The house in which I was brought up faced north across the open grassland of what survives of the medieval hunting park created by about 1180 and associated with the castle. Within this area is the race course. Just to the north-west was the Park Hill, a geological erratic, on top of which was an early twentieth century water tower built above a nineteenth century reservoir. When that was excavated in the 1870s Roman pottery was found and some apparent evidence for a ditch. This has been interpreted as the site of a Roman signal tower from the later imperial period and seems to be confirmed by an early nineteenth century map which shows a recognisable square just at that point on the hilltop. In Yorkshire, the obvious comparison is the evidence for signal stations along the Yorkshire coast most evident today at Scarborough Castle. The one close to my old home would have overlooked the Roman road linking Legiolium ( Castleford ) and points north to both Eboracum ( York ) and to Hadrians Wall, to Danum ( Doncaster ) and thence to the rest of Britannia and the rest of the Empire. Other possible watchtower sites, forming a linked chain, have been identified to the north and south of the Pontefract example. Most of this route is still in use as A roads today, although the stretch immediately west of the tower had disappeared under the hunting park by the twelfth century, surviving in part as a boundary, but otherwise obliterated.
A reconstruction of a rypical Roman watchtower on the Limes in Germany. There appear to be a considerable number of such reconstructed towers in the area of the Limes.
Image: Wikipedia
It is arguable, indeed probable, that it was along this road that Constantine the Great travelled as he began his journey to the sole rule of the whole Enpirw and all that flowed therefrom. The alternative would have been from York to the Humber at Brough, then, after the ferry, to Lincoln along Ermine Street and thence to the world beyond.
I was therefore interested to find online a couple of videos about this type of watchtower or signal station on the northern frontier of the Empire is now the Netherlands and Germany. The two are filmed at reconstructed towers and explain how they operated as a system of defence and warning, and also about the life of those who are stationed in them.
