Just to the south of Hadrian’s Wall, and at around the same time as the frontier fortifications were being built, the Romans constructed a fort on high ground overlooking the Solway estuary. Then, the site was known as Alauna Carvetiorum – today we call it Maryport – and it formed part of a chain of forts safeguarding the Cumbrian coast, which also represented an important communications and supply network. Perhaps the most famous finds from the fort are a collection of freestanding stone altars dedicated to the god Jupiter, which were found buried in a series of large pits on the highest point of the local landscape, 300m outside its walls (many are now displayed in Senhouse Roman Museum on the site). Between 2011 and 2015, these enigmatic objects formed one of the key foci of investigations on the site by Professor Ian Haynes and Tony Wilmott (investigations which were part-funded by Senhouse Museum Trust, part-funded by Newcastle University, and have recently been published in full, together with an account of antiquarian work on the site – see ‘Further reading’ on p.45), but the story of their discovery actually dates back centuries earlier.
It is a story that we have already explored in the pages of this magazine (see CA 259), but briefly to recap: altars were being unearthed at Maryport as early as 1599, as noted by the antiquarian William Camden, though this was only the first recorded discovery, and precise findspots and detailed descriptions of their appearance were rarely documented. By the later decades of the 19th century, however, attitudes to archaeological recording had advanced somewhat – and some of the most significant finds are described in the 1874 edition of the Transactions of the Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, which carries a report by John Collingwood Bruce hailing the discovery of a cluster of 17 altars north-west of the fort. Many of them bore the letters ‘IOM’, indicating that they were intended to venerate ‘Jupiter, Best and Greatest’, as well as the names of the commanders and units that had commissioned their creation – but why had the altars subsequently been committed to the ground?
It was initially suggested that the pits could represent an annual practice where, as a new altar was dedicated, its predecessor was respectfully laid to rest. Ian and Tony’s 2011-2012 excavations comprehensively debunked this theory, however, after they revealed substantial post-holes in the bottom of the pits. Far from being designed as the final resting place of still-revered stonework, the pits had once supported the timbers of at least one monumental wooden building – and the altars had been buried as convenient ballast.
Recycling the altars in this way would have signified no slight to their divine dedicatee: gravestones, building inscriptions, and religious stonework including altars have all been found incorporated into later Roman buildings across the empire. But what kind of building had benefited from the support of the Maryport altars? In 2012-2013, Ian and Tony led further excavations to help make sense of its footprint (CA 289), mapping 64 pits arranged in ten rows. Although these lines were not all parallel, and the pits themselves varied in shape and size (ranging from large and square to smaller and rounded), their post-holes suggest that they had all housed similar-sized timbers. A degree of intercutting hints that there may have been a second phase of building on the site, though the pits themselves yielded no organic materials suitable for radiocarbon dating or any diagnostic fragments of pottery. Indeed, the only datable remains within them were the altars, thanks to them helpfully naming specific individuals and units in their dedications.
Establishing the structure’s date was not quite so straightforward, however. The latest of the altars can be attributed to the mid-AD 160s- early 180s, but the pits themselves are thought to be significantly later, as they were found to cut into a ring-ditch containing late 4th-century pottery. This development might evoke memories of another large late- or immediately post-Roman wooden structure from the Roman frontier, namely the timber hall that Tony Wilmott excavated at Birdoswald in the 1980s (CA 116). The similarities are certainly appealing, although the Birdoswald structure had stood within the fort itself, while the Maryport pits are located outside, on a prominent hilltop a short distance to the north-west. With its lofty position, and the imposing dimensions indicated by the size of its timbers, the Maryport ‘hall’ would have been visible for miles around (CA 353) – but, while possibilities for its precise purpose cannot currently be resolved, its late date poses an intriguing question for our understanding of the altars. The religious stonework is centuries older than the pits in which they had been placed – so where had they originally stood?
Ian and Tony’s initial digging seasons on the site did not shed conclusive light on this matter, and so, in 2013, they turned to another location outside the fort, where antiquarian investigations had revealed further hints of Roman religious activity. Joseph Robinson, a local archaeologist and bank manager, had been a prolific excavator in the area around Maryport in the later 19th century, and in 1880 he came to the fort site itself. His investigation was undeniably enthusiastic, and he was a good excavator by the standards of the time, but he could not control the whole process; in a report of 1881 he notes that ‘the excavations were visited by crowds of people, many of whom dug in various directions’. While this makes for wince-inducing reading, his discoveries were hugely significant. As well as unearthing two more altars, one of which was again dedicated to Jupiter, the works also revealed the remains of two buildings. One was circular, the other rectangular, and Robinson interpreted both as Roman temples.
