 Well, Victorian antiquarians figure large in this talk and I have benefited like the late George Payne from a fund of goodwill with many people making their resources freely available then as now, now as then, some of them are here and welcome, some of them are here only in spirit, I hope this is interesting for the living and perhaps to the dead. I like to think of myself as following in the antiquarian tradition of exhibitions in ballots. However, when I went to my friendly neighbourhood library to find out more about the use of PowerPoint, all I could find out was how to make killer presentations. Oddly enough, it proved to be rather useful even if the author would be disgusted at my unimaginative use of PowerPoint. The book told me that I had to round my points home with shocking and unexpected imagery. This is not easy when discussing some aspects of Victorian antiquarianism. The present state of the temple is, however, fairly shocking. We know it was about here and no, the present developers' trend port property holdings group are not to blame for its destruction. Eventually, a new village and its extensive road network will cover everything for good. This has been a unique opportunity, not only to understand a historic discovery but its hinterland. Trend Port Commission's CGMS, to carry out an archaeological survey of every scrap of the 75 hectares in its view, and they provided ponds for the great crested newts, so they are goodies. The actual field work has been carried out by Mola. My contribution can be regarded as part of architectural archaeology's wide remit of pro bono outreach. The hookup is really a remarkable coincidence, especially as I used to work for Mola. I hope to reach people in the audience who are knowledgeable about Roman architecture, but I also hope to interest those who are theorising Roman Britain as an example of settler colonialism. I present the Burrum Temple as an extraordinary act of propaganda, an appropriation of the culture of the indigenous other by the Romans, and how I've longed to use a phrase like that. Increasing interest is also now being shown in the history of the society itself. The discovery provides a good example of the modus vivendi of the antiquarian movement at the end of the 19th century. This is the point where the term archaeologist and archaeology starts to be freely used under the guiding principles of Professor Francis Haverfield. I also have the forlorn hope that some of the lost records and finds may yet turn up as a result of this lecture. This site has been a problem for over a century and developer funding rarely comes to such old problems except by lucky chance. This is a major drawback at the current system of archaeological funding. I have worked from the uncoordinated efforts and brief publish notes of several long dead antiquaries. All field records are lost with one notable exception, photography. If ever the value of publishing was underlined, this is it, time eradicates everything, the printed word last. None of this evidence has ever been integrated before, and what was desperately needed was an accurate three-dimensional idea of what actually turned up in 1893-4. This is easier said than done. Anyway, I set about doing this and having done this, I now theorise about this building and I continue to change my ideas continuously. Please bear with me. This is a movable feast and please say anything to me at the end you like, however rude. Everything about this exercise has been made vastly easier through digital revolution, digital communication, imaging, CAD, the placing of archival material on the internet have all transformed this type of work and I've seen this happen developing my own career. It will be wrong to be too rude about past researchers who did not enjoy anything like these resources. I'll never fit the talk into the right time if I just talk about the technical process of reconstruction. I will try to stick to the more interesting stuff. So, how did I come to this subject anyway? I had been carrying out research in the Midway area local studies centre as part of my normal paid work. My diary says it was 29th January 2009. I was being paid, or not as it turned out to be, to write a desk based assessment of a Victorian street in Strewd. My attention wandered and I came across a copy of the 1932 Victoria County History for Kent as a relative newcomer to the county in 2003. I thought I'd better check it out. Several photographs of an extraordinary ruined building stood out amongst the usual villas, foundations, hypercoasts and Belgic pots. Two tiny scale drawings accompanied these. It was immediately apparent that this building was quite out of the ordinary. Why'd I never heard about it? The text wasn't very helpful. It recorded that the building was duly noticed by various antiquarians and archaeologists in 1893 to 4, and after disputes the matter gently dropped. When I sent a letter to the Kent Archaeological Society magazine in 2010, the editor commented that the building was a long standing puzzle for Kent archaeologists. This caused me to get even more interested. No entirely satisfactory explanation was given for the building, but Mithraeum was the most popular explanation. My past work on monastic sites and others in the city of London has given me much experience of historical archaeological discoveries of building remains. To me it was a technical challenge that ended up getting out of hand, but I'll spare you all that. So what happened in 1893 to 4? As I said, the discovery of this building coincides with an important point in the development of archaeology in Britain. Important new techniques were becoming normal, the routine use of photography and equally important the introduction of photographic reproduction. This allowed a new objectivity in reporting archaeological finds. The varied reactions and fractured communications of the past were giving way to a more collegiate and professional approach. However, as we will see, this was a discovery that created keen rivalry and some ill feeling. The dramatic persona and sequence of events was summarised by Ronald Frederick Jessup in 1956. He gave a lecture on the topic from this very spot almost exactly 60 years ago. Ars Lunga, Vita Brevis and all that. Probably in 2076 someone will demonstrate how wrong I got it. Anyway, Adrian James, our assistant librarian in 2009 kindly checked my predecessor out for me and found out he was born in 1906. His interests lay mostly in the prehistoric period. Elected a fellow in 1934, he lived until 1991 and a lot of you may remember him. He made a brave stab at setting out the facts as he understood them, for he had originally written the summary I came across in that local studies centre. His 1956 reprise in Cantiana tantalisingly mentions building material in various museums. This building material can no longer be traced. Remarkably, he was also able to get an eyewitness account of the discovery. Jessup's architectural understanding left much to be desired, but he reminded the audience that Professor Francis Haverfield himself had queried the Mithraeum identification. This is how things stood when I came along. I unwittingly became part of this much bigger happening thing in the Midway Valley. The surrounding area was about to become the focus of the vast Peters Village development, and we have two of the archaeologists involved in that attending today. Little did I know that a programme of developer funded archaeological assessments had already been commenced in 2008. I have therefore been able to exploit information that Jessup could have only dreamt of, such as this. This is a lidar survey, and on it you can see how the scanned Victorian Ordinance Survey has simply been superimposed, and the Roman temple is right, well it's indicated as a cross, that purple dot. This lidar survey at the Midway was carried out by the Valley of Vision's partnership scheme in 2011. This was funded by the HLF, and this radar-based technique is magic as you know. Power as a tool of archaeology has only begun to be appreciated by people like me. Rick Bain, Landscape Partnerships Manager, kindly provided this very useful image. The biggest problem turned out to be trying to reconstruct just what happened in 1893-4, and what individuals were involved and what sort of recording they did, what survived and what doesn't. However, because of my letter to the Kent Archaeological Society, somebody very kindly got in touch and told me about the Kent Photo Archive, Maidstone Museum and Bentliff Art Gallery. Mike Cockett drew my attention to a series of images of the woodham excavations that's in the archive, and was I interested? Could I in return provide any information about them? And I replied, yes, I am quite interested. This is one of the glass plates from the Kent Photo Archive. I looked at the website and where the low-resolution copies were available due to the lovely internet, and two images proved to be the original photographs published by one Frederick W. James. Adrian was unable to find out very much about it other than he was elected in 1896 and a moved, that is kicked out for the benefit of our guests in 1900. I suspect he was not the easiest of people to get on with. He curated at Maidstone Museum and showed good understanding of the remains as well as reproducing joints. At least 16 glass surviving negatives were taken by him on three visits. Another three were taken by one George Payne. These surviving reproduction in volume 15 of the proceedings, and Jessup later reproduced the blocks in the VCH. What happened to them or the photographs is now unknown. The first batch were taken on the 24th of November 1893 when James visited with the father of Ronald Jessup. A second batch were taken in the spring of 1894 during the emptying of the interior. His final field work occurred after the 12th of July 1894, by which time the emptying was complete. Meanwhile, Payne had hired an architect, Mr Horace Dan, to carry out another photograph and another survey. I like to think of the two meeting on site and I hope they got on. I particularly like this picture. Well do I know that East Kent glare? It's okay. Well do I know the East Kent glare? I mean quizzical look and friendly curiosity. The next man on the scene was George Payne, honorary secretary and chief curator of the KIS, as well as being local secretary of the Society of Antiquities. Frank Panton, honorary librarian of the KIS, told me that Payne was the author of Collectinair Cantiana. This was in effect a survey of his life's work in archaeology. He seems to have had private means, but he devoted most of his time to supervising excavations and monitoring quarrying around sittingborn and fawrishan. He comes over as a nice, rather dreamy person. Perhaps for all these reasons, Mr James viewed him with envy and suspicion. Payne's book unfortunately