Housesteads, Northumberland
Historical Description
Housesteads, a station on the Roman wall, in Northumberland, 3 miles N of Bardon Mill railway station, and 5½ NE of Haltwhistle. It is the most remarkable of all the stations, retains extensive and interesting portions of its original Roman work, was visited by a large excursion party from the British Association meeting at Newcastle, in 1863, and is called by Stukely the "Tadmor," by Bruce the " Pompeii," of Britain. In 1883 several altars were found. on the supposed site of a temple, and a bronze purse containing coins of the time of Hadrian. It was the Borcovicus of the Romans, and was garrisoned by the Tungrian cohort. It occupies a lofty ridge, with a wide view on the E, the S, and the W; contains an area of nearly 5 acres, is in the form of a parallelogram, rounded at the comers, and extending from E to W, and has the wall on the N, while the val-lum probably ran along the S. It shows an indication, in projecting beyond the wall's line, of having been constructed prior to the wall; it had natural defences on all sides except the W, and it was defended on that side by a triple line of ramparts. A number of suburban houses have left vestiges exterior to its S side, its own wall on that side still stands ten or twelve courses high, two principal streets traverse its interior, crossing each other at right angles, the W gate retains its strong central gate-post, and has also, in a ruined state, each of its guard-chambers; the intersecting point of the two principal streets retains a large square base of a pillar; and the entire station, besides having yielded numerous interesting relics which have been carried away, exhibits a surprising amount at once of solid masonry, of broken columns, and of fragments of millstones and pottery.
Land and Property
The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Northumberland is available to browse.
Maps
Online maps of Housesteads are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)
Newspapers and Periodicals
The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following newspapers related to Northumberland online: