Fourteen Thousand Coins in a Northern Spring

Coventina's shrine at Carrawburgh sat beside the Roman fort of Brocolitia on Hadrian's Wall, a walled enclosure built around a natural spring that the antiquarian John Clayton excavated in 1876. What he found was extraordinary even by the standards of Romano-British votive archaeology: somewhere between 14,000 and 16,000 coins, thrown into the water across roughly four centuries from the late Republic to the late fourth century CE, alongside altars, carved stone reliefs, glass, pottery, brooches, pins and a human skull. No other single votive deposit recovered in Roman Britain approaches it in scale, and the coins alone give an unusually precise timeline for how long the well stayed in active use, worked by soldiers stationed on the Wall as much as by any local civilian population. Several of the recovered altars carry short dedications, some from individual soldiers thanking the goddess or asking a favor, giving Coventina one of the better epigraphic records of any minor Romano-British deity even though not one literary text outside her own shrine mentions her by name. Everything known about who she was and what she was asked for comes from what her own worshippers left behind at the water's edge.