was published just before the discovery, so we can't find out anything about it from his book. Payne initially conveyed his discovery to the Society of Antiquities on 10 May 1894. The note then appeared in the proceedings of 1895. This must have annoyed James. Both were however beaten in publication by a Scottish Antiquary. Ironically, the Scott was the last person to see the structure before its final removal. The member of the Society of Antiquities of Scotland, James Lang, was also a member of the Leyland Club. I think I've pronounced that right. A wandering body of antiquarians and archaeologists, this has been founded by the FSA George R. Wright, and this man invited Lang to accompany him on a visit to the site at the end of August. Lang was only able to visit the site himself in December 1894, and he quickly reported it on 11 February 1895 in the proceedings of the Scottish Society. He mentions great deterioration since the excavation and that the total disappearance of the structure was a matter of weeks. A major in the Royal Engineer suffered considerable personal inconvenience in helping him to survey and photograph what must have been a cold, muddy and depressing spectacle. But, with the exception of one reproduced photograph, his fieldwork records are likewise lost. Fortunately, both Paine and Lang published dimensions, and while we are mostly reliant on James for the surviving record of the structure, the written descriptions contain the odd nugget of useful additional information as well as dimensions. So what did James find? He actually was the first person on the site, and he was the only person who saw the West End before its destruction. The West End being this big here. Not very tactfully, he pointed out the various mistakes of his two rivals who had not seen this. Anyway, Paine read a paper and James communicated his notes on the discovery at the Antichories on 12 March 1896, and this was published in volume 16 June 1897. So, I went to the site and this is what I saw in 2009. If we go back to this image, you can see how he's usefully shown the road between Maystone and Woodham, and there's a little footpath just to the north of it, and that's also visible on the Victorian Ordnance Survey Maps. But Victorians, being the Victorians, actually usefully indicated the temple directly. I did not initially know that. How calm and bucolic it was then, with farmland and the overgrown remains of a long lost ancient Victorian civilization poking out beneath the heights of the North Downs. Little did I know that this site had already been obliterated by not one but two generations of cement works. These had been destroyed and removed in their turn before I arrived on the scene. So it was a bit different then, before I was actually there. This is Peter's Cement Works, and here is the undisturbed sandbank in 1870. And this square here, this rectangle shows where I think the as yet undiscovered so-called Mithraeum was. And Mola, you can see, their evaluation trench must have just clipped its site, and absolutely nothing as far as we're aware. And that is the plan that I have perloined. This peaceful, secluded spot was not going to be peaceful or secluded for very long. Already, unbeginnanced to me, present-day archaeologists were doing the things that present-day archaeologists do. The vast new development was already on the go, and work had already started to the North two years earlier when I arrived on the scene. Mola, on the lookout for lime kilns, not temples. The work shown in relation to the 1870 OS shows the site of the structure in beautiful detail. To the North you can see the lime kilns which allowed lime to be barged directly to London down the midway. And this is what survives now. The triangle shows approximately where the Mithraeum was. Chris Clark kindly let me give a sneak preview of the most recent discoveries. But basically I'd be working from the facts that have been left in the winter edition of the Kent Archaeological Society magazine. And if I've got it wrong, I'm sorry. Here we are again in 1898, and it's all gone. I'll get this to work. However, you can see that the Roman surveyors were so incredibly thorough that they've even shown the outline of the temple. So maybe it wasn't deliberately destroyed immediately in 1894 and stood mouldering for a few more years until they built on this site, as we know they did. And as the later maps indicate the site with a cross after the quarry was built over. But the site is not now marked on the modern explorer map, which seems a pity. This is Google Earth and I've made this view to give an idea of the strange discovery I made. In its certainly a suggestive view, the north-downs overlooks the temple and the temple looked down a long westward stretch of the midway, you can see. What I did come across during my walk around the area was a commemorative stone on the riverside wall, the blue arrow. Apparently my problems were at an end for here was the exact spot where the Roman invaders crossed in 1843 apparently. The placement of the stone ultimately seems to stem from an article by one AR Berl in 1953. This Scottish history lecture was influenced by the brilliant and short-lived scholar R.G. Collingwood. Collingwood was in fact a professor of philosophy but he didn't let this cramp his style. He set the standard theory of the Roman invasion in stone and some would say that this was by Scheerbros Nick. As you can