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Burgh Castle Roman Fort


Burgh Castle Roman Fort is a free-to-access English Heritage site, run in association with Norfolk Archaeological Trust.

The site consists of large stone ruins in a meadow, accessed by a maintained gravel path from a free car & coach park. The site is technically accessible 24 hours a day although there are a couple of gates which hypothetically could be locked.


Website:

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/burgh-castle/


Access:

The car park and main paths to the site are all well-maintained smooth dirt/gravel and are fully mobility scooter/wheelchair/pram accessible. The actual site paths are largely mown grass or occasionally dirt but they were also very well maintained and smooth during our visit in July 2021, I think wheels would have no problem there either provided that the wheelbase is not too wide. The whole site is very flat apart from a very very gentle slope to actually pass through the gateway in the wall into the Fort.


A sign explains that you can get a 'key' to allow you to open the occasional gates yourself if you use a wheelchair but it was unclear to me where you would get this key from as the site is unmanned (although we did meet a very chatty lady in normal clothes and high-viz at the information boards next to the carpark it was very unclear if she belonged to the site or was just very chatty...). You would probably want to phone English Heritage in advance to establish how this worked if you wanted to try it.


Getting there:

The site was moderately hard to find although it is signposted - you have to go completely through the village of Burgh Castle and beyond past some holiday chalets before a sudden entrance on your left.


The carpark and paths to the site are all bounded by well-kept but luscious and dense 10 foot high hedges so there is a bit of a feeling of being in a hedge-maze, and I think it would be fairly easy to leave the path through the wrong gate and end up lost in the back of the church graveyard or in a totally different adjacent meadow without a fort in it. Noteably, when we first came to a five-bar type gate off the path into a meadow with signs about the Norfolk Archaeologists we did not go through and that was the correct choice - it may well have been a route that also linked up to the Fort but we continued along the path itself and finally came out at a second similar entrance with the Fort very clearly visible beyond. English Heritage say it is about 600m from the carpark to the Fort and it is certainly a "short walk" - a healthy mobile adult wouldn't really notice it but if you were on crutches you might feel it was quite a long way!


Facilities:

There are no actual facilities at the site other than litterbins in the carpark and information boards (the initial ones under a kind of open sided wooden gazebo for shelter). The car park is right next to a church at the edge of a village, however, so refreshments/toilets could be located in the village centre (I cannot recommend a specific place as we did not try).







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