(At Maiden Castle hill fort in Dorset)

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
This is the biggest Iron Age Hill Fort in Britain. Building something like this was a huge social undertaking and it marks the power of the chief and his family that he could force thousands of people to come here and dig out these defensive ditches. In times of crisis this was where you would come with your family, your possessions. your animals to seek refuge.

Hill forts were the nerve centres of tribal Britain so the Roman army made straight for them. The only trouble is that the Roman Army was the kind of threat that no one building these hill forts had ever anticipated.

The idea of these ditches was that an attacker would have to run down here so that the defenders up there could throw things down on top of him. The trouble is that the Romans didn’t play that game. The Roman army brought with them their artillery - catapults and huge crossbows called Ballistas. The people here would never have seen anything like that and they didn’t stand a chance. In the end these ditches were about as much use as trying to stop a Panzer tank with a pea shooter.

The secrets of Maiden Castle first came to light back in the 1930s. The great British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler excavated part of the huge site, and found evidence of a terrible battle. British skeletons with sword wounds, one even with a ballista bolt lodged in its spine: proof Wheeler argued, of a swift and overwhelming massacre, and of the absolute supremacy of the Roman military - a picture film makers have helped fix in our minds.

(Extract from "The Viking Queen" feature film)

  

(At a Roman re-enactment day)

The gleaming armour, the bright colours, the weapons and the discipline must have seemed pretty exotic and terrifying to the Britons. And perhaps this is our abiding image of the Romans - as a formidable fighting machine, the kind of thing that still draws huge crowds on re-enactment days.

ROMAN RE-ENACTOR
I've ran through forests, I've chased Barbarians in battle fighting weekends in the woods, I've climbed up small cliffs and I've had many javelins thrown at us.

GUY DE LA BÉDOYÈRE
Few of us today could match the fitness of a Roman soldier - according to one estimate they’d regularly march up to thirty miles a day carrying over fifty pounds of equipment. And when they’d stopped for the night they’d have to dig out ditches and build ramparts for their overnight camp - and then demolish it in the morning.

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