Deva Victrix: the Roman fortress at Chester

The fortress

Deva followed the standard plan of a Roman legionary fortress: a rectangle with rounded corners, sometimes called a playing-card shape, a little under 600 metres long and about 415 metres wide. It had a gate in each side, joined by two main streets that crossed near the middle. Those streets are still there in outline: Eastgate Street, Watergate Street, Northgate Street and Bridge Street meet at the Cross.

At about 25 hectares it was the largest fortress built in Britain in the 70s. The map of Roman Chester shows it over today’s streets.

What stood inside

Barracks

Most of the space was taken by long barrack blocks, each housing a century of 80 men in pairs of rooms, with larger quarters for its centurion at the end. The first were timber, wattle and daub, about 82 metres long; they were later rebuilt in stone to the same size.

The headquarters

At the heart of the fortress stood the principia, the headquarters: a courtyard, a great hall, offices, and the shrine where the legion’s standards and its pay were kept. Part of it can still be seen at Hamilton Place, behind the Town Hall, and column bases from the site now stand just north of the Town Hall, outside the Coach House inn.

The baths

Near the south gate was a bath-house about 83 by 86 metres, with vaulted halls perhaps 16 metres high and three furnaces. A heated floor from it survives in the cellar of 39 Bridge Street; columns and stones from it are in the Roman Gardens.

Granaries and workshops

A legion needed large stores of grain. Granaries had raised floors and thick buttressed walls to keep the grain dry and cool; the workshops made and mended armour, weapons and tools.

The Elliptical Building

Behind today’s Town Hall the Romans began something no one has found anywhere else in the empire: an oval courtyard about 52 by 32 metres, with a water feature at its centre and twelve wedge-shaped rooms around it. It was first found in 1939 and dug again in 1967 before a car park was built, but the results went unpublished for decades.

The first building dates from the late 1st century; a second, fuller version was built on its site around AD 220, dated by a coin of the emperor Elagabalus. Its purpose is unknown. Its quality is one reason some archaeologists think Deva was meant to be more than a fortress, perhaps a governor’s headquarters.

The waterfront

The Dee once ran much closer to the fortress, and ships could come up from the sea. Beside the Roodee racecourse is a massive stretch of Roman wall long described as the Roman quay. The archaeologist David Mason has argued that it stood too high above the tides to be a quay, and that it may have been a defensive wall; timber piles found on the Roodee may be the remains of a pier.

Outside the walls

Around the fortress grew a civilian settlement, the canabae. Shops lined the roads out of it for about 300 metres, an inn for official travellers stood to the south, and many veterans settled here when they retired. The amphitheatre stood just outside the south-east corner, and across the river, in a quarry, the quarrymen carved a shrine to Minerva.

Not to be confused with

Deva Victrix is the fortress at Chester, Cheshire. It is not Chesters, a cavalry fort on Hadrian’s Wall, nor the Romanian town of Deva, nor the many games, clubs and businesses that borrow the name.