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Updated: June 26, 2025
Earthworks and camps still guard the British ancient roads and trackways, and you still admire their triple vallum and their cleverly protected entrance. Happily the Earthworks Committee of the Congress of Archæological Societies watches over them, and strives to protect them from injury.
Nothing can be more plainly traced a proper agger or vallum, with its corresponding ditch or fossa. Indistinctly! why, Heaven help you, the lassie, my niece, as light-headed a goose as womankind affords, saw the traces of the ditch at once.
The cry rose for instant attack; and Caesar, yielding willingly to the universal impulse, sprang on his horse and led the charge in person. There was no real fighting. The elephants which Scipio had placed in front wheeled about and plunged back into the camp, trumpeting and roaring. The vallum was carried at a rush, and afterward there was less a battle than a massacre.
It can be most conveniently visited from this side. At present the most interesting part of the great mound is the actual fosse and vallum. The interior, while excavations are in progress, is too much a chaotic rubbish heap to be very inviting. But again this is merely a passing phase and soon the daisy-starred turf will once more mantle the grave of a dead city.
We cannot speak with decision as to the date of their earliest use, but this stronghold of Chûn was almost certainly utilised as late as the fifth or sixth centuries, and may have seen fighting during the days when Irish invaders, even if they came as travelling saints, were not always welcomed. The first and second vallum can be traced with their ditches, and there was doubtless an inner wall.
Noo the Romans were first and foremost a practical people, as a'body kens. They made sure o' their conquest, an' then built their wall, sae that the popular theory that the vallum was a protection against the south is a' stuff an' nonsense. 'Isna the result, queried the Minister, 'that ye haud ane theory, ither folks anither?
The principal street was one hundred feet wide, and was called Principia. The defenses of the camp consisted of a ditch, the earth from which was thrown inwards, and strong palisades of wooden stakes upon the top of the earthwork so formed. The ditch was sometimes fifteen feet deep, and the vallum or rampart ten feet in height.
In this manner the camp was protected not only by a double fosse, but also by a double row of defenders, some of whom, placed on the bridges, could from this elevated and sheltered position throw their missiles farther and with a better aim; while the others, placed on the vallum, nearer to the enemy, were protected by the bridges from the missiles which showered down upon them.
Now in sun, now in shade, the bright young antiquaries surveyed the old banks, and talked wisely of vallum and fossa, of legion and cohort, of Agricola and Suetonius, and discussed the delightful probability, that this might have been raised in the war with Caractacus, whence, argued Ethel, since Caractacus was certainly Arviragus, it must have been the very spot where Imogen met Posthumus again.
I smiled; and we began a discussion on camps and fosses, vallum and praetorium; the Danes, Saxons, and Normans; which, doubtless, we carried on to a most learned length: but at this distance of time, and indeed the very day after, I plead guilty to having forgotten all about it.
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