Lunt Roman Fort

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The Lunt Roman Fort was a Roman fort, of unknown name, in the Roman province of Britannia. It is located just outside the city boundaries of Coventry, in the village of Baginton, in the English county of Warwickshire, where it has been excavated and reconstructed.

The site was discovered when large quantities of Roman pottery were discovered in the 1930s. Excavations in the 1960s discovered a sequence of Roman military camps on the site.

The fort is notable for the Gyrus, a large circular ring which was used for training horses, and is believed to be unique in Britain. In the early 1970s some walls of the fort were reconstructed upon the original foundations, and the site is open to the public.

There is a large steep bank just beyond the Northern boundary of the fort, which goes down to the River Sowe. From the fort at the top of the bank there are good views of the landscape north for 2 or 3 miles and buildings of Coventry city centre can be seen about 4 miles away.

One distinct difference with Lunt Fort and other Roman forts is that The Lunt is not in the perfect playing card shape that most Roman forts were. Instead it has a bulge on its side, caused by the Gyrus. Also on the northern side of the fort instead of a wall there is a steep bank, the Romans decided to use the natural landscape to their advantage in this case. So Lunt Fort is unique as it makes use of the natural shape of the landscape rather than the traditional Roman method of ignoring the local landscape shape and building in complete straight lines.