of small black pebbles from the beach. Bonding tiles,
such as appear in the other Roman forts of the Saxon Shore, and in much
other Roman walling, seem to be absent. Boys, noticing much tile about
the Roman debris of the place, suggested that bonding courses had
existed in the upper parts of the walls, which are now destroyed. But
these courses, if used at all, would hardly have been omitted entirely
from the lower 8 ft. or 10 ft. of walling. And they should at any rate
occur on the inner face of the wall, which Mr. G. Dowker in 1877 and
Major Gordon Home in 1927 found fairly perfect. Apart from this seeming
lack of bonding tiles, the masonry is not unlike that of the other forts
of the Saxon Shore. Major Home’s excavation showed that the wall was
backed by a sandy bank, contemporary with it, but of unascertained size.
Little is known as to the gates. A slight inward trend of the south wall
and a gap about half-way along it were taken by Dowker to indicate a
southern entrance; and a discovery in 1931 proved the existence of a
buried gate here. Others have conjectured eastern and western gates, and
at the supposed site of the eastern is a large, loose jambstone. But
without excavation no certainty can be attained. Gough records a
surrounding ditch. There are now no surface vestiges of it, but a great
part of the land-surface outside the walls has been lowered several feet
since the Roman period.
Of the buildings of the fort, next to nothing is known. The
ruins of the Saxon church are built wholly or largely of Roman material,
but the two tall columns taken from the church, and now preserved in the
cathedral precincts at Canterbury, are Saxon rather than Roman.22
Apart from the defences, the only Roman masonry now visible, or
seen recently, in situ consists of two lengths of rough and
rather indeterminate stone walling found by Major Home a short distance
to the north-west of the presumed south entrance of the fort; and a well
found in 1923 near the centre, a short distance south of the churchyard.
This well was 3 ft. 4 in. in diameter, was lined with flint rubble (in
which foot-holes with brick lintels were placed at regular intervals on
opposite sides), and to the depth of upwards of 15 ft. was filled with
sand containing few and insignificant Roman remains. Roman buildings
seen by our predecessors and now destroyed add little to the story.
Three items can alone be cited, and none of them is quite satisfactory.
(1) Battely (p. 35, sec. 30) mentions that, fifteen years before
he wrote his book—that is, towards the end of the seventeenth century—a
fall of cliff revealed brick substructions and arches, and also vestiges
of mosaic flooring. This naturally suggests hypocausts with
dwelling-rooms above them. Unfortunately, the position of the find is
uncertain. Battely does not state it precisely, and merely treats the
remains as generally connected with the fort. Harris, writing a little
after him in 1719, describes the spot as ‘half a mile westerly of
Reculver towards Hearn.’ Mr. Fox, writing on Reculver, thought it was
near the fort but outside it, since it was discovered before the sea had
attacked the fort. He conjecturally places it between the north wall of
the fort and the shore, and suggests that it may have been the
bath-house which often occurs outside Roman forts. It is not perhaps
necessary to consider it an external building. The sea had already
attacked the northern rampart in Battely’s time, and if
22 For the church see C. R.
Peers, Arch. lxxvii, 241. The columns have evoked much
discussion: see C. R. Smith, Coll. Ant. vi, 222; Richborough,
etc., p. 197, and Proc. Soc. Antiq. 2nd ser. i, 369; Gent.
Mag. 1861 (i), 148; Fox, Builder, 20 Oct. 1900, and Arch.
Journ. liii, 353; Baldwin Brown, Arts in Early England, vii,
258; A. W. Clapham, Saxon Archit. (Oxford, 1930). |