The biggest Roman slag heap in England once stood on this spot. However a Victorian road engineer quarried most of it away for road metalling, leaving only a valley. But the two sides of the valley once formed the sides of a single slag heap.

Beauport Park by Gerald Brodribb

Beauport Park is the centre of one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Roman iron-working complexes in this country. However the most impressive discovery so far has been a fine Roman bath-house whose exceptional state of preservation makes it one of the finest surviving Roman buildings in southern England. Here Gerald Brodribb, the former headmaster of a prep-school but now a student at the Institute of Archaeology, London, describes how he discovered and excavated the site, and his hopes that it will soon be laid out for permanent display and opened to the general public.

ONE of the most important iron­ working sites in Britain was that at Beauport Park, near Battle, in East Sussex. A huge slag heap was first reported in 1868, and soon afterwards the local Highway Surveyor began to quarry away the slag for road-making: the present road from Battle to Hastings was heavily metalled with Roman material from Beauport. The quarry­ ing went on for ten years at a rate of 2000-3000 cubic yards a year, and much still remains. It has been estimated by my co-director of excavations at Beauport Park, Henry Cleere, that the heap must have con­ tained upwards of 100,000 tons of iron slag.

After this, there was little interest in the remains: James Rock wrote an account of the removal of the slag {Sussex Arch. Coll. (1879)), Herbert Blackman, another local antiquarian, wrote brief records of one or two visits in the 1920s, and Ernest

Straker, author of the pioneer study, Wealden Iron (1931), went there once in 1924. No serious investigation was ever made until I began to visit Beauport Park in 1966. The whole area was a well managed woodland rather than a park, but slag and pottery abounded, and after three years of regular search, a wooden Roman water-tan k (originally lead-lined) was found buried some 2.5 metres under at the bottom of a hill. The use of divining rods suggested that a track ran up this hill, and I was making a trial section when I literally hit a building on the 30th December 1969. This discovery came just in time for adjustments to be made to plans for the area to be covered by one of the holes of a new golf course.

Excavation began on the building, which proved to be a bath-house, and shortly afterwards by 1972 the results were so impressive that the Department of the Environment expressed their intention to open the bath-house for public display. Regrettably, cuts in public expenditure have now obliged the Department to withdraw, but other plans are being considered. A full report on the site is in advanced preparation.

Meantime voluntary effort and enthusiasm made it possible for a temporary roof to be put over the exposed building, the walls and floors were sandbagged, and the whole made weatherproof. The features that had excited the interest of the DoE were the general condition of the building and the remarkable height of the sandstone walls, which stand in places to over 2 metres: on the assumption that the internal walls once stood to 8 feet high, it is estimated that 60% of the walls are still standing: a meticulous survey of the masonry debris has permitted a quantity survey in reverse to be carried out.

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