Burgh Castle

On a ridge above marshland near the coast of Norfolk, by the junction of the rivers Waveney and Yare, is a ruined Roman fort called Burgh Castle. Three sides of the massive walls remain but the west wall had collapsed and fallen into the marsh below before the eighteenth century when the local antiquarian, John Ives, described the place, and probably even before the Normans built a castle here.

Cartloads of fallen flints and tiles, and even a complete over-turned tower, have been found in the marsh below. The walls are built of local flint with bonding courses of red tiles or bricks, a classic Roman building technique. They are eleven feet thick at the base, narrower at the top, and in places stand to fifteen feet, probably near their original height, The east wall is 200m long, while the north and south walls survives for a length of about 90m each. The surviving plan is trapezoidal so the fort could never have been a perfect rectangle or square. Along the walls, on the outside, are round bastions, solid towers on which catapults could have been mounted.