Burgh Castle Roman Site

Burgh Castle stands on a hilltop above what was once the estuary of the River Waveney. The fort was built in the 3rd century as part of the Saxon Shore system to guard against Saxon raids. Its massive walls of flint and tile still rise four and a half metres high on three sides. Six pear-shaped bastions project from the outer face, two along the south wall and one at each corner. The west wall has long since slipped down the slope into the marsh below, leaving only Breydon Water to mark the lost estuary. Archaeologists found coins and pottery showing the fort was occupied from the mid-3rd century until the early 5th century. Later, in about 630, Saint Fursey may have founded an Irish monastery here, though experts still debate the claim. Excavations in the 1950s and 1960s uncovered a timber church and a cemetery with 144 graves. A Norman motte was built in the south-west corner in the 11th century, but it was levelled in the 18th and 19th centuries. Visitors today walk along the surviving eastern and southern walls, their flint and red-tile courses still sharp after centuries. The view stretches across the wide mudflats of Breydon Water to the rivers beyond. Inside the enclosure, low earthworks mark where the motte once stood and where the monastic huts may have been. The nearby church of St Peter and St Paul still uses Roman bricks taken from the fort long ago.