Caerleon Roman Fortress and Baths
known as ‘Arthur’s round table’.
Although Caerleon’s Roman riches were only really revealed with the excavations of the last century or so, its ancient history didn’t go unacknowledged.
“The memory of Caerleon’s past was never lost, because ‘Caerleon’ means ‘ fortress of the legion’. A ‘caer’ in Welsh is the same as a ‘chester’ or a ‘caster’ in English – meaning a military camp. It was never forgotten that this was the site of a Roman legion, but by the mid-19th century, the walls were being robbed for building stone and inscriptions were even being broken up to mend roads of Victorian Caerleon. So local philanthropists and academics thought this must stop and raised money to build a little museum to, as they put it, ‘save from the destroying hand of time the valuable relics of bygone days’.”
As Lewis points out, the subsequent finds excavated from underneath modern Caerleon have been so rich and unparalleled because of the town’s comparative diminutiveness. Unlike Chester or York, a large city hasn’t been built on top of this once-great fortress. And our guide is eager for much more to be revealed about what lies beneath.
“We don’t know everything. Every time we put a spade in the soil or undertake geophysical surveys here in Caerleon, the story actually changes slightly. It’s through the archaeological record that we limp forward. There is much that we still don’t understand. I estimate that we’ve probably seen a thousandth of one per cent of the archaeology of this fortress. Most of it is still to be discovered.”