wide buttress uncovered at Trust’s Roman circus site

Yesterday (9th August), site volunteer Nathan began to investigate a buttress to the outer wall of the seating-stand of the Roman circus, on the Trust’s site in front of our building, Roman Circus House. This is extremely interesting, but – more significantly – we realised that Nathan is working on a wide buttress.

The circus outer wall was supported along the outside by a line of buttresses. The buttresses to the outer wall of the length of seating-stand on the opposite side of the arena (which we investigated a few years ago) were not all the same. Instead, they were in a pattern of two narrow buttresses alternating with a single very wide one. One of the reasons for our current circus excavation is to see if the pattern of buttresses on this side mirrored the ones on the other side. We can’t be certain, yet, but it looks very likely as if it did. More importantly, it also looks as though the plan of the part of the circus that we are excavating at the moment is, in fact, a mirror image of the plan of the seating-stand on the other side of the arena, to the extent that it even includes the narrow passage found there which provided spectators with access to their seats in the stand (see plan below). This may not sound particularly interesting, but this great chunk of evidence – the wide buttress – will help us greatly in our efforts to work out the ground-plan of the whole circus.

Visitors to our circus interpretation centre will be able to view the excavation site and the remains of the circus, on and from our opening day on the 24th August.

With many thanks from the Trust, as always, to all our volunteers.

The image shows site volunteer Nathan working on the wide buttress, yesterday; the light-coloured stone surface to Nathan’s right is the top of the buttress foundation, and it extends to the right as far as the single large block of stone.
The plan shows the excavation site, with the projected lines of the circus (grey), investigated parts of the circus (black) and, within the area of the excavation site, the wide buttress (black).

.