Milecastle 10 (Walbottle Dene) was one of the small fortlets spaced at roughly one Roman mile along Hadrian's Wall, lying west of Newcastle in the sector between Benwell (Condercum) and Rudchester (Vindobala). Built in the AD 120s as part of Hadrian's frontier scheme and occupied, with phases of repair and reduction, into the later 4th century, it would have housed a small garrison of perhaps 8–32 auxiliary soldiers controlling a gated passage through the Wall.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Like the other milecastles in this eastern sector, it functioned as a controlled crossing point regulating movement, taxation, and low-level policing of traffic between the province and the territory north of the Wall, rather than as a fighting fortification. It is not distinguished by any unusual features in the historical record.
The site has seen very limited investigation; its position is known largely from the regular milecastle spacing and from antiquarian and 20th-century observations along this stretch, where the Wall is heavily overlain by modern development and the Military Road (B6318). No substantive published excavation results exist for Milecastle 10 itself, and details of its gateway type (long-axis or short-axis) and internal buildings remain undetermined.
Milecastle 10 (Walbottle Dene) was one of the small fortlets spaced at roughly one Roman mile along Hadrian's Wall, lying west of Newcastle in the sector between Benwell (Condercum) and Rudchester (Vindobala). It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a fortlet site from the Roman period in Britain.
Milecastle 10 (Walbottle Dene) is classified as a Roman fortlet — 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 Turret 10A (Throckley East) (0.5 km), Turret 9B (Walbottle) (0.5 km), Turret 10B (Throckley) (1 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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