CHAPTER IV
Interior Buildings: Storehouses, Dwellings

The Storehouses

ON either side of the Principia there stretched two long narrow buildings supported by heavy buttresses. The actual walls were two and a half feet thick, and the buttresses projected in the building to the south three and a half feet, and in the building to the north two and a half feet beyond. In each case the interior measured one hundred and eighteen feet long by thirty feet wide. The heavy cobble foundations, six feet four inches wide, were carried out to the outside line of the buttresses. Nothing was left to indicate how the roof had been constructed, neither stones nor tiles, but there can be little doubt that the heavy buttressed walls were intended to bear the thrust of an arched roof and that the buildings in question were the horrea, that is, the granaries or storehouses of the fort. The floor was specially constructed to keep the place dry. It was supported on low sleeper walls about seventeen inches thick which ran the whole length of the building. Between each of these walls was a flue or air space one foot in width. Against the west wall of the south building were the remains of a loading platform ten feet long and fourteen inches high. Unfortunately its original width could not be ascertained. The existence of this platform would appear to show that the building was certainly at one period entered from the west. We have a parallel to it in the granaries at Corbridge and Gellygaer, all of which have loading platforms at the entrance.

Near the south-west corner of the building at a distance of two feet two inches from the wall stood a portion of a column with a circular base and a double torus moulding.[1] It is made of the red sandstone common in the fort and was still in an upright position, the top being so near the surface that the ploughs had grated upon it. In Plate XI., Fig. I, it is to be seen with

1 The column was removed with other stones from the Fort to Drygrange.

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