Found in the Manor House Museum in Ilkley - remarkably, free to visit - this is one of those objects whose significance seems to expand the longer you look at it.

Manor House Museum

Dating from the late first or early second century, this tombstone is Ilkley’s only known Roman inscription that speaks directly of civilian life. It commemorates a woman, probably called Vedica, who died aged thirty. She sits upright in a rounded chair, her hair falling in two extraordinary long plaits which she holds in her hands. Most remarkably of all, the Latin inscription identifies her explicitly as a woman of the Cornovii - a native British people whose territory was centred upon Wroxeter in what is now Shropshire.

Within a single object we seem to encounter several different Britains at once. The monument itself belongs to a Roman funerary tradition and its story is written in Latin, yet the woman it commemorates retains a distinct native identity. Even her hair and dress have been interpreted as more indigenous than Roman in character. Here is integration without complete erasure — somebody participating in Roman culture while still being identified by the people and place from which she came.

It opens up so many questions. What brought a Cornovian woman from the western Midlands to Wharfedale? Who was she? What circumstances gave her the status and means to be commemorated in stone? What does her monument tell us about women, family, mobility and identity in Roman Britain? We cannot answer all of these questions, but that is partly the power of it, for me.

And then there is the extraordinary setting in which we encounter her. She survives here alongside other Roman tombstones and altars, while the Manor House itself stands within the footprint of the Roman fort established at Ilkley around AD 80. The fort occupied this strategic crossing of the Wharfe for much of the next three centuries, and the connection is physical as well as archaeological: part of the Manor House actually stands directly upon surviving Roman masonry - which you can still see adjacent to the building.

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