Caistor (Lincolnshire) was a small Roman walled town on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, occupied from at least the later 3rd century AD into the late 4th. Its defining feature was a compact set of late Roman defences enclosing roughly 3.4 hectares, with stone walls, a ditch, and projecting bastions of a type associated with the defensive programme of the later 4th century. Together with Horncastle, it is one of the two principal candidates for the Bannovallum named in the Ravenna Cosmography.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Its strongly fortified late Roman walls, including bastions suited to artillery, suggest it was part of a network of small fortified sites in eastern Britain — perhaps a defended local centre, posting station, or military strongpoint guarding the route along the Wolds and approaches to the Humber estuary, possibly linked to the Saxon Shore command's hinterland.
Sections of the Roman wall survive within the modern town and have been recorded in several small-scale excavations from the 19th century onwards, revealing wall foundations, bastion bases, and the ditch; finds include late Roman coinage and pottery, but the interior remains poorly understood as it lies beneath the medieval and modern town core.
Caistor (Lincolnshire) was a small Roman walled town on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, occupied from at least the later 3rd century AD into the late 4th. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a settlement site from the Roman period in Britain.
Caistor is classified as a Roman settlement — 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 Caistor Roman town (0.3 km), Claxby (6.6 km), Walesby (9.2 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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