Given the presence of another Jupiter altar close to these structures, might they hold the key to understanding the original purpose of the other altars? Ian and Tony hoped so. ‘Following the absence of evidence from the 2011-2012 seasons for a display location/Roman cult focus on the site of the 1870s pits, it was necessary to reappraise the 1880s site’, they write – and, between 2013 and 2015, that is exactly what they did.
Ian and Tony’s work at ‘Site 2’ revealed that Robinson’s buildings had once stood within a large ditched enclosure with a metalled surface, standing like two islands in a sea of cobbles that had been brought up from the nearby beach and arranged over an area stretching 50m by at least 95m. Just to the north-east was the base of another monumental structure – too large to have held one of the Jupiter altars, and clearly designed for load-bearing, it was possibly a plinth for a statue or a freestanding column – but what remained of the buildings described in 1881?
The circular building was discovered, Robinson’s report tells us, by a Mr Dawson thanks to his ‘vigorous use of the sounding rod’, and photographs from the 1880 excavation show that its outline had survived remarkably intact, as a course of roughly dressed sandstone blocks laid on cobble foundations. It is fortunate that these photographs were taken – not just as an interesting snapshot of early archaeological work, but because the buildings were left exposed to view after the antiquarian investigations had concluded, and in the years after 1880 their stonework was largely spirited away for use in other local building projects. Other features had been completely dug away during Robinson’s excavations, with only his notes, plans, and photographs to preserve them for posterity. Nevertheless, by combining this archival evidence and surviving archaeology, it has been possible for Ian and Tony to reconstruct something of its appearance.
The building’s circular wall had an external diameter of 10.64m, with four buttresses at 6m intervals, and inside there was a central pit that probably held a timber support for the roof. Access to the structure was gained through a rectangular porch projecting to the north; this was c.1.85m square, and unlike the main building, which had stone footings, it was made entirely of wood. The modern project team could still clearly see the slots that had once held its timbers, and between these lay the remains of a worn flagstone surface covered over with cobbles.
As for the building’s date, Robinson records finding a coin of Antoninus Pius (r. AD 138-161) within the central pit, though he gave no other contextual information for it, and much of the interior floor surface had been cut away during the 19th-century excavations. This left few clues for Ian and Tony’s team to analyse, though they did recover fragments of mid- to late 2nd-century pottery from the porch foundations and its metalled floor – dates that were also compatible with radiocarbon dating of burnt material associated with the structure.
Could this burnt material hint at the building’s purpose? Robinson described several ‘burials’ in and around the circular structure, as well as a ‘funeral pyre’ to its side, and the 19th-century excavators compared this site to another circular building identified at Keston in Kent. With an external diameter of 9m, and with six radiating buttresses, it was strikingly similar in form to the Maryport structure, and more recent excavations (by the Bromley & West Kent Archaeological Group and Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit) have seen the Keston structure interpreted as a 3rd-century mausoleum. Could Maryport’s circular building have had a similar funerary role? Ian and Tony disagree, suggesting that Robinson had mistaken burnt deposits around the structure for cremation burials. Modern analysis has revealed them to contain not human remains, but animal bone (where the species can be identified, it is uniformly either sheep or goat); might they instead represent feasting debris or burnt offerings being made at a cult site?
A religious role?
A round design would be perfectly in keeping with a religious role, Ian and Tony write, noting that numerous circular cult buildings are known across the Roman Empire. In Britain, and specifically on the northern frontier, we might look to the round temple at Scargill Manor, which is dated to the late 2nd or early 3rd century, and which is located close to a rectangular building in a pairing tantalisingly close to what we see at Maryport. There is also a probably 3rd-century circular building at Chapel Hill, just outside the fort at Housesteads. Moving away from the frontier region, Ian and Tony add, some 50 circular and polygonal Roman buildings are known in Britain to the south of Hadrian’s Wall, and many more across the wider Empire, but a particularly thought-provoking parallel can be found at Egleton in Rutland.
There, we find a near-contemporary, if slightly larger, structure with an internal diameter of 10.5m. Like the Maryport building, it had a pit at the centre, presumably for a roof support, and a simple floor of patchy gravel overlaid with a more uniform layer of clay. The Rutland site had a much richer finds assemblage (though the paucity of artefacts at Maryport may well be due to the enthusiastic removal of surfaces by Robinson and his team), including 218 coins, lots of pottery, a curse tablet, and part of a figurine with a crested helmet that might represent Mars or Minerva, but one thing the two sites have in common is their apparent association with activities involving burning.
