We Explored the Only Roman Lighthouse in Britain

Roman Britain. Valuable for the empire or a thorn in its side? I'm Tristan Hughes, historian and host of The Ancients and I'm on a mission to answer that very question. Over the next few weeks and months I'm going to be exploring some of the most iconic sites from this historic period. And I'll be visiting groundbreaking excavations like this that are revealing more about life in Roman Britain. But to help me on my quest I need your help. I want you to tell me in the comments below where you think I should go and why. I'm starting my journey on the south coast in Kent, not too far from where the story of Roman Britain begins. Today I'm with historian Dr Simon Elliott who has brought me to one of the most remarkable sites in Britain. One of only a few surviving ancient Roman lighthouses in the world and it's in the middle of Dover Castle. Simon this is simply spectacular. In the middle of a medieval castle that is much older. That is Roman. Tristan that really is Roman. This is a Roman Theros, a lighthouse and you can see here this is a sort of a classic form for a Roman lighthouse. So you can see it would have been probably stepped in tiers. You can see the construction here. So you've got ragstone, limestone, blocks as the foundation and then layers of tufa which is a lighter stone which comes from the River Dower just below us here. And then the layers of tile between the sections of the tufa. And what also amazes you isn't it when you see it is just how big it is. Is this the original height of the Roman lighthouse? No. So what you're seeing here is two phases of construction. So the original Roman phase is where you've got the lovely nicely worked pieces of ragstone and tufa and then with the tile bonding layer. Where you get the flint that is a repair from the medieval period onward. That's about two thirds up isn't it? You really start seeing the flint appearing. Absolutely so it's about five metres worth up there. So that's bolted on top of the surviving Roman structure and actually you can see where a lot of the material from the top of the Roman structure is being reused in for example St Mary's Church here. The Roman Pharos I would think here is probably two more storeys on top of the existing Roman structure. So it's probably a little bit higher than you see it today and then on top of it you'd have a sort of a protective platform structure which is where you'd have the beacon. What we have here is a way of signalling any ships in the English Channel coming over and that happened all the time. So there's a two-way back and forth all the time in the Roman period. Many people think the English Channel today is a sort of a protective defensive water barrier but in actual fact for the Romans it wasn't. It was totally the opposite. It was actually a point of connectivity. So without the Channel Britain wouldn't be part of the Roman Empire. So it's absolutely essential that this two-way back and fro happens successfully for military, for commerce, for industry and to make sure it works properly you have technology like this, this amazing lighthouse. Putting together a video like this it requires a huge amount of research, navigating through countless sources, archaeological discoveries and articles. And to help me navigate through the digital world I rely on one essential tool and that is the sponsor of today's episode, Opera. Now when researching for a film or podcast it's not unusual for me to have dozens of tabs open and it can get pretty chaotic but Opera browser has some brilliant features to help organise my workflow. One of my favourite features is their tab islands feature. This lets you group tabs based on anything. For instance I could have all of my tabs about Roman governors of Britain in one island or my maps of archaeological sites in another and when I'm not using one of these islands I can simply just collapse them and so keeps everything tidy. They also have a split screen function where you can drag tabs to the side of the page so you can have more than one page on the screen at the same time and help with your research. But perhaps the most remarkable part of Opera is their AI tool, ARIA. Let's say you want to find out who was the Roman governor of Britain during the Boudiccan revolt. You simply start by pressing command forward slash and then put that question into the AI tool. ARIA gives you the alongside a whole host of sources but ARIA can also do more complex things too. For instance it can help you generate an image. It can also, if you upload an image, give you more details on where that image comes from, what it shows and so on. ARIA also has a really remarkable tab command system where you can ask ARIA to close all tabs regarding research on Roman London or to group all tabs together concerning YouTube. So if you want to streamline your browser experience why not give Opera a go? You can download Opera for free for your desktop by clicking the link in the description or in the pinned comment. Now let's get back to the archaeology. Simon, this has to be one of the most impressive Roman structures, freestanding structures, still standing in Britain. And you can see here all the classic elements of Roman building technology. So you've got the vouzoir