roman fort and that's an interesting point actually. On the vast majority of Roman forts that you excavate on you discover there's a civilian settlement on the outside where they would have traded and often married the people within the fort, of course unofficially married because they weren't allowed to do this on paper but not here at Hardnot. That's because this fort was only occupied for about 30 years yes but also probably no one lived here, no one was around for them to live in the outside settlement so this would have been a very lonely place indeed for the soldiers, those Dalmatians who were stationed right here. One of if not the most important building in the Roman fort is this building behind me. These were the granaries, of course granaries stored lots of grain but they would have also stored other things like meat, eggs, that kind of stuff. These walls are absolutely huge, they're almost as thick as the perimeter circuit walls, that's because grain weighs a lot and they would have had to raise the grain off the really wet ground in order to keep it from rotting. These buttresses that you can see here were also for that purpose, they stopped the walls from collapsing. Now of course this is something that the Romans learned from trial and error, a lot of the early granaries weren't built with thick enough walls and they collapsed and got the grain wet which would have led to the starvation of the 500 men who lived in this fort. This was so important, good granary management made the careers of certain Roman commanders. I'm standing in the middle of the headquarters building which is also one of the three buildings that was built in stone. This was a very important place because it's where the commander of the fort would have given out his orders every single day. The lower ranking centurions and maybe a few optios which is like second in command to the centurion would have been coming in and out of this entrance over here daily, hourly in fact, in order to take the orders of the commander and put them to the troops who lived in barracks on that side or that side of the headquarters building. So I'm sat in the ruins of the commander's house which is of course where the commander would have lived with his wife and children if he had any. By the way we don't know the name of any of the commanders of this fort and we only have one inscription for the name of the unit that occupied this fort. But there's something really weird about this building. It's meant to be in a classical style but there's only one wing on this side. The other side as you can see in this drone footage is completely missing. It's not clear from archaeological excavation whether this side was maybe covered up by wooden planks or wooden post holes. Another alternative explanation is that this building was never completed and that this was just what it looked like in roman times and perhaps the governor lived in this stone section with his family. We really don't know and more archaeological excavations need to be done but the main issue for archaeological excavations is that as I said earlier this place really is in the middle of nowhere and there really isn't any money for this kind of archaeological excavation. So the path I'm walking on right now is a path that the soldiers who garrisoned Hard Knot Fort would have walked many times at least once a day during their posting here. I'm walking to the bath house and it's quite amazing that in this place this remote that the roman soldiers had access to a bath house. They'd have had a nice plunge pool, they'd have had a nice warm room, they'd have also had a hot and dry room which is something that a lot of leisure centres don't even have today. Come with me and I'll show you it. There's a reason why the bath house was so far away from the roman fort because there was a fire in there that heated the hot room and the warm room. Of course you can't have this inside the fort because if the fire catches the entire fortification goes up in flames so that's why they keep them away and isolated. But imagine this walk coming back after you've got nice and clean in the baths on a really cold winter's day here at Hard Knot wouldn't have been very nice at all. This water feature is just a few meters down from Hard Knot fort over that ridge and it highlights two things. One, how wet the lake district is. Even in June this stream was formed here which would have plagued the soldiers of this roman fort I'm sure. But also it reveals the kind of materials that the romans would have used to build that fort up there. This being in the middle of nowhere you can't exactly import many building materials from far flung places. You have to do a lot of the stuff in situ right here on site. These blocks are carved out by water action like this but it almost looks like they've been carved out by a roman mason who would have been in the camp up there. These are almost ready made for the roman fort to be made out of. So as I said earlier this fort was built in about 130 AD on the orders of the emperor Hadrian. It was occupied for about 30 years which is a generation so people would have served their entire military career here very likely. It was abandoned when the romans tried once again to conquer Scotland. They did a very good job this time and they made an inroad into the central belt and they decided to build a brand new wall abandoning Hadrian's wall. This time it was under the auspices of the emperor Antoninus Pius hence the Antonine wall. This fort was never occupied again they just didn't find any use for it because really there was no one who was living here for the soldiers here to guard and make sure they paid their taxes and no one was going to really raid this road anyway because like I said no one lived here. So instead they decided to expand the fort at Ravenglass and the romans put a fort here as well because it's a fantastic place to defend against raiders from the Irish sea but it's also a great place to defend the harbour which was situated here where three rivers come together. The romans really liked doing this because riverine transport was cheaper, easier and faster than hauling stuff over land so Hardknott was really here because Ravenglass was here and they also expanded the fort at Ambleside but this fort here was only occupied for a generation. That's part of the reason why it's so well preserved because there's nothing around and it only has one main phase of occupation. I'm here now at Ambleside Roman Fort which is about nine miles down the road from Hardknott Fort. As you can see there aren't really any circuit walls that are well preserved but the central range is still visible in plan from a bird's eye view. This is because Ambleside was occupied as a town unlike Hardknott Fort so locals reused these stones and building materials to build their houses, their churches and their dry stone walls. I'm standing on the foundations now of the Fort Commander's house. Unlike at Hardknott much of it is visible in plan. Do you remember at Hardknott there's that entire wing that's missing? Well not here. Either that's because this was built in stone and Hardknott's wasn't or maybe this fort was more important. I mean here at Ambleside it was occupied from about the same time as Hardknott, Hadrianic times, well up until the end of Roman Britain. Possibly because it's great access to Lake Windermere so they could bring in grain from the lake but also because it was a more strategic location. Hardknott really is in the middle of nowhere whereas Ambleside as you can tell by the bustling small town is in a prime location. I'm in the headquarters building now of Ambleside Roman Fort and in plan it looks very similar to the one at Hardknott but I want to show you something particularly interesting that's preserved really well here. Follow me. So if I go down these steps here I'm entering a safe strong room. This would have been the temple of the camp. The commander of the fort would have kept things sacred to the gods that the people of this camp prayed to and sacrificed to. They would have kept the eagles here which are really important for morale and also in this strong room where I'm standing right now they would have kept the money that they would have used to pay the soldiers. Think lock and key, iron bars, underground. A lot of people in this fort wouldn't have even known where the money was actually kept because only people who needed to know would have set foot in this room that I'm standing in now. I'm in the granary of Ambleside Roman Fort which is very similar to the one at Hardknott Roman Fort but if anything it's slightly bigger and is slightly more strongly built. There are more foundation pillars, the buttresses are even bigger and that suggests that this place wasn't just a fort it was also used as a grain depot for all of the soldiers operating in the lake district. I mean if you think about it Hardknott was only occupied for about 30 years. This fort here was occupied until the late Roman period so they would have needed lots and lots of grain to supply all the soldiers operating all over the lake district. The field here where the fort ruins are is actually sometimes used as cow pasture as you can tell by my friends over there who are sitting down and to be honest this may not be very different to in Roman times. You see Roman soldiers enjoyed a certain privilege that most people in the province of Britain didn't. They ate a lot more meat. See most people had a really impoverished diet they mainly just ate bread and other forms of grains whereas a Roman soldier's diet was far more varied. They demanded a lot more meat than the average person so they would have kept a herd of cows or more likely they would have just taxed the locals for it forcing them to keep them on their behalf maybe grazing them near their fort.