What the Romans did for us

THE NEXT time you visit Bolton Museum, take a moment to examine two unobtrusive exhibits which you will find just across from the "Extinguisher" horse-drawn fire engine.

One is made of dark stone and looks like a simple model of a volcano. It is cone shaped with a depression scooped out of its peak.

The label reads: "Rotary quern top stone 'beehive type' Bradshaw. Romano British.".

The other is lighter in colour, oval, about two feet across and has two indentations ground into its centre. It looks like an abstract sculpture after Henry Moore. Again the label tells the story: "Quern top stone, Red Moss, Horwich, First century AD".

Both of these objects come from the period when Britain was part of an Empire which spanned from the Euphrates to the Rock of Gibraltar and from the sands of the Sahara to Hadrian's Wall. The Roman Empire got everywhere. Even Bolton.

The Romans first came to Britain under the command of Julius Caesar, but his expeditions of 55BC and 54BC achieved little.

The real invasion of our island started in 43AD, in the reign of the academic oddball Claudius, who needed a military victory to boost his public image.

He sent in four legions to the strange, soaking wet, mist-shrouded island at the back of beyond.

The Bolton area was inhabited for several thousand years during the Middle Stone, New Stone and Bronze Ages, but the site seemed to have been abandoned in the Iron Age (from round 1000 BC) because of a sharply deteriorating climate.

By the time Claudius's boys disembarked on the south coast, conditions had improved. And so people returned to the high moors and river valleys, bringing their querns with them.

What is a quern? It's a wheat or barley grinding mill made of two stones. Skilled operators can turn out up to 4lbs of flour in 60 minutes of hard grinding.

The flour is then baked into loaves of bread. A quern was a pretty vital piece of kit, not as exciting as a bronze dagger or a hoard of Roman coins, but more useful if you planned on not starving to death.

Some archaeologists see the quern as the very heart and embodiment of family life.

So, in the Romano-British period people were grinding wheat into flour in what is now Bradshaw and Horwich. Life had come back to our area.

In Roman times, the inhabitants of most of Britain were Celts. This tribal society had spread all over Europe in the Iron Age, (they even sacked Rome in 390BC). They fought in chariots, made beautiful gold jewellery, and lived in tribes and kingdoms. And the largest kingdom in Britain, was that of the Brigantes.

The Brigantes, or upland people, lived in what is now northern England.

They were more a loose federation of sub-tribes than a straight kingdom and it is possible that one of the sub-tribes, a group called the Segantii, lived in what is now Lancashire. Our Bradshaw and Horwich wheat grinders might have answered to that name. The Roman occupation of Britain advanced in fits and starts with the occasional disaster -- the bloody revolt of Queen Boadicea in 61 AD is the best known example.

The Brigantes, numerically the largest tribe in Britain, started off as allies of Rome -- indeed their Queen, Cartimadua, handed over the resistance leader, Caratacus, to the invaders in 51 AD.

But in 78AD a new governor, Julius Agricola, launched an ambitious campaign to subdue all of Britain that was left outside the zone of conquest. Lancashire was one of his first targets. In marched the legions. The area that is now Bolton, and its scattered settlements, became part of the Empire. They would remain in that condition for over 300 years of peace mixed with the occasional emergency.

Roman Lancashire was a quiet place, but not the back water that some historians have made of it. There were settlements at Lancaster, Ribchester, Colne, Wigan and Manchester and these settlements and other scattered outposts, were connected by a network of roads. Two of these passed through our area.

The first was an important arterial from Carlisle to Manchester and points south and its course is followed now by that of the A6. Travelling south from Preston, it begins to swing to the south-east at Adlington and then skirts Blackrod.

There may have been a permanent station at Blackrod, at the site known as Castle Croft, to the south east of the village.

In the 18th century, the locals discovered "urns, coins, hinges, horseshoes and iron utensils", the possible remains of a small police post. The garrison would have been few in number, but it offered something rare in the ancient world -- a salary, and would thus have attracted locals on the make from far and wide.

South of Castle Croft the road passes within half a mile of Red Moss, where one of our life-giving querns was discovered.

It then swings through Cooper Turning, Four Gates, Westhoughton, Wingates, Chequerbent, Over Hulton, Four Lane Ends, Little Hulton and then on towards Walkden, Worsley and eventually Manchester.

The other Roman road, which connected Manchester to Ribchester, is more famous. We can imagine the soldiers marching, their hobnailed sandals clattering on the stones -- from Prestwich, through Radcliffe, over Cockey Moor and past Bradshaw and then on to Watling Street and through Affetside.

They are marching quickly through a freezing cold rain, their faces pinched, cloaks pulled tight, many of them wearing Celtic trousers or hide leggings to protect themselves from the awful cold and damp.

And sometimes they dropped things. An incomplete coarse Roman pot was found by the side of the road near Edgworth. And in the 1960s, a small hoard of 30 or so early Roman Imperial coins was discovered in Affetside. Were they lost, stolen, mislaid? We can't tell now.

Another quern stone, the volcano-shaped one, was found in Bradshaw, close to this road. In times past Roman coins were discovered on Cockey Moor, and in Turton.

Roman roads attracted people: not just travellers on official business but also farmers with crops to sell.

Settlements sprang up round military outposts. We have seen that one such post may have been at Blackrod, but there is another potential site.

A surviving ancient document, called the Antonine Itinerary (a sort of Roman AA map), states that a place called Coccium existed 20 Roman miles from Ribchester, and 17 Roman miles from Manchester.

A Roman mile is 1,618.5 yards. If you do the arithmetic (a calculator helps) and then play around with a set of compasses and a map, you will find the lines intersect just south of Affetside and rather near Cockey Moor in Ainsworth.

Could Cockey Moor be Coccium? We know Roman coins were found there in times past, but there is no other direct evidence. Or rather none has yet been discovered.

The Romans pulled out of Britain in 406. Meanwhile, sailing swiftly across the North Sea in their "wave-horses", a new generation of invaders was approaching the shores of Britain.

In time they would come to Bolton, too.