Huddersfield in Roman Times
By Ian A. Richmond

ROMAN PIONEERS IN THE HUDDERSFIELD DISTRICT A.D. 71-79

THE FORTS AT MELTHAM AND KIRKLEES
On the high moors above Meltham, standing upon a spur of the Pennines, in a position favourable only for guarding an easy ascent to the uplands, are the remains of a small fort constructed in typically Roman fashion. The place was just over an acre in size, and provided with one double gate of wood, placed where it was least accessible to a charging foe. Excavations, made by the writer in April, 1923, have proved that there were no ordinary buildings within the fort. Its irregular shape is an adaptation to the contour of the ground. On three sides a ditch six feet deep had been dug, mostly in “middle grit” sandstone. The rampart, consisting of the loose stones and earth cast up from the ditch, was twelve feet in average width and, accordingly to proportions given by Hyginus, should have been raised originally as high as nine feet. It is noteworthy that it was laid upon an artificial band of clay, levelled up over uneven ground. Embedded on the rampart, at the point marked with a cross in Fig.9. was a broken upper stone of a “bee-hive” quern, a British production, made from local mill-stone grit.

Roman Fort at Meltham

From these details and from circumstantial evidence an attempt may be made to reconstruct the history of the site. It is clear that the fort was occupied only for a short time, and its size and shape suggest for an early date; yet it was held for longer than a night or two, since those who built it took the trouble to erect the rampart firmly upon laid clay and to construct a wooden gateway, through which they built for a few yards a rough cobbled road. They also cut in the rock a short drain from the roadway into the ditch. But it may be assumed with fair certainty that no general would want to build a semi-permanent fort along the pass after the cleverly engineered road through Castleshaw and Slack had been built. Thus the fort seems to represent an early attempt to cross the Pennines by an inconvenient route across six miles of high and cruelly bleak moorlands between Meltham and Greenfield.

Roman Fort at Kirklees

Nor does it seem that the fort at Meltham stood alone. Another irregularly shaped fort, slightly larger than that at Meltham, but of much the same shape, lies at the foot of the Colne Valley, upon a thick bed of gravel in Kirklees Park. It was excavated in 1906 by the late Sir George Armytage, who died before publishing a full report of the work, and left behind him no records which the writer can trace. It appears that the interior of the fort produced nothing; its rampart was composed of gravel, containing loose water-worn stones of all sizes; and the late Professor Haverfield, who saw the work in progress, thought the fort to be Roman. On previous maps of the Huddersfield district this earthwork has been associated with Slack; but the forts are too near to each other to belong normally to the same system, as Gough noted long ago, and fuller knowledge suggests that the fort at Kirklees should be connected with that at Meltham. Taken together, the two forts seem to have guarded the line of the earliest Roman crossing of the Pennines yet known. It might be rash to connect them for certain with the name Petilius Cerialis; but they can hardly belong to a time before his governorship, and, after the construction of a good road across the hills by Agricola in A.D. 80, who would need to build semi-permanent forts along the route which uses the Meltham Valley and the Ashway Gap? No well-paved road led to either of these tiny forts, and it seems best to think that for four or five years, until the course for a good road in the mountainous districts between York and Chester had been surveyed and settled communication between the two fortresses used the “dirt-road” provided by a native trackway, as analogy would suggest. Only in the hills, as it seems, was the Roman route ever changed when once it had been chosen; but the Pennines have proved formidable to the most daring engineers, nor was the road through Castleshaw and Slack the last Roman attempt to surmount them. The forts at Meltham and at Kirklees seem to show, however, that it was not the first.

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