Until quite recently, classical scholars confidently identified the Roman settlement here as Glannoventa - one name on a list of Roman British places. Then archaeologists started digging at the fort in the 1970s. A lead seal turned up bearing the name of the Cohors Prima Aelia Classica - the First Cohort of Hadrian's Marines. The same unit appears in the Notitia Dignitatum, a late Roman administrative list, garrisoned at Itunocelum in the 4th century. Two more finds - a Roman military diploma from the beach by the fort, and an altar fragment from nearby Muncaster - both named the same cohort. The identification was settled: Ravenglass was Itunocelum, the western anchor of Rome's coastal defences below Hadrian's Wall, manned by what one might justly call Hadrian's Marines. The fort held 500 soldiers for more than 300 years. From here, a road climbed into the central fells over Hardknott Pass, linking the port to the inland garrisons at Hardknott and Ambleside.

Most of the Roman remains are gone - quarried, ploughed, or buried beneath later buildings - but one structure refused to disappear. The bath house, known locally as Walls Castle, still stands four metres tall, with patches of internal plaster clinging to walls of 2nd-century stone. It is one of the tallest surviving Roman buildings in England, and the misidentification of it as a medieval keep probably saved it: nobody pulled it down because nobody quite knew what it was. A mile's walk away, Muncaster Castle was reputedly built partly from stones taken from a different Roman fort that once stood nearby. The grade II listed Muncaster War Memorial, designed by Edwin Lutyens - the architect of London's Cenotaph - sits between the two. The Roman fort's location at the most southerly point of the Cumbrian coastal defence system makes Ravenglass the western extremity of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire World Heritage Site, alongside Hadrian's Wall itself.

Ravenglass is reputed, according to one strand of tradition, to be the birthplace of Saint Patrick. The claim is unprovable - there are other contenders for the honour - but the village's late-Roman date and coastal position make it the kind of place where a young Romano-British man might plausibly have been captured by Irish raiders, the event that supposedly began Patrick's saintly journey. The name Ravenglass itself has at least three competing origins. One reads it as Welsh - yr afon glas, meaning "the greenish or blueish river," preserving a fragment of the British language that survived Roman, Norse and Anglo-Saxon settlement. Another sees Norse-Irish hands at work, combining the Irish personal name Glas with a possessive, giving "Glas's share." A third proposes the Old Norse personal name Hrafnkell suffixed with óss, meaning "estuary." Three plausible derivations for one small village is more than most English place-names manage, and matches the layered history of the place that bears the name.

In 1208 - the year a tradition holds that the Pennington family arrived at Muncaster - King John granted Richard de Lucy, Earl of Egremont, a charter for a Saturday market at Ravenglass and a yearly fair on the feast of St James, 5 August. By 1297, royal records ranked Ravenglass among the port towns of north-west England alongside Lancaster, Cartmel and Workington. The harbour faded as silting and the rise of larger Cumbrian ports took the trade away, but the village stayed - 337 inhabitants by the census of 1841, a working population of fishermen, farmers and railway workers as the Cumbrian Coast Line arrived in the 19th century. Today Ravenglass is served by that same line, with trains to Carlisle and Lancaster, and it is also the western terminus of the fifteen-inch-gauge Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway - La'al Ratty - which runs up into Eskdale during its operating season. Rosemary Sutcliff set part of her final novel Sword Song here in the 9th century; Granada Television used the village extensively in its 1972 serial The Intruder, where Ravenglass played the fictional location of Skirlston. The village still goes about its small business, the only coastal village inside England's most famous national park, mostly unaware of how much of its history walks the streets alongside it.

Ravenglass village sits at the estuary of the Esk, Mite and Irt rivers at 54.35 degrees north, 3.41 degrees west, on the West Cumbrian coast. From the air it appears as a small village clustered around a single main street parallel to the railway, with the triple-river estuary fanning west to the Irish Sea and Muncaster Castle's wooded grounds rising to the east. Best viewed from 2,000 to 4,000 feet AGL at low tide, when the channels through the sandbanks are most visible. Nearest airfields: Walney Island Barrow (EGNL) about 20 nm south, Carlisle Lake District (EGNC) about 36 nm north.