INSCRIBED ROMAN STONE RESURFACES

By Staff Reporter
Published in The Hexham Courant on 28/02/2003

AN inscribed Roman stone has been rediscovered in the walls of a house in Greenhead ­ 27 years after it was last seen.

The owners of Holmhead Guesthouse, Pauline and Brian Staff, have always known that the walls of their home contained two inscribed stones.

One, located just next to their kitchen door, they have always known about, but the other has been lost since it was last surveyed by an archaeologist in 1976.

The second stone was revealed when an overgrown patch of land was cleared during landscaping, and the same archaeologist ­ Paul Austen, co-ordinator of the English Heritage Hadrians Wall office in Hexham ­ was able to describe its location to the Staffs.

Pauline said: "We're turning a derelict byre into a Camping house, which will sleep up to eight people, in time for the opening of the Hadrians Wall Trail. The stone is in the wall of the Camping house.

"I knew it was supposed to be in the house, but I didn't know where. You can see writing on it, but I couldn't read it."

Paul Austen deciphered the inscription: IVL.IANAL.

"IVL is short for Julius and IANAL is short for Ianalis, so the Roman centurion Julius Ianalis would have been responsible for overseeing the building of the stretch of the Roman Wall the stone came from. That would probably have been somewhere around AD124 or 125," he said,

"The body which did the building in an army were legionaries, Roman citizens. There were 10 cohorts in a legion and these were divided down into centuries. Centuries usually consisted of 80 men, with a centurion in charge.

"These types of stones recorded the name of the centurion who would have had a section of the wall and vallum to build. He was leaving his mark."

Paul discovered the stone in 1976 by accident, while he was looking for another stone which was already well-known.

The first stone, next to the Staff's kitchen door, carries the inscription 'civitas Dumnoni', indicating a tribe from the Devon and Dorset area had been working on the Roman Wall.

"There are records of only one or two other stones like this," said Paul. "At times the Romans have conscripted building teams on to the Wall.

"We don't know the circumstances of this at all. We just know that there were men from Devon and Dorset who served there and left their marker behind.

"You get the big, official inscription done by professional stone masons, which are nicely written and presented, and then you get these types of stones, which were chiselled in a very amateurish fashion, probably with six-inch nails."

Pauline believes her house was built at the turn of the 1800s. It was constructed predominantly out of stones from Hadrians Wall, and possibly from Thirlwall Castle, which is nearby.