The story of Birdoswald
The story starts with trees. In AD 122 the builders of Hadrian’s Wall cleared a wooded spur here and drained a small bog. West of the River Irthing the Wall was first built of turf, not stone. The oldest thing found on the site is the builders’ own camp, with a ditch and a fence; pieces of their leather tents turned up in the ditch.1
The fort came soon after. It was built across the Wall, so part of the turf Wall and one stone turret, number 49a, were pulled down to make room. Work seems to have stopped for some years, then started again, and the fort was finished before Hadrian died in AD 138. At 2.14 hectares it was one of the larger forts on the Wall. Then the turf Wall near it was rebuilt in stone, on a new line further north.1
The Dacians
After the brief move north to the Antonine Wall, about AD 142 to 160, Birdoswald was fully manned again, probably by the unit that then stayed through the 3rd and 4th centuries: the cohors I Aelia Dacorum, a thousand-strong cohort raised in Dacia, now Romania.1
Two of their building stones are carved with a palm branch and the falx, the curved sword of the Dacians. One records a granary built in AD 205 to 208, with help from a cohort of Thracians, under the tribune Aurelius Julianus. While he was here, Julianus lost his baby son, Aurelius Concordius, whose tombstone was found in the fort’s cemetery. The other stone records work on the east gate in AD 219.1
The Dacians set up at least 23 altars to Jupiter, Best and Greatest. Outside the walls a village grew along streets to the east, west and even north. South of the fort, timber buildings and pottery like that of Frisia show another, irregular unit living in its own way.1
After Rome
Birdoswald is one of the best places in Britain to see what happened when Roman rule ended. On the site of the granaries, archaeologists found a series of halls. The first reused the southern granary. When that became unsafe, two timber halls were built, one after the other, on the site of the northern granary. People lived here without a break from the late Roman period, probably into the early 6th century.1
The soldiers had long been local men serving because their fathers had. Without an empire to pay them, the garrison may have become something like a war band, or a small local lordship, whose people still thought of themselves as Roman.1
Where the evidence is unclear
Was it empty in the late 3rd century?The last inscription from Birdoswald records rebuilding the commander’s house, which had been “covered in earth and fallen into ruin”. That suggests a short gap, but not how long.1
Did the Dacians stay to the end?The Notitia Dignitatum, a late Roman list of army posts, still puts them here. But historians doubt how reliable it is for the western empire.1
Raiders and romantics
In the Middle Ages the fort walls made a handy enclosure. A small tower house went up by the west gate in the 1400s. In the 16th century the Tweddle family lived in a fortified farmhouse inside the walls, with animals below and people above, and complained to the Warden of the West March three times, in 1588 and 1590, after raiders took their cattle. In 1599, in the middle of all this, the first antiquarian visitor, Reginald Bainbrigg, came to look at the ruins. In the mid 1800s the landowner Henry Norman dug out the fort walls and gates and gave the farmhouse its mock-medieval tower, and that is largely the Birdoswald you see today.12
