Turret 42A (Burn Head) is one of the regularly spaced stone watch-towers built into the curtain of Hadrian's Wall, situated between Milecastles 42 (Cawfields) and 43 (Great Chesters) on the dramatic Whin Sill escarpment in Northumberland. Like its neighbours it was constructed in the 120s AD under Hadrian and was probably manned by detachments from the auxiliary garrisons of nearby forts; it would have functioned as a signalling and observation post controlling movement along and across the Wall.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
As part of the integrated system of two turrets between each pair of milecastles, it formed a link in the chain of visual communication along the central sector of the Wall, where the natural cliff-line of the Whin Sill already provided formidable defence. It is not individually distinguished in the literature, taking its importance from its place within the wider Wall system.
The turret site is known from the standard surveying of the Wall (notably the work of Collingwood Bruce and later the MacLauchlan and Ordnance Survey mappings) rather than from major excavation, and little detailed published evidence of finds from Turret 42A specifically is available. By analogy with excavated turrets in this sector (e.g. 41A, 44B) it would have been a small square stone tower roughly 4–5 m internally, with a hearth and ladder access to an upper storey, likely abandoned or reduced in use during the later 2nd century
Turret 42A (Burn Head) is one of the regularly spaced stone watch-towers built into the curtain of Hadrian's Wall, situated between Milecastles 42 (Cawfields) and 43 (Great Chesters) on the dramatic Whin Sill escarpment in Northumberland. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a watch tower site from the Roman period in Britain.
Turret 42A (Burn Head) is classified as a Roman watch tower — 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 Haltwhistle Burn Temporary Camp 4 (0.2 km), Milecastle 42 (Cawfields) (0.3 km), Cawfields Roman temporary camp (0.3 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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