If the circular building was religious in nature, and if the 2nd-century evidence indicates its date, could it have been broadly contemporary with the altars, forming part of the same sacred landscape? Might it even have been their original home? Ultimately, Ian and Tony believe that this was not the case as, long before the altars were buried at Site 1, the land around the circular building was dramatically and disruptively remodelled to allow for the construction of a second religious building. The ditches enclosing the circular structure were backfilled around the middle of the 3rd century, and it was at this time that the fine cobbled surface was laid in front of it and its new neighbour: the rectangular structure. All of this took place decades, if not centuries, before the altars were buried, meaning that unless they had been moved and kept in storage for the interim (unlikely, Ian and Tony observe), they probably should not be associated with the temples on the hill. What, though, can we say about the later rectangular structure?
Reconstructing the rectangular temple
In Robinson’s report, the surviving remains of the rectangular structure sound impressively well-preserved: he writes of an unbroken outline created by the footings of solid walls, a cross-wall to the north end, and a square apse facing to the south. Unfortunately, these have again been heavily robbed since the 1880s, reducing the building’s footprint to clay and cobble foundations, but it is possible to piece some of its appearance back together, reconstructing a building of relatively modest proportions, measuring 13.9m by 7.9m, with an additional 4.8m by 2.23m apse. Although today its floor levels have been largely lost to the plough and to antiquarian digging, fragmentary traces of pebble surfaces were uncovered by Ian and Tony’s team, and thanks to Robinson’s photos we can tell that these had once been covered by a flagstone floor.
While much of the structure had been removed, however, there was one particularly fortuitous survival. Robinson initially described this as a ‘pavement’, but it is in fact the collapsed rear wall of the apse, which had been left where it lay – and, happily, had survived virtually undisturbed. From this stonework, we can see how the top of the wall – originally 4.8m high – once expanded to a cornice, with three stepped courses representing the original roof pitch. Surviving building materials also evoke a strikingly colourful building, with its walls built from red sandstone, yellow sandstone used for the cornice, and a roof of blue slate crowning the whole. Most tellingly of all, the presence of cobble column bases at the front of the building suggest that it had a tetrastyle façade (that is, faced with four pillars) which would be within the tradition of a temple of Classical form.
The rectangular structure is therefore the most north-westerly Classical temple known in the Roman Empire, albeit a relatively small one. In Britain, there are plausible parallels with the temple that once stood in London’s forum, and the temple of Sulis Minerva in Bath, which are of similar style – though the Maryport structure was not built on a platform or podium, which is unusual, and these other two buildings are both much earlier in date and rather grander. Based on the remodelling works described above, which preceded the rectangular building’s construction, combined with the presence of later Roman pottery and radiocarbon dating of associated sheep/goat remains, it is thought that this building was not completed until the second half of the 3rd century, or even in the 4th century. These dates pose intriguing questions about the later life of Roman Maryport: the extra-mural settlement associated with the fort is thought to have been abandoned in the mid-3rd century, part of a pattern that is repeated at many sites in Britain; why, then, was this site outside the walls still being elaborated?
For now, the original location where the Maryport altars were displayed remains a mystery, but Ian and Tony’s investigations have uncovered a host of illuminating clues about other religious practices outside the fort. Despite the predominance of dedications to Jupiter among the altars, we do not know which deity or deities were the focus of the temple buildings. Archaeological evidence attests that a diverse range of gods were worshipped by the inhabitants of Roman Maryport, though Ian and Tony note with interest that the Site 2 structures are perfectly positioned in alignment with sunrise on the summer solstice. Prehistorians are well aware of the significance of this date in the orientation of much earlier monumental architecture, but the solstice is not known to be significant in the Roman ritual calendar. Is this orientation a coincidence, then, or might there still have been a solar association?
In the later 3rd century, Ian and Tony point out, the cult of Sol Invictus, the ‘unconquered sun’, was promoted with increasing imperial enthusiasm. This deity was particularly important to Aurelian (r. 270-275), who depicted Sol on his coinage (as did some of his successors) and dedicated a temple in Rome in AD 274, and this was also a common theme on Constantine’s coins between AD 310 and 317, even after the emperor became an official champion of Christianity. The fact that the Maryport temples do not face towards the fort, but are oriented towards the highest ground, might suggest that worshippers were being encouraged to ‘look up’ during the rites held there. But, while we cannot currently prove or disprove the intention behind these buildings, it does seem that they were deliberately located on a prominent spot where they could make the most of the rising sun – or, as Ian and Tony put it, exploit the ‘interplay of terrain, sun, spectacle, and the glories of times past in military settings’. Perhaps, in time, such clarifying light will also be cast on the meaning behind the Maryport altars and the building that they came to bolster.
Ian Haynes and Tony Wilmott, A Cult Centre on Rome’s North-west Frontier: excavations at Maryport, Cumbria, 1870-2015, Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, £35, ISBN 978-1873124864. It can be purchased from the Senhouse Roman Museum shop: www.senhousemuseum.co.uk/about-museum/shop.