arch there made from tiles and bricks etc and also these windows here. That's very important because what you need to make a beacon burn very brightly in addition to the pyre you need a flow of air. So the windows here are all to guarantee there's a flow of air going right through the middle. So when you torch that beacon it's going to flare up like the sun. So it is almost a symbol for the importance of Roman Britain to the Romans. The logistics of keeping this fire burning, the engineering to build something out of stone this spectacular and also the fact that one of the best surviving Roman buildings in Britain today. It's not in the heart of Britain, it's not in the north, it's in the southeast, it's in Dover. It is within seeing distance of France and the continent. Absolutely right. So I mean a couple of key points there. The first point to make is the Romans loved monumental buildings because it was a statement of the power of Rome. And the interesting thing here, a second point to make, is the longevity. This beacon, this light of Romanitas would have been lit for as long as the Romans were present here. So you can almost imagine as the Romans abandoned Dover maybe towards the end of the fourth century, the light flickers out and that could be the end of Roman Britain. Okay well it looks like we can go inside so come on let's have a look. Let's have a look. Wow. Is this the almost the original interior of the Roman lighthouse? This physically is the interior of the Roman lighthouse. So when you look up, well the first point to make is you can see it's actually still blackened and that's from when it was a Roman pharaoh. So you can imagine when you got the beacon lit, you've got floor after floor after floor, all wooden floors, all stacked with timber. The timber going up ladders to feed the beacon at the top, then the air being sucked in through all these windows to create the flow of air which keeps the beacon burning as bright as you want it to burn. But if you think about it Tristan, if you go back to the Roman period when you were standing here, when the beacon was lit on the top of the lighthouse, this would have been a place like hell because you've got incredible heat coming through. I mean you've got four or five floors all stacked with wood going up to the top to keep the beacon going. You can feel the draft today on a windy day. Well the windows are here to allow the draft to go through to get the incredible heat you need to get the beacon lit to the level you want it to to be useful to be seen out at sea. So it's going to be hot, it's going to be smelly, it's going to be smoky and probably the only people working inside here are going to be slaves. And working almost 24-7 I presume? In actual fact what we do know is that they were always used at night but in the daytime maybe not. So in the daytime they had to be available to be lit when they were required, bad weather, fog etc. But probably because of the incredible expense of running this you didn't run it 24-7. The lighthouse was part of a long chain of fortified beacons and harbours placed along this coast, designed to ensure safe passage and to keep watch over the channel. These were the gateways into Roman Britain. And just 15 miles west of Dover Castle, near the village of Lim, Simon believes they found another key fortification in this chain overlooking an important yet lesser known Roman harbour. Oh Simon look at this, this is a very nice section of wall we've got right here. Absolutely beautiful, immaculate sort of interfacing wall from a Roman fortification. Oh you also see first of all like so many layers of it isn't it? It's almost like Roman forts wherever you go, they're built very similar in their style. Absolutely right, so basically this is a local stone, the local building stone is ragstone which is a limestone and you've probably got five or six layers there, levels, and then on top of that you've got a tile bonding layer, two or three levels of tiles and then another five or six layers of stone and so on. Wow and what do we think this wall was part of? I mean when do we think this is dating to? So this is dating we think to the 290s so it's probably towards the end of the Norse Empire of Carusius in Electus, probably Electus. It's contemporary with the Saxon shore fort which is built at the bottom on the harbour, we're above the harbour here, so you get two fortifications as part of the same complex. This is probably big enough to house about five or six hundred men, Roman cohort, probably auxiliaries and they're here because of the location on top of the cliff to control access from that road there down to the harbour. So it's also an ideal place to tax people if they're coming out of the harbour with mercantile or even military goods. So I was going to ask if you were one of those soldiers in the cohort and you were stationed here looking out this way rather than out to sea, what would you see? We would see a Roman road would you just down below you? Well there'll be a very very well built Roman road here, the Roman road there is probably the road that then goes to Canterbury, so it's the link from this very important port through Canterbury. There's also two branches of this road, one branch is towards Dover and then one branch is towards