Pigeon Clint (or Pigeon Crag) Written Rock is a Roman quarry face on the north side of the Gelt valley in Cumbria, one of a small group of inscribed quarries along the River Gelt that supplied dressed sandstone for Hadrian's Wall and its associated installations. Inscriptions here and at the nearby Written Rock of Gelt indicate activity in the 3rd century AD, with the most securely dated text from the Gelt complex naming the consulship of 207 under Septimius Severus, though the quarries were almost certainly worked from the Hadrianic period (c. 122 onwards) through subsequent rebuilding phases.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The site is part of the principal stone source for the central and eastern sectors of Hadrian's Wall, and the inscriptions — naming military units, working parties (vexillations) and individual soldiers — provide rare direct evidence that Wall-stone was quarried by the army itself rather than civilian contractors. Together with Coombe Crag and the Written Rock of Gelt, it documents the organisation of legionary labour in the northern frontier zone.
There has been no formal excavation; knowledge derives from antiquarian recording of the rock-cut inscriptions and tool marks on the quarry face, with recent laser-scanning work (notably by Newcastle University on the Gelt inscriptions, 2019) improving the record of weathered texts. Beyond the epigra
Pigeon Clint (or Pigeon Crag) Written Rock is a Roman quarry face on the north side of the Gelt valley in Cumbria, one of a small group of inscribed quarries along the River Gelt that supplied dressed sandstone for Hadrian's Wall and its associated installations. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a quarry site from the Roman period in Britain.
Pigeon Clint Written Rock: Roman quarry inscription is classified as a Roman quarry — a industrial 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 River Gelt Roman Quarry (1 km), Romano-British farmstead and associated enclosure 770m ESE of Old Church (3.7 km), Four Romano-British farmsteads 370m south east of Old Church (3.8 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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Research the area around Pigeon Clint Written Rock: Roman quarry inscription