Roman
The Romans landed in Dorset at Poole Harbour and the Fleet and moved inland, while other groups travelled west from Old Sarum and Winchester. At Abbotsbury on the Fleet the Romans quickly took the hill fort, Abbotsbury Castle, bloodlessly before moving on to Maiden Castle. There is some evidence of a struggle at Maiden Castle and Badbury Rings but current opinion amongst archaeologists is that these, and Hod Hill, also fell with ease. There is, however, a find of 130 skeletons at Spetisbury which show that the invasion was not entirely peaceful.
Dorset has many notable Roman artefacts, particularly around the Roman town Dorchester, where Maiden Castle was taken early in the Roman occupation. In the grounds of the County Council offices is a Roman house with well preserved mosaic floors and an aqueduct fed by waters of a tributary of the Frome empounded behind an earthen dam, with a covered timber-lined channel of some nine km; the dam gave way and the aqueduct was abandoned unexpectedly early, in the mid-2nd century. Roman roads radiated from Dorchester, following the tops of the chalk ridges north west to Ilchester near Yeovil, and east to Badbury Rings where it forked to Winchester, Bath and a particularly well-preserved route running north east to Old Sarum near Salisbury, as well as tracks to the many small Roman villages around the county. In the Roman era settlements moved from the hill tops to the valleys, with Roman finds, such as the famous Hinton St Mary mosaic, being found in the vales. In the Isle of Purbeck a long-settled Iron Age site at Worth Matravers was reorganised late in the Roman period to grow grain for the legion, with a grain-parching granary floor heated with a hypocaust. By the 4th century the hilltops had been abandoned.
Read more about this topic: History Of Dorset
Famous quotes containing the word roman:
“My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother’s in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Semantically, taste is rich and confusing, its etymology as odd and interesting as that of “style.” But while style—deriving from the stylus or pointed rod which Roman scribes used to make marks on wax tablets—suggests activity, taste is more passive.... Etymologically, the word we use derives from the Old French, meaning touch or feel, a sense that is preserved in the current Italian word for a keyboard, tastiera.”
—Stephen Bayley, British historian, art critic. “Taste: The Story of an Idea,” Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, Random House (1991)
“The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, “All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.” And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)