Maidstone and then Rochester, so it's a very well connected place. Big harbour, well connected roads etc and the fort here is overlooking what will probably be lots of Roman buildings either side of the road and going all the way down I would have thought going down towards the Saxonshore fort as well. So at the moment we can see a green field but in the Roman period it would cover with buildings. An activity happening over here for decades, hundreds of years in the Roman period, so I'm guessing a huge amount of artefacts found here too? Hundreds of years, hundreds of years yes. So this particular fortification is the last one in use on this location. By the time the Saxonshore fort at the bottom falls out of use this is continuing in use and it's been repaired to keep it going probably until the early 5th century AD and in terms of the artefacts found, well very poignantly right here, right there, was found the body of a baby. Oh wow. A baby skeleton in the very very very late phase just before this fortification fell out of use, so probably the 380s and 390s, not associated with the war being built because it's centuries after that, so this in actual fact is a deliberate burial just in the lee of the wall. Goodness, as you say how poignant. Very very poignant, right there. Amongst the ancient ruins Simon's team have also discovered artefacts ranging from unique pieces of pottery to coins. Head archaeologist Richard Taylor is responsible for cataloguing the new finds uncovered here. So Richard we're in the finds tent just down from the site and we have huge array of artefacts in front of us. These are just from the season, yes, we've got a range of finds, we've got pottery there, we've got some really nice animal bones, shell, ceramic building material, everything you'd expect from a Roman site is here. Just as you mentioned oyster shells, it seems kind of an interesting food choice that they have here. Yeah well we're right next to the coast so this sort of thing is plentiful, so lots around, so it's probably, you know, a posting here was probably quite good because you've got an abundance of food material and clearly they were looked after because we can see nice pottery and we've got coins and things like that, so yeah everything we'd expect. How interesting and you've got, of all of these artefacts, you've picked out a select few for us and these I guess quite different in how they look but they help tell the story of this site as so far as it's known. Well these are interesting because they tell us a little bit about the chronology of the site, how long it was occupied and who occupied them. So the earliest, this is probably my favourite, this is a late iron age coin from the local Kantai tribe. Oh so this is the iron age tribe before the Romans who lived in this area? Absolutely, so this is probably about 500 to 100 BC. It's a beautiful coin, I mean if you have a look at that it's just, you know, so what is it, is it kind of a... So what does it show there almost? You can barely see, you can barely see the decoration. It almost looks like a horse or something like that. So that's local and that's telling us that people were around here in numbers long before the Romans got here. And do we find many of these kind of coins in this area of the world? No, I've never seen one quite like that before so that's a real plus for this season. There you go, I'll give you it back. Thank you. So that's the earliest dated artefact that we have interesting. The big question is how far do we then go with the coinage here? Well the next one we've got, next coin, which is really good because it's so clear and this was found the other day. Oh that is beautiful, Richard look at that. So that is about, we date that to about 269 to 271 AD and it's Victorianus. You can see the Latin on the around the side can't you? Yeah, the actual lettering is pretty clear and you can see the radiant crown. Oh it's a face and his beard, yeah and the big crown he's got on his head, oh yeah. Absolutely, yeah. So that's telling us that there were people here around 270 AD. So he's one of those brief Roman emperors during that crisis of the third century period isn't he? Yeah. So that's lovely and the latest coin we have at the moment which dates from about 364 to 375 AD. That's a Valentinian coin. Valentinian, so this is near the end of the Western Roman Empire, almost 50 years before the end of Roman Britain. So this is really near the end now. Yeah, so again that's very clear. Oh yes, look at that. Very Constantine, post-Constantine like design isn't it? Yeah, so we've got an age spread here of about 450 years so there's constant activity here from a coin point of view for about 450 years minimum. So those coins, I mean they are really, although they look small and maybe easy to put to one side straight away, they're so valuable for letting you know about the vast chronology of this site. Exactly and coins are so good because they're very dateable and people looked after them so that you wouldn't want to lose them, so they're key evidence. So you don't find that many but when you do it tells you quite a lot. So coins are absolutely key. So we've got a few other different items. We've got this and this was pulled out of a ditch right at the bottom. There you