Alauna was a Roman auxiliary fort located at modern Low Learchild in Northumberland, occupying a position on the Devil's Causeway, the Roman road running north from Corbridge towards the Tweed. It appears to have been active primarily in the late 1st and 2nd centuries AD, covering around 2.8 hectares — sufficient for a quingenary cohort or possibly a part-mounted unit.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The fort formed a key intermediate garrison along the Devil's Causeway, helping to control movement and communications through the territory of the Votadini between the Tyne and the eastern lowlands of Scotland. Its placement reflects Roman strategies of road-based military supervision in the frontier zone north of Hadrian's Wall.
The site is known principally from aerial photography, which revealed the playing-card outline of a substantial fort with multiple ditches, but no significant excavation has been undertaken. Surface finds and cropmark evidence suggest at least two phases of occupation, though detailed structural and chronological information remains limited.
Alauna was a Roman auxiliary fort located at modern Low Learchild in Northumberland, occupying a position on the Devil's Causeway, the Roman road running north from Corbridge towards the Tweed. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a fort site from the Roman period in Britain.
Alauna is classified as a Roman fort — a military site in the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer. Roman Britain's archaeology encompasses thousands of sites ranging from legionary fortresses and marching camps to villas, temples and towns.
Several Roman sites lie within a short distance, including Learchild Roman fort (1.4 km), Defended settlement, Romano-British settlement and field system 100m south and east of Jenny's Lantern (3.9 km), Romano-British farmstead 1km south-west of East Bolton (4.2 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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