IN 1872, Matthew Richley, the Bishop Auckland historian, wrote that a field at Binchester was “an inexhaustible repository of antiquities”.

Time and again, he said, Roman artefacts had been unearthed by ploughmen, and in about 1800, a horseman had a horrible shock when the ground beneath his hay cart gave way and revealed a Roman hypocaust.

But, said Richley, these remains were not well looked after. In the 7th Century, many stones had been dragged off to Escomb to build the church and more recently, he said, “many altars and sculptured stones”

had been destroyed by the local landowner who lobbed them down his new coal mine at Newton Cap as he needed some ballast.

Yet the inexhaustible repository has kept on giving, and this week archaeologists have hailed it as “the Pompeii of the north”

– only without the volcano and as yet, the erotic art. The bath-house, with its brightly coloured walls that still stand up to 7ft high, is now regarded as “one of the best preserved Roman buildings in Britain”. This weekend, it is open for its annual Roman festival.

Binchester was in Dere Street, the road north from York, and was begun in AD79 – the year the volcano snuffed out Pompeii.

It came into its own when the wall was being built around AD130, and a vicus, or civilian settlement, grew up alongside the military camp. Inside the vicus were inns, shops, a market place and light industrial units – half-finished lumps of jet have been found, suggesting there was a trinket-making workshop.

The bath-house was built a couple of centuries later. It was more than just a bathhouse – it was a leisure centre. There’s a stone-flagged palaestra for weight-lifting, a tepidarium, or warm room, for relaxing and playing board games like draughts, and then a caldarium, or hot room, where the oiled, sweating skin would have been scraped with a strigil to remove the dirt – the Romans might have invented civilisation, but they hadn’t come up with the concept of soap.

The site is being excavated by Durham University in conjunction with Durham University, and recent finds include an altar dedicated to the goddess Fortune the Homebringer – a soldier thousands of miles from home would have prayed to her in chilly Binchester that one day he might return to his native soil.

But one of the most interesting finds is a 3rd Century silver ring (see main picture) set with an intaglio (an image cut into a flat surface). That image shows two fish dangling from an anchor which, in its day, was a Christian symbol as powerful as the cross.

The image is common across the Roman Empire, but only one other has been found in this country, in York.

So Richley was right. Despite the vandalism across the centuries, Binchester is still “an inexhaustible repository of antiquities”. And fascination.

  • Binchester Roman Fort’s annual festival is on Saturday and Sunday between 10am and 4.30pm. Events, including weaponry displays, mock battles and horsemanship, start at 11am and are repeated at 2pm, plus there is the chance to see some of the finds. Admission is £5, children £3. Info on 01388-663089.