Chris Upton digs into a Roman enclave in the Midlands that survived the collapse of the empire and the ruin of the Dark Ages.

Civilisations can end with remarkable speed. It is generally accepted that early in the 400s AD the lights went off in Roman Britain.

Roman lifestyle and culture – all that bathing and piquant fish sauce – came to a shuddering halt.

Plague and recession followed, and England became a chaotic battleground for warring chieftains. It took the German efficiency of the Anglo-Saxons a century later to settle things down again.

Whenever I teach this period I turn off the central-heating and dim the lights.

It’s time, I tell the students, for the Dark Ages.

Such was the implosion that within a generation or two an anonymous Saxon writer was describing the Roman ruins at Bath as the work of mysterious and ancient giants.

The break had been total.

That, at least, is the received wisdom, and given the darkness of the Dark Ages it’s not easy to disprove it.

One Roman city, however, tells a more complex story.

The city of Wroxeter – what the Romans called Viriconium Cornoviorum – is unusual in many ways.

Unlike almost every other Romano-British city, such as York or Chester, London or Colchester, it did not subsequently grow into a medieval and modern town.

Most of Wroxeter remains buried under farmland, a quiet retreat in the middle of Shropshire.

Even the stretch of Watling Street that ran through the middle of it has not been widened into the A5; it’s a little country lane down to the church.

This is ironic in itself, for Wroxeter had an after-life, as a sub-Roman town, long after many of its fellow urban centres had been abandoned.

Here, then, undisturbed by the modern world, the archaeologists can begin to fill in what is impossible to unearth elsewhere.

The reality was that, though central England was no longer run from Rome, taxes died up and public buildings became too costly to maintain, the people of Viriconium did not suddenly vanish.

They still had a living to make and families to support. It is in the old baths complex, once a proud symbol of Imperial Rome’s dominion, that this after-life is easiest to discern.

Well into the 500s the old baths were still in use, not for bathing, but for workshops – including metal-working – and market stalls. If a Roman wall was still standing, why not make use of it ?