Silchester

Silchester began as Calleva, a centre of the Iron Age Atrebates in the late first century BC. After the Roman conquest of AD 43 it grew into Calleva Atrebatum, a substantial town laid out on a street grid, with public buildings, a forum basilica, a rest house near the south gate for travellers on imperial business, and an amphitheatre on the eastern edge.

The amphitheatre was raised between about AD 55 and AD 75 in earth, clay and timber, and given a stone wall around the arena in the third century. The town was still going when Rome lost control of Britain at the start of the fifth century, and was probably abandoned somewhere between AD 550 and 650.

What makes Silchester unusual is what happened next, which is nothing. The town was never reoccupied or built over, so the full circuit of its walls still stands, among the best preserved Roman town defences in England, and the ground inside them has kept a picture of the place that almost nowhere else can offer. The University of Reading has excavated here since the 1970s, the amphitheatre and the forum basilica among the digs.

The medieval village grew up beside the Roman town rather than on it. The twelfth century parish church of St Mary the Virgin stands about a mile east of the modern village, just inside the Roman wall.