Just along from the bandstand is an area with some rectangular concrete strips laying out the floor plan of a building. If you read the notice on the other side of the railings at the back, it tells you the following:
“These floors are the remains of a Roman town house excavated in 1920 by the famous archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Three houses were discovered here. Two of them were grand buildings built around central garden courtyards in a Mediterranean style in the 2nd century AD. The floors that survive are made of tiny red terracotta cubes. The walls are marked by modern flagstones. Very little of them survives because the ruins of these houses were used by the Normans as a quarry for building stone when they constructed the Castle.
“Lavish houses or the king seen here were not constructed in the towns of Roman Britain until the 2 century AD, when wealthy native Britons had acquired a taste for the Roman way of life. Rich local families used the adoption of Roman architectural styles to demonstrate their voluntary commitment to Roman rule. However, even before the end of Roman Britain these houses became derelict as the province of Britain declined.”
However, that is not the whole story of their discovery, which actually goes back to 1906. The summer of that year was a scorcher. In September the temperature reached 36OC which was the highest temperature every recorded in this part for Britain for that year. It was only beaten by the temperatures reached last summer.
The summer being so hot, Castle Museum curator Arthur Wright went out into the Castle Park to eat his lunch. We don’t what he had for lunch, but we do know that whilst eating it, he spotted something that got him very excited. He saw rows of cracks and strange lines of parched grass in the park all around him. Did he finish his lunch? We don’t know, but a little bit of digging on his part quickly revealed that underneath the marks were the tops of some mysterious foundations just below the grass. He quickly realised that he had found the remains of a Roman house.
A local artist called Major Bale was called in to draw a measured plan of all the marks before it rained and made them disappear again. These were then stored in Colchester and fourteen years later Sir Mortimer Wheeler got the plan out and did his excavation. He found not only the three houses, but also a well-preserved Roman street. The street and houses were buried again, but the plan of one was laid out with the concrete slabs you can see today.
The summer of 2018 was another scorcher and the marks reappeared and can be seen on Google Earth photos. If it is hot and dry this summer and you are in Castle Park, have a look to see if they reappear again.