Military History | Segedunum Roman Bath House — They Dug on the Vaguer of Two Notes

Wallsend's Roman fort had a bath house, and for a century and a half the only evidence for it was two pieces of nineteenth-century paper that did not agree.

The Tyne and Wear Historic Environment Record sets them side by side. In 1840 John Hodgson published, in his History of Northumberland, an account of "a very curious cauldron for heating water in", square outside and oval within, five feet by six and three deep, lined with hard cement mixed with brick, a flue close beside it. The record adds that it is "possible to read his account to mean" that he saw the thing in 1814, at Fawdon Staith, already the last fragment of a building mostly carted away. The other note is H. MacLauchlan's, in his Memoir of a Survey of the Roman Wall of 1863, and MacLauchlan had it second-hand: a bath house near the Ship Inn. The record calls it "unlikely, on grounds of date, appearance and improbable survival" that the two men were describing the same structure.

In 2014 volunteers on WallQuest, a community archaeology project run by Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, dug MacLauchlan's ground: the plot the Ship Inn had stood on, about 130 metres south of the fort. The building was there. Cold, warm and hot rooms, two rectangular plunge baths and a semicircular one added later, one bath still carrying its pink waterproof lining and its steps down, pilae standing where the heated floor had been.

John Hodgson's small hot bath, the one somebody had actually measured, was not. Of that, the record says only "This must lie beyond its extent."

The excavated rooms now sit in a terraced cut off Gainers Terrace, the robbed-out walls picked out in yellow, white and red gravel, shipyard cranes on the skyline behind. Segedunum's museum lists them as open during its own opening hours.

📸 Cover: the excavated bath house at Wallsend, the robbed-out rooms laid out in coloured gravel with the pilae of the hot room at right; photograph by Bill Boaden, 20 April 2017, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons. Second image, the Ship Inn on Gainers Terrace, the pub that stood on the site and not the excavation itself; by Peter McDermott, 30 July 2011, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons.