Qualla: Alauna (Maryport)

Alauna (Maryport): Introduction

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Morgan, CC BY-SA 2.0. More Roman altars have been pulled from this hilltop than from any other site in Britain. Some came up in Tudor times. Others surfaced in 1870, when a labourer's spade clinked on stone and seventeen of them appeared together in a pit. The dig in 2011 returned to that same pit and asked a different question. Where had the altars originally stood, and why had they been buried? The site is Alauna, the Roman fort and town just north of Maryport, on a hill above the River Ellen. It was one of the western anchors of Hadrian's Wall's defensive line, and for nearly three centuries Roman soldiers from across the empire stood watch here over the Solway Firth.

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Image: Chris Morgan | CC BY-SA 2.0

Alauna (Maryport): A Name from a Single Source

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Veleius, CC0. The Roman name appears securely only once, in a sixth-century document called the Ravenna Cosmography that listed places across the known world. From that single reference and a careful reading of evidence, scholars have established beyond reasonable doubt that the Roman name for...

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Image: Veleius | CC0

Alauna (Maryport): Reading the Ground

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Between May 2000 and September 2003, TimeScape Surveys conducted a magnetometry sweep across 72.5 hectares of Camp Farm, the land covering the fort and its civilian settlement, or vicus. It remains the largest geophysical survey carried out on the northern Roman frontier. What it...

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Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Alauna (Maryport): Voices in Stone

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Veleius, CC0. The altars are made of local sandstone, and the inscriptions on them give names, ranks, and home towns of the soldiers and officers who once served at the fort. Many were erected for ceremonies that appear to have taken place once a year. One altar, now in the British Museum, was...

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Image: Veleius | CC0

Alauna (Maryport): Why the Altars Were Buried

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The 1870 discovery of seventeen altars in pits was long read as a deliberate ritual deposit. The 2011 dig, led by Ian Haynes of Newcastle University and Tony Wilmott, who was named Archaeologist of the Year in 2012, reinterpreted that picture. The altars had not been carefully bu...

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Image: Public domain

Alauna (Maryport): The Senhouse Collection

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Carole Raddato from Frankfurt, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. From the sixteenth century, the Roman fort site was owned by generations of the Senhouse family, who began collecting altars and inscribed stones almost as a hobby. Their accumulated finds, gathered over four hundred years, form the heart of the Senhouse Roman Museum, which opene...

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Image: Carole Raddato from Frankfurt, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0