go. Look at that. Okay, so it's metal and I'm guessing from its shape it's something to do with clothing. Yeah it is, it's a brooch, it's a copper alloy brooch and this one's quite interesting because we think it's Roman and it's probably about AD 40 to 75. So that's really early. That's kind of Claudius' conquest in the expansions isn't it? Yes. So what does that tell us? That they're coming, it's almost straight away, they are coming and establishing themselves right here. It looks like it, yeah. And when you think that this site is such a key strategic place because of its proximity to the continent and the harbour which it overlooks, it's not surprising that they were here for the duration of the Roman occupation. Right, so that's fairly early and we get a lot of pottery and pottery's great because it's very datable and we get a lot of this and this is this decorated, it looks like Samian but it's not Samian. I can see those little patterns etched onto it, repeated and repeated and repeated. So Samian, is that kind of almost the fine china of the Roman world? Indeed yeah, manufactured in Gaul but this version was actually manufactured in Britain. So this is English Samian, it was manufactured in Oxford and it basically tried to replicate what they did in Gaul and quite successfully as well I think. It is beautiful isn't it? I mentioned already those patterns and the more you look at it, I mean the devil is in the detail, it's really rewarding isn't it? Because you notice even more and more about it. Absolutely yeah. And to think that it actually came from further north, so not the coast, not the coast, not the south, the ripe lands of Roman Britain, a bit further north. Yeah, well I think what happened was that the potters in the UK saw the Samian material and thought this is great, we'll copy it and they did and they did it quite well. And lastly we have this. Okay, a bit different to what we've seen. Yeah absolutely, yeah so this is interesting because it may look like a normal piece of tile or ceramic builder material, it's Roman, but what's really interesting about this is, and it's quite difficult to see, it's covered in mortar but we have lettering stamped on this tile. Oh yes, almost rectangular, it's stamped into the tile. Yeah. So what does it say? Right, we think this says C L B. Oh yes, I can see a B there, yeah absolutely. And what's missing is R, so Classis Britannica, the Roman navy if you will. So this is the second type of tile we found on this site, so clearly we think that the Classis Britannica were actually key or operating out of this site, that would make sense from the evidence that we found. That's important because when we think about the site it's actually overlooking the harbour, you can see Boulogne, the continent, you can see Dover, so it would have been a very strategic place for Classis Britannica, the navy, to operate out of here, absolutely perfect. So the fact that this area is so important in terms of what you can see and the evidence that we've got from the tiles etc, it's looking like this was occupied by the Roman navy. So we've gone from coins, which tell a lot, to even just this stamp, which is easy to overlook once again because it just looks like a piece of construction material. However, but all these things combined, what are they starting, and I stress starting because you know this is only early on in your excavations, but what are they starting to reveal about the importance of this site in the Roman period? What they're revealing we believe is this is an important site, it's a communication point, it's a point of entry and exit, it needs to be policed, it needs to be managed because it's the entranceway, if you like, from the continent. So we can tell from the artefacts that we found and the archaeology that we're discovering, this is really really key in its strategic importance to the Roman empire. We think of those great port towns of Roman Britain like Dover or Richborough, this one's been overlooked but could have been just as important. Absolutely, it's kind of the forgotten gateway, if you like, and hopefully what we're doing here will put it back on the map and we can understand its relationship with Richborough and Dover and other key ports across the British coast. To be invited to this excavation even on this, I must admit, pretty windy day, well it is a real privilege because this is one of the most exciting Roman discoveries here in the southeast in recent history. This is the discovery of an until now largely unknown Roman port, one of the key gateways linking Roman Britain to the rest of the Roman empire over there on the continent. It makes you realise how, yes, we can talk about the roads, about the land connections in Roman Britain, how important they were to Roman Britain reaching its height, becoming prosperous, the moving of resources and so on, but all of that would have been fruitless without the port facilities, without places along the south coast such as at Dover, down there and here, that were instrumental, vital for the ships, the key ships that would have been sailing back and forth across the channel linking Roman Britain with the rest of the empire. Thanks for watching, remember to like and subscribe and let me know where you think I should go next.