Military History | Segedunum Reconstructed Bath House — The Real One Turned Up Later

The building standing between the fort platform at Wallsend and the River Tyne is a full-size Roman bath house that no Roman ever entered. Its own site leaflet is blunt about this: "This bath house was not built by the Romans. It was built by archaeologists who found out as much as they could about Roman bath houses then built their own." Other accounts call it a replica of the baths at Chesters, or of Chesters and Vindolanda together. Neither version comes from the people who built it.

Construction ran with the wider Segedunum project, which began in January 1997, and Segedunum Roman Fort, Baths and Museum "opened its doors to the public for the first time in June 2000". Inside were cold, warm and hot rooms laid out from general knowledge of how such buildings worked.

Then the original appeared. In 2014 volunteers on WallQuest, a Heritage Lottery Fund community archaeology project, found the fort's own bath house about 100 metres south, under the site of the Ship Inn, a pub demolished in 2011. Nick Hodgson, the WallQuest archaeologist, was quoted that July: "We've seen enough of the remains now to be 100 percent certain that we have the site of the fort bath house." Roughly half of it has been excavated since. The Tyne and Wear Historic Environment Record notes that the ground falls steeply toward the river here, that the whole building is skewed, and that it slipped down the slope and was rebuilt.

The same July 2014 report mentioned in passing that the replica was "currently undergoing maintenance work". Hadrian's Wall Country says today: "The reconstructed Roman bathhouse is currently closed for essential maintenance." The excavated foundations, five minutes' walk away, are open.

📸 Cover: the reconstructed bath house at Segedunum, entrance front; photograph by Carole Raddato, 31 July 2011, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image, the excavated fort foundations with the reconstruction standing beyond them and the Tyne at left; Christine Westerback, 14 August 2005, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Geograph Britain and Ireland / Wikimedia Commons.