Leahill and Piper Sike, a matched pair of Roman watchtowers near Birdoswald, where excavators found a straw-covered floor and two soldiers' hearths
Open accessfree to visit at any reasonable time
Substantial ruinsruined, but plenty survives above ground
Leahill and Piper Sike stand about 500 metres apart, a matched pair of small stone watchtowers, or turrets, built into Hadrian’s Wall. Under the numbering system used for the Wall, Leahill is turret 51a and Piper Sike is 51b, one of eighty numbered pairs strung along the frontier, each mile of Wall getting two. Excavations at Leahill turned up a straw-covered floor and two hearths where soldiers cooked and kept warm, along with a quern for grinding flour, a coin and fragments of glass that suggest glazed windows. Close to Piper Sike, someone once carved a stone with the name of their commanding officer, Candidius Crescens. Archaeologists excavating here in the 1920s were among the first to realise the turf-built stretch of Wall it stood on ran all the way to Bowness-on-Solway on the Solway coast. Both turrets are open to walk round, right on the Hadrian’s Wall Path, a short walk from Pike Hill Signal Tower and Banks East Turret.
