button to main menu  Gents Mag 1907 part 1 p.176

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Gentleman's Magazine 1907 part 1 p.176
bronze and iron; also various kinds of pottery, though there was very little of really fine Samian ware.
Many fragments of glass and lead showed that the windows of the fort were glazed. Several pieces of jewellery were found, one being a fish with an enamelled red eye. In the three-roomed house outside the fort remains of a cat and kittens (or dog and puppies) were found under the debris of the roof and walls. Slates were discovered amongst the ruins showing that the dwellings had all been roofed with slates.
How the camp was overthrown after the departure of its Roman occupants we do not know, but its ruin was evidently completed by fire. Perhaps the barbarian hordes lurking among the grim fastnesses of the mountains around descended upon it. History, at any rate, is silent upon this point.
Many of the sandstone door-posts, corner-stones, etc., were carried away in later times. Some of them were found by Mr. Calverley in use as cheese-presses, etc., at farms in the neighbourhood. Still sufficient of the camp is left for us to build up in the imagination what it once was. We can see what an imposing edifice it must have appeared to the wild hillmen, perched in mid-air on the edge of a crag round which mists swirled and snow drove. It must have been a dreary spot in winter for those Roman soldiers, with the north wind from Sca Fell and Bow Fell howling round it, and wild boars and wolves prowling, perhaps, outside its gates.
A wild boar's tusk was found amongst its debris, and portions of the antlers of red deer. To-day hares and foxes may be found amongst its ruins, while ravens still have a nesting-place in the crags above, and buzzard hawks and peregrine falcons hover above it in its bleak desolation.
The view from the camp on a fine day is so beautiful as to make it well worth a visit independently of the great interest of its relics from an antiquarian point of view. It is doubly interesting, perhaps, by reason of the mystery which enshrouds it. Of its builders we know
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