see, my old friends had actually crossed the temple with an evaluation trench, apparently unaware. Isca Hall has recently found that no surviving Roman deposits for some distance from its site. It's just a vast depth of 19th and 20th centuries smashed up cement factory. I had been hoping for some evidence of a Temenos to the east, but no luck. The entire environment has to use the modern technical term being thoroughly zapped. To return to the 1893 discovery, in 18, the decision was taken to quarry away the elbow of the river bend and labourers working for the cement works were given this task. It's all done by hand, which did mean a slightly more chance of things being discovered than nowadays. Anyway, this strange thing poked out the age of the sandbank and this became public knowledge as a result of a newspaper article which I had yet to trace. On 23 November, Frederick James, a curator of Maidstone Museum, arrived on the scene. As you can see, his superb photographs really make it almost like you're there. The extraordinary resolution of these images means that you can zoom in on them and scan across them as if they were standing there with binoculars. You can almost sort of feel the weak winter sunlight of 1893. As you can see, it's set deeply in the ground in complex archaeology. Jessup saw this as the soft sand and gravel known as head. This solid-flacted deposit directly overlaid water-laying sand, probably of interglacial date. All were aware that the structure was sunk in this undisturbed geology rather than being an earlier building buried by deposits. For this reason, it was always immediately identified as an underground feature and it was an easy step from it being underground to it being a cavern. So far, so good. The labourers proudly stand to the left of their discovery and the bola-hatted gentleman striding to the right is probably Mr James. This view shows the entrance in its entirety and also the commencement of an entrance passage, this thing here, standing no less than 11 feet high. The fresh damage shows how the labourers had actually been in the process of demolishing the thing when Mr James turned up. He cross-examined the foreman who was, quote, in the habit of preparing plans and the foreman described the part they just removed as forming a zigzag in plan. The rough finish of the wall to the west shows that this was a trench-built construction poured against the side of a trench. The sharp finish of the ashlar in the passage shows that it was never exposed to the elements. The site location plan published by James shows a simple rectangular structure. Lang and James agree that the long axis was aligned five degrees south-west from north. It's not clear if this is magnetic north or geographic north. The structure was finally faced with curly burr, ashlar or Melbourne rock for the interior. This is basically a sort of chalk. James carefully photographed a loose example for his museum, but more of this later. The stone was used at all periods in the Midway area but is unsuited to outside use. Jessup also had specimens of very hard mortar that had stuck to these ashlars and he got them analysed. The result was they resembled other mortars of known Roman date. I often wonder if the research laboratories of the Portland cement manufacturers still have these samples. This is probably the father of the 1956 author. I don't know his first name, I'm just calling him Young Jessup here. Mr James' friend poses next to the entrance way. This was no less than 11 feet high and you'll see that the crown of the arch was already destroyed before dumping was put in place inside. The commencement of the zigzag is clear as are holes below which I see as being probably, if you look here carefully you can see. I think what we've got there are steps that were broken away either by the labourers or perhaps robbed at a much earlier date. Beyond the young man can be seen dumped of dark organic material interleave with rubble that filled the interior. This contained few finds even if we assume that the labourers only kept the largest and most interesting bits. All are now untraceable and James merely states that nothing other than those finds normally associated with Roman settlements such as burry, tiles etc occurred. Bones of ox, deer, pig and sheep were also noted. Pain provided rather more detail in his two notices which vary in their details but he mentions a block of either sandstone or ironstone and this had a Lewis hole in it to allow it to be hoisted into position. A handle of an amphora was also found and several iron nails and according to Jessup in 1956 the old man he spoke to said there was lots of bits of amphora. Anyway, one of the sharp-eyed labourers recovered a tiny coin from the dark infill and though this was lost as well, Lang provided a detailed description but more of this later. All the antiquarians only mentioned Roman finds, nothing later in the whole infill of the building. The chamber was 12.3 metres long they discovered once they removed everything that was inside it and 5.94 metres wide. The untranslated measurements given by James fall systematically 6 inches short of 40 by 20 statute feet. The width divided by 20 comes out as 29.78 centimetres. It therefore seems likely that this internal plan was double square, 20 by 40 Roman feet. I've exploited this in my reconstruction, I've tidied it up. The official pest monatalis is given by Furnias 29.59 