Turret 78A (Kirkland) was one of the small stone watchtowers built at roughly third-of-a-mile intervals along Hadrian's Wall, positioned between Milecastles 78 and 79 in the western, Cumbrian sector of the frontier as it ran toward the Solway. Like its neighbours in this stretch, it was constructed in the 120s AD under Hadrian, originally as part of the Turf Wall sequence before the curtain was rebuilt in stone, and was likely occupied intermittently until the later 2nd or earlier 3rd century, with the wider Wall system functioning into the 4th century.
Source: Pleiades — A Community-Built Gazetteer and Graph of Ancient Places. View the Pleiades record →
Its role was observational and signalling rather than defensive in any serious sense: a small garrison of a few soldiers detached from a nearby fort (most plausibly Burgh-by-Sands or Drumburgh) watched the approaches across the low-lying coastal plain toward the Solway estuary, where the formal Wall gave way to the system of milefortlets and towers continuing down the Cumbrian coast.
Turret 78A is one of the more poorly known structures on the Wall; its position is inferred from the regular spacing system, and little upstanding fabric survives in this low-lying agricultural landscape where stone has been robbed and the Turf Wall sector leaves only subtle earthwork traces. No significant modern excavation of this specific turret has been published, and finds attributable to it are essentially absent from the record
Turret 78A (Kirkland) was one of the small stone watchtowers built at roughly third-of-a-mile intervals along Hadrian's Wall, positioned between Milecastles 78 and 79 in the western, Cumbrian sector of the frontier as it ran toward the Solway. It is recorded in the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places as a watch tower site from the Roman period in Britain.
Turret 78A (Kirkland) 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 Milecastle 78 (Kirkland) (0.5 km), Turret 78B (0.6 km), Milecastle 79 (Solway House) (0.9 km). Aubrey Research maps over 2,200 Roman sites across Britain, drawn from the Pleiades ancient world gazetteer.
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