New Evidence for Portus Setantiorum

No pictures this week, just a rant! (Well, it is Christmas after all and we're expected to serve up our annual healthy dollop of 'Bah Humbug'.)
Our days of being pleasant towards the great and the good of the British Archaeological World have reached an end. It’s time to roll up our cuffs and aim squarely for the snotty noses of Academia.
Why?
Because no matter how many e-mails we’ve sent to university websites concerning our discoveries at Bourne Hall in relation to the missing Portus Setantiorum, nobody, as yet, has bothered to reply. Not a single site has been updated to accommodate the new information we’ve provided. Not a solitary lecturer, archaeologist or head of department has responded to our clarion call, whether in ‘favour of’ or ‘against’ our argument. It’s almost as if we’re too insignificant to matter to such superior intellects; an idea backed up by the numerous discussion boards scattered across the web, turgid with badly reasoned arguments put forward by lackadaisical researchers to which people like us aren’t even invited. (To obtain a password to these discussion boards you must first have a Master’s Degree in Elitism, prove you can wield a thesaurus at thirty paces and be ready and able to use seventeen words when one would normally suffice).
Before the steam starts emerging from our ears, we’d better explain what our problem is for the uninitiated. In the second century A.D. Claudius Ptolemaeus of Alexandria (or Ptolemy as he’s more familiarly known) created an Atlas of Britain in which, between the Belisima Aestuarium (the mouth of the River Ribble) and Moricambi Aestuarium (Morecambe Bay) he recorded a port known as Portus Setantiorum.
Over the centuries arguments have raged between historians as to where this portus might have been, most attempting to place it as close to their own front doorsteps as possible with only circumstantial evidence (and a great deal of rewriting of the original co-ordinates) to back up their claims.
As a result Setantiorum (similar to sightings of Elvis) has been reported in locations as far flung as Wales and Cumbria.
The general consensus, however, believes the port to lie in the middle of Morecambe Bay, once again paying scant regard to Ptolemy’s coordinates which place it slightly inland and to the south of this location, and regardless of any concrete evidence.
We figured differently, reasoning that, for a start, the port (as its name suggested) wasn’t Roman at all, but belonged to the Brigantes.
Secondly it figured that, as Ptolemy only recorded three ports on the west coast of Britain, it must have been of substantial size.
Less than 200 years ago the area of land between Fleetwood harbour (as it stands today) and Burn Naze in Thornton was underwater. It was bordered to the east by a huge bank of shingle known as Kirk Scar. The area was drained when Peter Hesketh (Fleetwood’s founder) built his railway from Bourne to Fleetwood. Before that time it was a huge natural harbour, its southern most boundary being the long, straight embankment at Burglar’s Lane.
Archaeologists probably don’t this.
Nowadays research is generally conducted by the ‘Paid Experts’ on their laptops and involves little more than a visit to Google. The idea of investigating the landscape through old maps, documents and the power of reasoning was apparently abandoned during Archaeology’s transition from Victorian Antiquarians to University Graduates.
We also figured that what we were looking for weren’t Roman ruins at all (again something that the experts have overlooked) but rather a large, late Iron Age settlement.
Putting of all of this together, in 2005 we obtained permission to excavate Bourne Hill (the highest point on the Fleetwood peninsula) where we believed Setantiorum to be. And guess what we found there? Yep…a large, late Iron Age settlement complete with roundhouses, defensive earthworks, a triangular entrance, and a cobbled track running from the area that we’d predicted as being the quayside (unfortunately, nowadays, lost beneath the caravan park). The track encircled the settlement before heading towards Stanah where it met with the known Roman road crossing Stanah Hill from Nateby.
Not only that, but we could also date the Bourne Hill site. A fragment of mortarium discovered on one of the roundhouse floors placed it firmly in the second century; the same period that Ptolemy drew up his Atlas.
To be on the safe side we called in Peter Iles, the Lancashire County Archaeologist, who basically confirmed everything that we’d said, declared that, in his opinion, the site was of ‘National Significance’ and even agreed with us that it might be the missing portus.
For anybody interested, our excavation report ran to several hundred pages. We’ve summarised here for the sake of convenience.
All right…so we can’t claim that Bourne Hill is Portus Setantiorum with absolute certainty…at least, not at the moment. Who knows, at some future date we might discover an obelisk with the word SETANTIORVM carved across it. Nonetheless, Bourne Hill is beyond doubt the best argument for the missing portus yet and, as such, deserves a bit of recognition.
That’s why several months ago we wrote to numerous websites specialising in Roman towns that discussed the whereabouts of Portus Setantiorum.
As mentioned earlier, to date we haven’t had a single reply. It seems that everyone is sticking by their original theories, however ill-conceived and misinformed they might be. It’s either that or they have no friends and never bother to check their e-mails.
Whatever the case, here’s to academia, the people that time forgot, in the hopes that, at some future date, their ‘desktop surveys’ might stumble across this posting and the great and the good might remove their heads from their thesauruses and realise there’s a world out there featuring real people, conducting real research, with real archaeology just waiting to be discovered.

And for everyone else, have a very Happy Christmas and, if you're that way inclined, see you at the next Wyre Archaeology meeting in the New Year.