Tomen-y-Mur West Practice Camp II is one of a cluster of small Roman practice camps situated on the upland moor northwest of the auxiliary fort at Tomen-y-Mur in Merionethshire (Gwynedd). Like its neighbours, it is a diminutive earthwork enclosure, considerably smaller than a marching camp, almost certainly constructed as a training exercise by the garrison of the fort during its occupation in the late first to early second century CE (broadly c. 78–140 CE, spanning the Flavian foundation through Hadrianic activity).
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
The Tomen-y-Mur practice camps form one of the most concentrated groups of such earthworks in Roman Britain, comparable to the well-known clusters at Llandrindod Common and Gelligaer, illustrating how auxiliary units in upland Wales were drilled in the standard procedures of camp construction — laying out playing-card-shaped enclosures, digging ditches, and building gateways with tituli or claviculae.
The camp survives as a low earthwork identified through field survey and aerial reconnaissance, with the characteristic rounded corners and traces of protected entrances, but it has not been excavated and no datable artefacts are recorded from it. Knowledge therefore rests on morphological comparison with the better-studied practice camps of Wales rather than on stratigraphic evidence from this specific monument.
Tomen-y-Mur West Practice Camp II is one of a cluster of small Roman practice camps situated on the upland moor northwest of the auxiliary fort at Tomen-y-Mur in Merionethshire (Gwynedd). It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a military camp site from the Roman period in Britain.
Tomen-y-Mur West Practice Camp II is classified as a Roman military camp — 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 Tomen y mur (0.2 km), Tomen y Mur Roman bath house (0.3 km), Tomen y Mur amphitheatre (0.4 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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