ROMAN ARCHITECTURE AT CORBRIDGE

A joint project between Tyne and Wear Museums and English Heritage with funding from the North East Regional Museums Hub Opportunities Fund

Excavations in 1906-14 on the site of the Roman town at Corbridge, Northumberland, found many stone fragments with architectural ornament.  They had once belonged to important buildings.  There were also many fragments of statues and sculptures.  These stones were found re-used to repair the surface of a road running through the centre of the Roman town.  Some had been re-used in late-Roman buildings.

The architectural fragments can not be seen today at Corbridge Roman Site.  They are protected from the damaging effects of the weather in an English Heritage store at Matfen, a few miles from Corbridge. 

 The ‘Roman Architecture at Corbridge project’ has been carried out as a joint project between Tyne and Wear Museums and English Heritage with funding from the North East Regional Museums Hub Opportunities Fund.  Its aim has been to assess the importance of the collection of Roman architectural fragments from Corbridge, to see what they can tell us about the buildings that once existed there, and to make this little-used evidence for the appearance of Corbridge in Roman times more widely known.

ROMAN ARCHITECTURE AT CORBRIDGE RECONSTRUCTED

The stones include a large number of decorated cornice fragments. 

A cornice is a projecting decoration that runs along the horizontal base and the sloping sides of the triangular gable (pediment) that sits on top of a classical building. 

 The study has found that the collection contains fragments of both horizontal and raking, or sloping, cornices.  Also, the fragments of cornice can be sorted into six separate groups. 

 Examples from three groups are shown here:

Two stones with matching carved decoration (or ‘moulding’)

Two from a group with projecting teeth (or ‘dentils’)

The stone from the top (apex) of a pediment, decorated with a rosette

This shows that the cornice fragments come from a group of classical buildings with pediments.  The only buildings of this type that could possibly have existed at Corbridge would be temples.  There must have been at least  six separate temples, because there are six separate groups of cornice stones.  A number of column shafts, bases and capitals in the collection are of the correct size to belong to these temples.

 The fragments of stonework in the collection can be used to reconstruct one of the temple facades in detail.  There is a series of stones carrying a repeated decorative motif shaped like the letter ‘S’.  Previously thought to be from a decorative screen, it is now known that these stones formed a crest on top of the pediment (triangular gable) on the frontage of a major temple. 

The ‘S’ decorated stones fit on top of one of the groups of cornice blocks.  This cornice must have run along the top of the temple pediment or gable.

There is also a stone from within the triangular space (‘tympanum’ enclosed by the pediment which shows that this space was decorated with the ‘S’ shapes.

 The individual fragments can be fitted together like a jigsaw to establish the size and appearance of the temple frontage.  The front of the temple was around 6 m (nearly 20 feet) wide.

 The ‘S’ shapes were not meant to represent the letter ‘S’.  It is simply decoration, based on an ancient Greek pattern.

Stones of exactly the same size with the same ‘S’ decoration come from the pediment of a classical temple at the Roman site of Vindonissa in Switzerland, proving that the stones at Corbridge could have been used in this way.

Inscriptions and sculptures from Corbridge show that the Roman legionary soldiers stationed in the town worshipped oriental deities, such as Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun) and Jupiter Dolichenus.  The architectural fragments in the collection probably come from the temples of these two gods and other deities.  The legionaries started to build temples in the 160s AD.   This is shown by a magnificent inscription dedicated to Sol Invictus carved at this time by soldiers of the VI Legion.  This inscription was found in the same roadway as the architectural fragments in the collection. 

The collection also contains a number of pieces of small, delicately carved columns.  The study has shown that these columns are the right size to fit with a pediment (triangular gable) which is on display in the site museum at Corbridge.  This belongs to a fountain and public water tank built by the XX Legion and excavated in 1907.  This stood at the centre of the Roman town and was supplied by an aqueduct channel.  The stone collection allows us to build up a much more detailed picture of what ‘the fountain’, with its rich architectural ornament, looked like.

 In the collection there are fragments of stone that belong to two smaller pediments.  One of these was found in the remains of the ‘fountain’.  This shows that there must have been three gables, or pediments, ranged alongside each other, as shown on the reconstruction illustration.

The reconstruction image shows the great earth bank that carried the water channel to the back of the fountain.  Once it arrived at the fountain the water cascaded through three levels before reaching the big public water tank at the front of the fountain.  This meant that the water was sparkling and fresh and that silt was trapped and left behind in the upper tanks.

 Public water fountains of this type are common in Roman cities in the Mediterranean where the climate is hotter.  The legionary soldiers that built the fountain at Corbridge were copying models from the Mediterranean world.

Besides the temples and the fountain, several stones in the Corbridge collection come from a headquarters building (principia) belonging to the soldiers of legion II Augusta who were stationed at Corbridge.  Others come from a great market building.

 The study has shown that the collection of architectural fragments from Corbridge is one of the most important in Roman Britain.  This rare collection of stonework has only survived together because the Romans demolished the temples and re-used the pieces in a roadway.  The careful examination of the fragments has changed our picture of Roman Corbridge.  The temples and fountain built by the Roman legionaries of the second and third centuries AD would have made a striking sight among the ordinary houses and shops of the Roman town.