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Fall Asleep with Frank — Walking Through the Stones of Coria: A Quiet History of Corbridge
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
A gentle sleep story about Corbridge Roman Site — the ancient fort and town once called Coria, where two great roads met the River Tyne in Northumberland. Let Frank's slow, unhurried voice guide you through two thousand years of quiet history as you drift off to sleep.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a place in the north of England, just two and a half miles south of Hadrian's Wall, where the land holds a very long memory. The village of Corbridge sits quietly in Northumberland today, with stone walls and old rooftops and the River Tyne moving past not far away.
The name itself is worth lingering over, because it's genuinely uncertain. The full Latin name hasn't come down to us cleanly.
The Romans weren't the first people to make use of this ground. There's evidence of Iron Age round houses on the site before any legionaries arrived.
Around eighty-four AD, after Roman victories further north in what is now Scotland, a new fort was built on the Coria site itself. It was built in the manner of early Roman forts in Britain: turf ramparts, timber gates, wooden buildings inside.
After one hundred and sixty-three AD, the Romans pulled back from the Antonine Wall and settled again at Hadrian's Wall as their permanent northern frontier. At that point, Coria changed.
There is a stone that survived from Coria's military period, though it didn't stay at the site. In eighteen eighty-one, during work on Hexham Abbey in Northumberland, a carved Roman funerary monument was found built into the stonework of the south porch of the transept.
Coria has found its way into fiction over the decades, which is a quiet testament to how evocative a place it is. Rosemary Sutcliff, who wrote beautifully about Roman Britain, set part of her nineteen sixty-five novel The Mark of the Horse Lord at Corstopitum.
And so Coria remains. Partly visible, partly buried.
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