Burgh Castle.
The first evidence we have of the stage which the silting up process had reached during the time of man’s occupation of these parts are the records and vestiges of the presence of the Romans on the banks of the Yare and the Waveney during the first four centuries of the present era.
In his account of Burgh Castle Mr. Suckling gives us a map shewing the different positions occupied by the Romans in these parts in connection with their system of coast defences against the Saxons, or other tribes on the opposite shores of the North Sea, whose piratical visitations were as much a cause of fear to the British inhabitants of our island as they were several hundred years later to its “Saxon” inhabitants themselves.
According to this map we have the strong fortress of Burgh Castle placed in the northern extremity of Lothingland, in such a position as to command a view of the entrance of the Yare and the Waveney from the estuary, the diminished area of which is still represented by Breydon water. A short way up the Yare we find another Roman Station at Reedham where the river approaches close to the glacial highlands, and where an invading force sailing up this river would find a convenient landing place at the river side, not separated from the river channel by a wide space of impassable morass, or shallows only navigable at high water. A few miles up the Waveney we have another Roman Station at Burgh St. Peter (or Wheatacre Burgh) at the extremity of a tongue of glacial highland, which is again closely approached by the present channel of the river. The extraordinary position of the church, at the lowest and extreme edge of a parish which contains a large area of high ground proves that this spot had some mysterious importance in remote times, and the existence of Roman bricks in its walls, which may have been used in several successive buildings since they were made, points to the existence of some Roman fortress nearby to which they originally belonged; while the remains of human skeletons which have been found near the bank of the river buried in a promiscuous manner, as if the result of a battle on the river’s edge, add support to the view that Burgh Staithe, being a convenient landing place for the invader, was a place of considerable importance in ancient times.
If the low marshland through which the Yare and the Waveney now wind their way to the sea was at the time when the Romans established their system of fortifications, a wilderness of bog and fen, impassable either by ship or on foot, we can understand the importance of these spots on the river-sides where the enemy could get from their boats on to the highlands of Norfolk and Suffolk. The conflict of opinion among antiquarians as to the true site of the Roman Garianonum has made the conditions of the area immediately beneath Burgh Castle in the Roman period, a familiar subject of discussion. Whether Burgh Castle or Caister was the Roman Garianonum, the disputants took it for granted that it was some place near the entrance of the river from which it took its name; but they appear to have overlooked the point that if there were any river channel near either Burgh or Caister which could be attributed to the Yare, the estuarine condition of the interior must have already passed away. When this inland area was an arm of the sea, as it has been so often described, the rivers which meet at Yarmouth must have lost their channels and their names several miles further west. The Yare would have terminated at Norwich or Reedham, the Waveney at Beccles, and the Bure somewhere about Wroxham. The Yare could have had no claim to give its name to any place near the present coast, either Burgh or Caister. The Orwell is still an arm of the sea and it is not called after either the Gipping or the Stour. The Romans probably named their fortress at Burgh from the Yare, rather than the Waveney because the river Yare was the common waterway from the Roman camp at Caister on the Taes to the sea.
The massive fortress of Burgh Castle could be safely held by a small force for a long time against any enemy who might succeed in effecting a landing on Lothingland itself, and if cavalry were kept there, as we are told they were, mounted messengers could be sent off as soon as a hostile fleet appeared, who would be able to carry the intelligence to head quarters at Caister, via Oulton and Beccles or Bungay, before the enemy could get very far up either river.
The peculiar arrangement of the walls of Burgh Castle, which while they presented an impregnable defence on the North, East and South sides, left the west side with an easy slope down to the level of the river, unprotected, can only be explained by supposing with Camden and Spelman that the area between the river and the cliff, which is now marsh, was then an impassable morass, which offered an insuperable obstacle to the approach of a hostile force either by ship or on foot. [10]
The existence of Burgh Castle at the northern extremity of Lothingland is also strong evidence that the detached portion of the mainland was no more an island then than it is now. Such a fortress would be absurdly out of place to protect the country from an invader, if there was another open water-way at Lowestoft through which he could enter.
From these and the other considerations to which I have called your attention we may feel certain that the estuarine condition of the interior had ceased to exist as long ago as the Roman period, and that our marshland area was already in a condition of fen and bog, through which the Yare, and the Waveney, and the Bure flowed in their present channels to their joint outfall between Burgh and Caister, some thousand years before any historic Norwich or Beccles existed. The hill on which Lowestoft was destined to rise in after ages, was probably often visited by the Roman soldiers as they passed to and fro between their fortress at Burgh and their camp in the interior, but no relics have as yet been discovered bearing testimony to either Roman or British occupation of the site of our town, though Roman coins have been found at Kirkley, and Carlton and other places in our neighbourhood.