A Roman fort and settlement below Hadrian's Wall, still being dug each summer, and the source of the famous wooden writing tablets
Open to visitorscheck opening times and admission before you go
Substantial ruinsruined, but plenty survives above ground
Vindolanda was a Roman fort, a walled army base, with a busy civilian town growing up alongside it just south of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. It stood on the Stanegate, the Roman road that ran east to west across the country and linked the northern forts before the Wall itself was built. The army rebuilt Vindolanda over and over across three centuries, one fort on top of another, which is why the site is such a deep layer cake of walls, streets and buildings. Archaeologists still excavate here every summer, and it is one of the most thoroughly dug Roman sites in the country.
The waterlogged ground preserved things that usually rot away, and the greatest of those are the Vindolanda writing tablets: thin slivers of wood carrying ink writing, the everyday letters and lists of the people who lived here. They include a party invitation and a soldier’s request for more socks and underpants, and they rank among the oldest handwritten documents ever found in Britain. The originals are in the British Museum, with replicas and thousands of other finds shown in the museum on site.
Vindolanda is run as a charitable trust and charges admission, separate from the National Trust and English Heritage sites along the Wall. It sits near Bardon Mill and the Twice Brewed Inn, and makes an easy pairing with Housesteads fort and the much-photographed Sycamore Gap a little way north. The Hadrian’s Wall Path runs across the ridge above, and The Sill visitor centre nearby is a good place to get your bearings.
Full name: Vindolanda (Chesterholm) Roman forts, civil settlement and cemeteries, adjacent length of the Stanegate Roman road and two milestones
More at the National Heritage List entry
