Burnhead is a Roman temporary marching camp located in the upland country of the central Anglo-Scottish border, on the line of the Roman road running north from the Stanegate frontier through Liddesdale toward southern Scotland. Like other camps in this corridor, it is most plausibly associated with troop movements during the Flavian advance (c. AD 79–80s) under Agricola, or with later Antonine or Severan campaigns into Scotland in the 2nd–early 3rd centuries.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Camps of this type were short-stay overnight enclosures for army units on the march, and Burnhead's position helps trace the routes by which Roman forces moved between the Tyne–Solway isthmus and the Scottish Lowlands. It is one of a network of such sites that, taken together, reconstruct campaign logistics in a landscape otherwise sparsely garrisoned.
The camp is known principally from aerial photography and earthwork survey, showing the typical playing-card outline of a ditched enclosure with rounded corners, but no published excavation evidence is available to refine its size, gate arrangement, or dating. As with most upland temporary camps in this region, no internal features or datable finds have been recovered.
Burnhead is a Roman temporary marching camp located in the upland country of the central Anglo-Scottish border, on the line of the Roman road running north from the Stanegate frontier through Liddesdale toward southern Scotland. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a site site from the Roman period in Britain.
Burnhead Roman temporary camp is classified as a Roman site — a civilian 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 Turret 42B (Great Chesters) (0.2 km), Cawfields Roman temporary camp (0.4 km), Chesters Pike Roman temporary camp (0.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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