The South Gate and Defences of Venta Icenorum: Professor Atkinson's Excavations, 1930 and 1934

death, they came to the present writer. In 1971 some account of Atkinson's excavation of the Forum of the city and its Public Baths was published,' in which full references were made to the surviving sources, their history, and the difficulties of interpreting their scanty record for a modem account. These sources and comments are not repeated here. For the defences and the South Gate there exist some plans and photographs, now in Norwich Castle Museum, together with a small notebook, though this is of little help. Nevertheless, and despite a most regrettably extended delay, the Gate deserves publication. In the records dimensions were given in feet and inches, and for consistency imperial measurements are retained here, metric equivalents being added in brackets. Although English and Roman feet do not coincide exactly, the former system gives some idea of the intentions of the builders.2 The South Gate lies at the end of what may be called the cardo maximus of the city, the street which bisects the town-plan from north to south and presumably gave access to the Roman road from Colchester, known today as the Pye Road. It is true that no trace of this road appears on aerial photographs in the vicinity of the South Gate, and that a map published by Myres and Green (1973, map 1) shows the road on the other, western, side of the river Tas and apparently heading for the West Gate, perverse though this would seem. However, we may note that the last known alignment of the road from the south, at Swainsthorpe, is directed towards the South Gate, and the very existence of this gate presupposes a road leading from the city-centre to the recently discovered amphitheatre3 and beyond, although now destroyed by ploughing. The importance of the South Gate is reinforced, as we shall see, by the exceptional character of its masonry. The traces of a road west of the Tas, if genuine, may relate to the first-century pretown military phase. Atkinson noted that, in a section cut just north of the South Gate, the street consisted of five superimposed layers of road-metalling, the lowest of which yielded a sherd of samian form 37 of Flavian-Trajanic date. This would suggest that the street may have been laid down c. A.D. 90-120, a date-range which is consistent with other evidence for the establishment of this civitas-capital,4 and was not in origin a feature of the preceding military occupation.