National Roman Legion Museum

The National Roman Legion Museum stands in Caerleon, a town near Newport in south-east Wales. It occupies part of the old Roman fortress of Isca Augusta, built in 75 AD as one of only three permanent legionary bases in Roman Britain. The museum holds many artefacts from the fortress’s two centuries of occupation, including coins, tools and uniforms linked to Legio II Augusta. Outside, the remains of Isca Augusta include a military bath house, the most complete Roman amphitheatre in Britain, sections of fortress walls and the only visible Roman legionary barracks in Europe. The museum itself sits on the via principalis, the main road that once led to the amphitheatre. Its first building, the Antiquarian Museum of 1850, was a simple Bath-stone box designed by H.F. Lockwood, with a Greek Doric portico. The portico is all that survives today, after the 1987 rebuilding largely replaced the old structure. The new building is modernist and plain, with few windows and little ornament. Visitors find the museum’s displays arranged around the fortress’s history and daily life. Outside, the amphitheatre’s stone tiers still rise from the ground, and the nearby barracks remains at Prysg Field show rows of rooms. The bath house museum shows parts of the original heating system and mosaic floors. The fortress walls and the via principalis give a sense of how the legion’s streets once looked.