Professor Rob Collins

I'm sorry, I'm stopping.

I can't remember some of the other forts now at the top of my head.

But there are a number of forts.

It's not just along Hadrian's Wall, where we can see similar evidence for continued occupation and activity beyond the end of Roman Britain.

And so I think that tells us two important things, that even if we argue about who is living in those forts and who are they descendants of, are they descendants of the former Roman

military communities, the Mitinei, which I think they were, but even if they are new migrants or living in those, I mean, maybe not far off migrants, maybe just the local communities moving into that space.

the fort itself is still seen as a useful and maybe even a desirable location to live in.

And suddenly you're no longer in the protection of a big, bad empire, right?

So I think those changing conditions that will happen when you're not necessarily part of a stable political entity

security is going to become a much higher priority.

So regardless of their ancestry, the people living in those forts are still seeing those forts as desirable.

And we should also see them, I would say, as the elite settlements of this region.

So when we look at the evidence for the same period in Wales, in the southwest of England, hill forts.

Hill forts come back.

They come back, don't they?

They come back again.

And we see that also in Scotland, that, you know, hill forts and some of the great work that's been done recently by Gordon Noble's project on the Picts, you know, looking at some of those Pictish hill forts.

Fortified settlements are really important in the 5th and 6th centuries.

What we do not have evidence for in Northern England and a little bit Southern Scotland, but certainly the Roman frontier zone, we don't have good evidence yet for the reoccupation of those hill forts.

But what we do have evidence for is the occupation of those Roman forts.