centimetres but given the doubt about this value the odd 2 millimetres between friends can be forgiven. Whoops, I'm getting too technical. All agreed that the wall was built below ground level, the outer face formed only by the trench side. In this they were mistaken, the upper parts of the side wall were actually built in an open trench. And you can see on the right hand side here what we have now called the construction cut. And this is all dumping presumably a waste material from the cutting of the stone. There is no indication of a Roman ground level in any photo or in James' drawings, but Payne mentions what we would now call a demolition horizon of building material at about 2 feet from the surface. So what is it we got here? Piecing all this information together is more art than science. But I contacted Dr Amanda Claridge and she suggested that this rather than being a cabin was more likely to be the basement or foundation of a taller building. The implication is that it was the podium or substructure of a classical temple, a type of building extremely rare in Britain. We can therefore knock the idea of this being an underground chamber on the head and that tends also to do away with mithras. The next drawing shows my attempts to put together the information in three dimensions of what survived and it's very small, necessarily much simplified. If this was a classical building, what might it have looked like? I have tried to work from the best known surviving parallels and one that springs to mind is the morceleum of Anya Regilla which was built atempieta temple style. It certainly resembled it both in size and plan. This building, almost complete, stands by the Fiume Alamone between the Via Latina and Via Appia coming out of Rome. Pain recorded that the stone block illustrates the possibility that the superstructure at Barham was likewise at least partially dressed stone but there is no mention of brick. This here shows my reconstruction of the plan based upon what the foreman told James all those years ago and though it says pink it's actually come out sort of mauve but anyway that bit on the left is essentially an attempt to come up with something that has the right number of steps to meet what I consider to be the ground surface as related to the structure. No written measurements of the outside dimensions of the Barham plan were published but I think it is likely that the external dimensions were likewise formed as a double square of 50 by 25 Roman feet. This has the effect you'll notice of making the end walls thicker than the side walls but this makes architectural sense because it would be a normal in a Roman temple for engaged columns to be used on the pediments at the ends but not necessarily at the sides where they might just have used simple pilasters as at the tomb of Anya Regilla. On this basis we may assume that above the basement was a cellar or cellar I'm not sure which is the correct pronunciation with a flat ceiling. There is no evidence of a west doorway at first floor level indeed there's no evidence of first floor other than what's provided for it. But Jessup was told of a chalk causeway in Timberwarf in 1956 by one of the workmen presumably the boy in 1893 and it makes sense that any first floor entrance would face the same way as the cellar entrance. This is another useful analogue. This firemoney surviving is a depiction this is the tomb of the Hatterie a relief from it and it shows a mausoleum and this adorned a wealthy builders tomb in Rome and this gives an idea of the sort of sculpted ornament that might have been employed on the Barham temple. This is a place of dressed stone and what you can also see here above the building is a sort of X-ray view of the upper part of the building showing the funery showing a dead woman who's most just sitting up you have to think about lying down and laid out for the obsequies or it could be perhaps a statue. As with the tomb of Annier Regilla the upper funery chamber is raised on a tall podium with a side door leading to presumably the columbarium of the family down here and we don't get this at Barham. We know that there was a north opening at Barham which was certainly not a side door and it could only have opened above ground level. This suggests that the basement was dimly lit by a northern window. Hard sunlight was deliberately avoided it seems. The zigzag entrance likewise prevented direct sunlight from ever entering the chamber. Lang commented that the structure was in direct prolongation of a stretch of the medway that would be brilliantly lit at sunset. So why whether three niches in the east wall it would make sense to distribute them around the chamber if these were functional presses for lights or other items. If this is a family tomb why so few niches for cremation vases and why so large and in one end only. This is ritual all right if not mothraic. And you can see here I've assumed that the basis of the missing upper floor is 25 pezbonitalis wide and the cellar or cellar might have been square in elevation and obviously you have an attic space above it and the pitch roof. But at this stage I deliberately avoided going into any great detail. And here we have the reconstruction of the longitudinal sections of the building and this shows quite clearly how you've got this window here but not here. And the little man gives an idea of just how big it was. And operating on the same principle that the