The valley of the River Dove, stretching between the highlands of the Peak District and the fertile Midlands plain, has always been a place of passage. Its ridges, meadows, and watercourses drew people long before history was written. Bronze Age mounds, Iron Age trackways, and sacred springs already marked the landscape when the legions of Rome arrived nearly two thousand years ago.
For Rome, the Dove Valley was not a destination but a corridor of control. The conquest of Britain in AD 43 and the push northward towards the frontiers required roads, forts, and supply chains. Staffordshire, lying between Watling Street in the south and the Pennine routes to the north, became a crossroads of empire.
In this book we follow the traces of Rome in Uttoxeter and Rocester: forts and farms, shrines and wells, roads and quarries, stories and legends. But we also trace what came after — Saxon and Danish settlers, medieval abbeys, Tudor dissolutions, and even modern rituals. Each new age did not erase the Romans but built upon them, reusing the same landscapes.
What emerges is a picture of continuity: the land itself has memory. From the tramp of ghostly legions to the dwindling calls of Uttoxeter’s market, Rome’s presence lingers.
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