Corbridge Roman Town

Corbridge Roman Site
Corbridge
Northumberland
NE45 5NT
Tel: +44 (0)1434 632349

The site of Corbridge Roman Town stands about half a mile north west of the centre of modern Corbridge and is reached from a minor road which winds its way along the north bank of the River Tyne to Hexham. It has often in the past been called "Corbridge Roman Site", and still is in the edition of the guidebook on sale when we visited, but the change of description to "town" has the dual benefit of being more accurate, and of giving prospective visitors a sense of the sheer scale of what they are coming to see.

Roman Corbridge, possibly known as Coriosopitum to its residents, stands only 2.3 miles behind the line of Hadrian's Wall, but has origins that predate its better known neighbour. Traces of a circular hut reveal that people were living on at least part of the site for some time before the Romans arrived in these islands.

When the Romans did arrive it took them a little time to work their way up the country, and they arrived in the area of what is now Corbridge in AD79, as Julius Agricola made his way north to invade Caledonia. Their first fort in the area was half a mile west of the site you can see today, and has been called the Red House Fort after the name of the farm on whose land it stood.



Corbridge stands close to the modern A68. This roughly follows the line of the old Roman road, Dere Street, into Scotland and this in turn formed an important junction with the Stanegate running east to west between the Tyne and the Solway.

In the late AD80s a new fort was built on the site of the later town, presumably to provide security for this strategically important junction and the nearby crossing of the River Tyne. It is thought that the fort here was garrisoned by a unit of 500 auxiliary cavalrymen. It was built of wood, and this doubtless contributed to its destruction by fire in AD105.




Roman road known as the 'Stangate' situated within the Corbridge Roman Site

A second fort was built on the same site and to a similar plan to its predecessor. This formed part of the defensive curtain of forts strung out along the Stanegate. When Hadrian's Wall was built in the years from AD122 the initial plan was to garrison its troops in forts placed a short distance to its south. With this in mind the fort at Corbridge was rebuilt again, this time in order to allow it to accommodate a cohort of 1,000 infantry.

Within two years the decision had been taken to garrison troops in forts built along the line of the wall itself, and it seems likely that at this point the fort at Corbridge fell out of use.

Things changed yet again when the Romans moved their northern frontier forwards to the Antonine Wall in Scotland in AD142. As Corbridge stood on the main road north it became an important focus of military activity once more, and once again the fort was rebuilt, though this time stone was extensively used for the first time.

When the Antonine Wall was abandoned in AD162 and Hadrian's Wall once more became the northern border of the empire, the need for a fort at Corbridge disappeared altogether.



Although the area that has been excavated at Corbridge is large, it is worth remembering that what is on view today represents only a small proportion of what is known of Roman Corbridge. It is thought that the total area covered by the town at its fullest extent was some 27 acres or 11 hectares.

The main road running through the centre of the excavated area, the Stanegate, is known to have extended for some distance under what are now fields to the east and to the west of the site.

Read more on Corbridge Roman Town HERE and  HERE

Above pictures taken by myself, Ken Fitzpatrick more can be viewed HERE