Roman Britain Beneath Your Feet

I · Start with a place

Reveal the Roman landscape nearby

Search once, choose how far to look, then work outward from the familiar modern place. The local profile uses a curated gateway dataset, while the Portable Antiquities Scheme gateway opens the official Roman-period records for the resolved area.

Search Roman Britain

Enter a town, village or postcode

The search runs only when you press Investigate. Choose a radius first; location results are cached in your browser to reduce repeat requests to public geocoding services.

Choose a search radius

10 km 30 km 50 km

Important: a nearby mapped feature does not prove Roman occupation beneath the exact modern address. The result shows relationships within a wider landscape.

Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · Roman routes are simplified interpretive corridors

II · Understand the profile

Four questions organise the local evidence

Every result uses the same sequence so visitors can compare movement, military presence, settlement and the portable objects later recovered from the surrounding landscape.

Which route was nearest?

Road corridors connected forts, ports, towns, resources and frontier zones.

Where was military power placed?

Forts and fortresses occupied passes, river crossings, junctions and supply corridors.

Where did settlement concentrate?

Towns, vici and villas reveal administration, trade, craft, worship and daily life.

What objects were recovered nearby?

PAS records add coins, brooches, fittings and other reported portable evidence through the official area search.

III · Read the layers

A map becomes evidence one layer at a time

The full Roman Britain map contains many overlays. These four steps turn the controls into a historical argument.

Land

Begin with terrain and water

Passes, estuaries, river valleys and uplands constrained movement before Rome arrived.

Movement

Add routes

Roads reveal which places were made reachable, supplied and governable.

Force

Add forts and settlements

Military and civilian sites show where movement, supply, administration and daily life concentrated.

Objects

Continue into PAS

Open the official Roman-period record list for the resolved area and examine the portable evidence in its proper catalogue context.

IV · Continue exploring

Move from the local profile into the full map collection

The location search is the guided entrance. These pages provide the national and specialist views.

Multilayer map

Interactive Map of Roman Britain

Switch between military sites, amphitheatres, naval evidence, mosaics and other layers.

Open the full map → Map library

Interactive Maps Hub

Browse Roman roads, resource networks, frontiers, settlements and external research atlases.

Explore all maps → Method investigation

Ghost Roads

Learn how LiDAR reveals—and sometimes falsely suggests—lost Roman roads.

Follow the evidence → Landscape investigation

Where the Sacred Groves Once Stood

Compare place-name evidence, ritual archaeology and deeper sacred landscapes.

Explore sacred landscapes →

V · Method and limits

What this investigation calculates—and what it cannot

Location resolution

UK postcodes are resolved with Postcodes.io. Named places use a site-owned Vercel proxy to OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim service, with a direct browser fallback.

Distance

Distances are straight-line estimates from the searched coordinate to a curated site point or the nearest part of a simplified road corridor.

Coverage

The gateway dataset selects major and illustrative places. It is not a complete Historic Environment Record or national archaeological inventory.

PAS recorded finds

The page links to official PAS Roman-period searches for the resolved administrative area. PAS export access is account-controlled and many findspots are protected or generalised, so this investigation does not claim to plot PAS objects as precise local points.

The honest result may be “no mapped feature nearby”

Absence from this page does not mean absence of Roman-period activity. It means the curated gateway dataset does not contain a sufficiently close feature. Use the full map and local Historic Environment Records for deeper investigation.

VI · Sources and services

The map stands on shared public infrastructure

Geocoding

Roman Britain
Beneath Your Feet