Venta Icenorum

Listen for a moment. Wind moves through long grass. Somewhere nearby, sheep are grazing, and a skylark may be singing high overhead. Under your feet the ground rises into a low, grassy bank, and in places dark flint pokes through the turf. It looks like ordinary Norfolk countryside, a few miles south of Norwich. But you are standing inside a Roman town. Its streets, temples and market square still lie just below the field around you.

This place is Venta Icenorum, the Roman town at Caistor Saint Edmund. The Latin name is usually explained as the market or meeting place of the Iceni. The Iceni were the Iron Age people who lived across much of what is now Norfolk. Today the site is quiet farmland and pasture, cared for by the Norfolk Archaeological Trust. Paths lead around the old defences. The River Tas runs along the western side, slow and reed-fringed, just as it did when Roman boats may have used it.

To understand why this town exists, start with a name most visitors already know: Boudica. She was a queen of the Iceni. In the year 60 or 61, after brutal treatment by Roman officials, she led a great revolt. Her forces destroyed Colchester, London and Saint Albans before the Roman army defeated them. The punishment that followed was harsh. Much of the Iceni homeland was left damaged and depopulated.

Some years after the revolt, the Romans laid out this town. Historians think it was built partly to bring the Iceni back into the Roman system. It worked as a regional capital, a place for local government, trade and taxes. Here is the first surprise. This was not a fort for Roman soldiers. It was a civilian town, run largely by local people who had learned Roman ways. The descendants of Boudica's tribe may have walked these streets in togas.

The town followed a neat grid of straight streets, typical of Roman planning. At its centre stood a forum, the open market square. Beside it stood a basilica, a long hall used for law courts and public meetings. Excavations have also found public baths and temples. Houses and workshops filled the blocks between. Picture timber and stone buildings, red tile roofs, and smoke from cooking fires drifting over the river meadows.

Now look again at the bank beneath your feet. Those walls came later, probably in the third century. They were built of flint, with neat layers of flat red tile running through them to keep the courses level. Look for these thin red stripes where the wall face survives. And here is the second surprise. The walls enclose a smaller area than the original street grid. The town seems to have shrunk, so the builders defended only its core.

For centuries, nobody quite knew what lay inside. Then came the dry summer of 1928. The grass and crops dried unevenly over buried stone. From the air, the outlines of streets and buildings appeared like lines on a map. Royal Air Force photographs captured the pattern, and their publication caused real excitement. Excavations followed soon after, between 1929 and the mid-1930s. Here, a camera in the sky did the work of years of digging.

Archaeology here did not stop in the 1930s. Since the early 2000s, a long-running project has combined geophysical survey with fresh excavation. Geophysics means instruments that detect buried features without digging. These surveys have given a much sharper picture of the streets, the buildings, and the landscape around the walls. Each season adds detail. The town is still being understood, even though most of it will probably stay under the grass.

In the south-eastern corner of the walled area stands the parish church of Saint Edmund. It is a small, flint-built village church, and it sits inside the Roman defences. Builders in the Middle Ages almost certainly reused Roman material from the ruins nearby. It is worth pausing here. A Christian church, named after an East Anglian king, stands within the walls of a Roman tribal capital. Several layers of history share one quiet corner of a field.

There is a local saying you may hear. Caistor was a city when Norwich was none, and Norwich was built of Caistor stone. It is a rhyme, not a historical record, and the stone claim is hard to prove. But the first half carries a truth. When this town was busy, the city of Norwich did not yet exist. Norwich grew in the Anglo-Saxon period, long after Roman rule ended in Britain.

What happened to the town at the end? Roman government in Britain collapsed early in the fifth century. Towns like this one slowly emptied. Archaeologists have found Anglo-Saxon cemeteries close by, which show that new communities settled in the area. Life did not vanish overnight. It moved, changed, and eventually shifted towards the river settlements that became Norwich. The old walls were left to the grass, the farmers, and the weather.

The best way to experience the site is simply to walk it. A circuit around the defences gives you a sense of the town's size. Information boards along the way show reconstructions of what once stood here. From the higher parts of the bank, look across the flat interior and imagine the street grid underneath. Mornings and evenings bring long shadows, and these can make the low earthworks easier to see.

Before you leave, stand still once more. Feel the slope of the old rampart under your boots. Notice the flint in the wall face, grey and glassy where it has broken. Look towards the river and the line of trees along it. Nearly two thousand years ago, people stood here and watched the same water move past. As you walk back to the path, the field will look like a field again. Now you know what lies beneath it.