basement was 40 pezbonitalis long I had assumed that the upper floor was 50 long and that provides five foot wide. That provides, as I said, thicker walls for the end than the side walls. And obviously I had no exact notion of where the upper floor level was but it was probably only a short distance above the crown of this barrel vault. And we can be quite confident about the height of the barrel vault because we know the height of the springing above the ground and we know the width of the chamber. And so given that it's certainly a semi-circular arch you can then predict the height of the chamber quite exactly as 14 feet, 14 Roman feet high. And one of the antiquarians who presumably saw the end of the sadly one end of the building collapsed soon after being dug but somebody measured it as 14 foot high before that occurred. So, where does this take us? This is where it starts getting a bit more contentious. So, do we have an exceptionally elaborate classical morceleum? If so, where is the equally if not much more sumptuous villa? No evidence for this has emerged recently nearby. Although there is admittedly a small, simple villa of exceptionally early date, about a kilometre away, it echoes. Although that was finally appointed by the standards of nearer's reign it was, however, barely larger than the Burrum Temple that we seem to be looking at. So, I don't think the Burrum building was a morceleum to any particular villa. On the eve of discovery a perceptive local vicar commented that the walls of Snotland and Burrum churches were full of Tufa associated with Roman brick and pink mortar. And it is tempting to assume that the temple formed the source of this stone. However, we know that there were other Roman buildings in the area from several other mentions by the Antichories in the 1890s. And I think that the Burrum building was in fact deliberately and carefully demolished in the late Roman period because the little that survived was a bare husk stripped of its fine ornament. James perceptively identified that the remarkable herringbone finish of the interior was keying for plaster, even though no plaster survived in position. Nor was there any actual floor in position. He does mention fragments of opus signinum in the infill of the chamber, but these could equally well have derived from the collapsed floor above. So, he also mentions the presence of what he calls nails in the west wall, one of the short walls of the building. Lang anyway gave a detailed description of the coin and Richard Rees kindly identified it as a type dated between AD 330 to AD 335. And he suggests that it was lost not later than about AD 365, given the fact it's a very unusual coin and it's beautifully preserved. So, this suggests that the Burrum building was not a mouldering ruin crumbling into the Norman period. The big concerted demolition took place in the fourth century and admirable concern was shown for removing the dangerous hole it left by filling it in as fast as possible. And this is why the chalk, this is why the herringbone finish on the chalk is so remarkably fresh. So anyway, the cellar of valuable dressed stone was probably dismantled before the vault was deliberately collapsed and complete roof tiles were also salvaged. This would not have happened until all useful materials have been removed from the cellar as opposed to the cellar. James cryptic mention of iron nails in the body of the west wall suggests that these are clamps for holding marble veneer in place. And this certainly would have been carefully removed before the building was knocked down. And pulling away the marble would also have pulled away the underlying mortar. And it seems that the passage and the window embrasure never had plaster or marble finishes. And I suspect that, therefore, that marble was restricted to the end elevations corresponding to the way you see the three niches here at Meme and to the opposite end to balance it. But we just plaster on the side walls. And I also suggest that the vault had stuck a ornamentation on it. This is the sort of thing that's unlikely to have been highly unlikely to have been recovered by the Victorian labourers assuming that any had survived in recognisable form from the collapse. Any floor, like also, would probably have been removed for reuse if it contained nice mosaics. The presence of large nails in the infill of the chamber suggests that the mouldering roof timbers were just simply abandoned and thrown into the big pit. It's pretty clear that the hole was used as a rubbish dump for the surrounding area, which seems to have been quite... Well, we seem to be getting two messages from the Victorian suggest that it's got a lot of settlement and buildings going on in it. But the more recent excavation has suggested that it was more farmland than anything else and estates rather than built up. So it's still some ambiguity about what's going on in the precise area. Certainly some waste material from the demolition ended up by chance in this infill, including smashed tiles and that stray dressed block. But the finds that are mentioned by Payne may therefore not have much to do with the temple, so we've got to be careful. So, why an expensive classical temple? When was it built and why? The best functional analogue for the barren structure is probably seen in the so-called temple of Diana at Nîm. A slight problem is that we do not know what that similarly dimly lit vaulted building