Alchester

Alchester was a Roman settlement in Oxfordshire, England, about two miles south of modern Bicester, possibly identifiable with the place called Alavna named in the Ravenna Cosmography, though it does not appear in surviving ancient texts by that name. Positioned at the junction of Roman roads linking Silchester, Dorchester on Thames, Towcester, Cirencester and St Albans, it began as one of Britain's earliest legionary fortresses after the AD 43 invasion, housing the Second Augustan Legion under Vespasian before the legion moved to Exeter around AD 68, and it later grew into a walled civilian town inhabited until roughly the 5th century. Excavations since 1996 by Oxford University, the University of Leicester and the University of Edinburgh have uncovered its military infrastructure, and the site now lies in the civil parish of Wendlebury.