The plan of Viroconium Cornoviorum

Abstract

Most of the Roman city of Viroconium Cornoviorum at Wroxeter (Shropshire) was purchased for the nation in 1973 to protect its remains, which mainly lay in arable land, from further damage by the plough. This part of the city, beyond the limits of the Department of the Environments's Guardianship site, is known very largely from crop-mark photography, tracing the lines of buried foundations by corresponding patterns in a growing cereal crop (Frere & St Joseph, 1983, 162–6). This technique continues to yield results, for ploughing at Wroxeter is regulated rather than prohibited, and never to better effect than in the dry summer of 1975, when excellent marks developed to west and north of the Baths (PLS. XIV, XVI), and in 1976, which afforded new details to south and east of them (PL. xv). At the request of the Inspectorate of Ancient Monuments and Historic Buildings vertical photographs were taken by the University of Cambridge to form the basis of a new plan of the known remains. The potential of air photography for reconstructing such a plan had been shown by Webster and Stanley (1964), using the photographs of Mr Arnold Baker, but much more had been learnt about certain areas both by Mr Baker and by Cambridge University since then.