was for. Recent thinking is that it was an Augustium attached to an ancient Celtic spring sanctuary. The complex hydraulics at Nîm both emphasised the sacred nature of the site and played a role in imperial propaganda. This is certainly intriguing and would be a typical colonising appropriation of indigenous culture as post-colonial theory would have it. Was something similar happening at Barren? If the Barren temple had originated as a Celtic sanctuary, we would have expected many more discoveries in 1893 to 4. There seems to have been a complete absence of Celtic-style ritual offerings and carvings. It is conceivable that some of the many bones originated as part of Roman sacrifice, but this is pushing the evidence rather hard as they used to say. Nor can any particular spring source be identified at or near this point. The sanctuary seems to have been a brand new construction and a Roman one at that. Early it would seem post-conquest perhaps. There are good parallels for this Roman appropriation of the common triple water goddess of Celtic religion. This might explain the three niches. Such triplets occur under varying names. Their connection with water is very marked. The triple bridget was even Christianised, the Saint Bridget of Kildare. The tribal name of the Brigantes preserves this important goddess's name. We can see the fresco from the sunken room at Lullingstone with its remarkable almost Hellenistic painting of three water nymphs with water spurting from their breasts. This evidence survived by the barest chance this had been walled up, but similar shrines occur in more solid materials at other villas, such as the three niches in one wall of a chamber at Great Whitcombe Villa in Gloucestershire. These niches overlook a central font in a chamber next to the bath suite. At Burham, the niches are sufficiently large to have held marble statues of nymphs, not just paintings, and these could have been near if not quite live-sized. We can see Burham as a shrine to the water goddesses of the nearby River Medway. The quality of construction and size would make this one of the finest Roman buildings in the island of Britain, and with an interior covered with marble veneers, as I suggest, and perhaps figures stucco and fine-painted plaster. This is not the conceit of some local bigwig. The exceptional standards of construction make comparison difficult. It is reasonable to assume that at least a century had elapsed before the careful demolition of this building was carried out. Factors such as Christian iconoclasm may have been involved. We can safely say that whatever had mattered when the sanctuary was built no longer mattered indeed was virtually forgotten. Some very important, very rich person saw fit to discharge pious vows to the river goddesses of the Medway. Who could this be? CGMS and Mola's recent excavation have revealed part of what appeared to be an extensive regular double-ditched enclosure located near St Mary's Church, several hundred metres to the south. This is dated to the early post-conquest period by a single Claudian coin. It has been suggested by Chris that this might be a Roman marching camp. Wellies to the near Bell lane, Roman field ditches hint at the development of a field system running on the same alignment as the temple. There is a north-south trackway, which has also been identified. Next to this is a robust timber palisade. It was a robust palisade at right angles to the trackway. The posts of what Chris has suggested it was a defence were packed in place by locally produced first-century roof tile. Could this be where the temple roof ended up? All this is suggestive indeed. Certainly the implications of a marching camp are considerable indeed and while the structure remains undated, the implication is that it is early and perhaps these roof tiles derived from it. These were locally manufactured roof tiles. The temple is that triangle again and it's below the pilgrim's way. It is tempting to think of Roman legions appearing over the crest of the north-downs, much as they do in the final battle of Spartacus. But we must remember that until very recently no evidence existed for Collingwood's river battle other than Dyer's mention of it. But on the basis of that mention Collingwood launched the standard theory of the Roman invasion. The presence of a marching camp does rather begin to sort of start making this area a bit more interesting. It was in 1953 that the nearby pilgrim's way along the top of that hill was first given a starring role in the river battle. This forms the most detailed part of Dyer's account of the Roman invasion. Burns's influential article drew on the ideas of Collingwood if we caution. Collingwood's vivid picture is not so much conjecture as romance. However, it would be unwise to always reject someone however romantic they are. Perhaps I had best closed before claiming this temple as a smoking gun for the Medway battle. But I can only suggest that Vespasian and his heirs had every reason to thank complacent river nymphs wherever the river battle had actually occurred. Sometimes guesses can prove correct regardless of their lack of academic respectability. With Collingwood indeed lightning may yet prove to have struck twice. As I am currently arguing in a book I am preparing about the Roman invasion and the specific role of elephants in that invasion based upon a single reference in Dyer. So go there if you want conjecture.