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Richard
Turner
Inspector of Ancient Monuments
Cadw
Plas Carew Unit 5/7
Cefn Coed
Nantgarw
Cardiff
CF15 7QQ
Wales
Tel: 01443 336012
Fax: 01443 336001
In 1982 Cadw's predecessor (the Ancient Monuments Division of the Department of the Environment) carried out consolidation work on the rampart wall of the Roman legionary fortress at Caerleon (ST 340906). The walls adjacent to the southern corner are the best preserved of the whole circuit, and there was a desire to display them appropriately to the public as they lie within the guardianship area.
This work revealed that the internal deposits of the interval turret on the south-western wall closest to the southern corner remained intact despite extensive robbing of its walls. Consequently, it was decided that the excavation of both the interval turret and the southern corner turret, which had previously been excavated in 1909, was justified before further repairs were made to the walls and the two turrets to prepare them for public display.
The excavations took place in July and August 1982 and were directed by Howard Mason. They produced an important dated sequence tracing the development of the defences which furthermore allowed reconstructions of how the defences would have appeared in the first to third centuries. These reconstructions were subsequently used in popular guidebooks. The post-excavation work took place during the mid 1980s, but the report remained unpublished due to circumstances beyond the excavator's control. In 1996 Cadw funded an additional programme of post-excavation work to complete the report and Philip Macdonald was employed to do this. The finished report again remained unpublished because it fell between two stools. It was too long to be published as an article in a journal and felt to be too short to justify publication in a stand-alone monograph.
In the autumn of 2009 it was suggested that the most appropriate way forward was to publish the full report via the ADS and to prepare a synthetic overview for publication in Archaeologia Cambrensis. Cadw approached the third named author to complete this work which was carried out in February and March 2010.