Lower German Limes

We visited the Köln-Deutz component on a sunny hot September day in 2023 as the Praetorium was (and still is) closed for visitors. A 20 minute walk from Cologne Cathedral across the Hohenzollernbrucke to the eastern bank of the Rhine allows for excellent views of the modern-day cathedral but in Roman times would have had line of sight to the provincial governors palace at the Praetorium. You will have the (admittedly few) remains all to yourself as visitors instead throng the riverfront or city centre. An unexciting 10-15 minutes is the extent of the visit to what are some 1970s reconstructed outlines (using original stones) of one of the gates of the Divittia bridgehead fort, its location in a quiet pedestrian throughway a far cry from being an essential part of Emperor Constantine’s late Roman era defensive line. 

There is an information board onsite (fully in German if I recall) and a bronze model up some steps that we missed. Far more is actually to be gleaned from the nomination and ICOMOS documents which identifies Köln-Deutz as one of the few components to actually have some above-ground features as well as the only permanent military installation of the Lower German Limes on the right bank of the Rhine, connected by a 400m bridge to the colony that is now Cologne. Forts of the Late Roman period are characterised by heavy stone walls and large numbers of round towers, of which Köln-Deutz is the best preserved example and seemingly a …

I visited in April 2024 the DOMunder experience in Utrecht. Like previous reviewer has explained, you get to go under the Domplein square to explore with flashlights the ruins of the Dom Church's nave that was destroyed by a tornado(!) in 1647. However, besides the church ruins you can see also other ruins from different time periods, one of them being the Roman period. There is a very tiny part of the Roman wall on show as the Roman ruins are not the main focus of the DOMunder. 

The DOMunder tour started with a presentation in the basement of Utrecht Music School where the guide goes through also the Roman history of the Domplein. And here you can get really close to the actual Roman wall ruins! Before the presentation started our guide showed us a hole in the wall where you can see and touch the original Roman wall. This is not automatically part of the tour so you can ask from your guide to see it in case they forget to show it. I really enjoyed the DOMunder experience and can recommend it for anyone interested in history.

I booked the tour online and checked in for it at the Utrecht tourist information center. From the tourist info I got myself a free brochure about the Lower German Limes sites around Utrecht. They all seem to be worth of visit if you're interested in Roman history but the DOMunder is the only way to see the …

I visited the Lower German Limes in Germany and the Netherlands. The “Roman Disneyland” Xanten is already covered in other reviews. The museum in Cologne was in September still under reconstruction. Therefore I will focus my review on the Netherlands.

In my quest to find original remains in the Netherland. While most of the dots on our map seem to scatter around Nijmegen, it seems that none of these remains are actually visible. Then I stumbled upon Utrecht. Most (if not all) remains in the Netherlands are underground and in Utrecht you have the chance to go there. "DOM under" provides a guided tour to, you guessed it, an excavation site under the cathedral, or rather the part of the main square, that used to be part of the cathedral before a storm struck it down.

Space down there is limited. So you need to pre-book for a timeslot. We started in the basement of a house. There are a few exhibition items and the briefing took place there. Most important: there are remains of the roman walls visible within the building structure. For the second part, we left the building and entered the excavation site via stairs in the middle of the square. The Roman remains are only part of what I saw underground. There are several layers with part of the earliest church and the destroyed cathedral as well. However, there are Roman remains, which makes the Limes in the Netherlands not completely invisible.

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I visited the Lower German Limes WHS location of Remagen in Germany in October 2021 which was one of the only open sites during the pandemic. Basically this WHS is all about scattered Roman remains or ruins so I wasn't expecting much, even though it has to be said that Remagen has a good network of several types of Roman remains or ruins which make for a pleasant loop near the Rhine with 15 stops named Stadtrundgang with information boards in English and German at each stop. The Roman Museum only has information boards in German, but English translations are provided at the entrance.

The "highlight" of this location is the Roman Museum of Remagen with exhibits from the old Roman fort of Rigomagus displayed in the former chapel of St. Magdalena from the 15th century. The collection includes coins and grave contents from the 1st to the 4th centuries AD. Some tombstones with figures of Roman soldiers in full gear are noteworthy. The finds provide an insight into the life of the Roman soldiers based on the Rhine. In the basement of the former chapel you can visit the foundations of an arcade/portico from the 2nd century with 3 large column bases. This portico was the entrance to the "principia", the headquarters of a Roman fort.

The ancient author Ammianus Marcellinus mentions Remagen in his report on the invasion of the Franks in 356. The Roman army under Emperor Julian found the forts and towns between Koblenz …

The nomination of the Lower German Limes is scheduled for 2021. The German part of this TWHS includes 25 components, some of which have multiple locations. However, not much is left of the Limes section along the Lower Rhine today, only very few original remains are visible, most remains have been preserved underground. Hence it seems more than questionable whether the Lower German Limes could add anything significant to the already inscribed parts of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire.

The Dutch nomination website provides the entire nomination dossier including maps. Based on this information, I have identified the following locations of the German part, where original remains are visible:

- Xanten Colonia Ulpia Traiana (CUT) (id 27), an archaeological park
- Monheim Haus Bürgel (id 35), remains of the original walls are visible in walls of the later medieval and modern estate
- Cologne Praetorium (id 37), the former Palace of the Roman govenor; remains are shown in an underground museum
- Iversheim (id 43), remains of six lime kilns

I visited Xanten and Iversheim in summer 2020. The Praetorium in Cologne was closed due to construction works (until 2021), the area is being redesigned into an archaeological zone. And the Haus Bürgel didn’t seem worth the detour.

Xanten was once one of the largest and most important Roman settlements in the Germanic provinces. The archaeological park encompasses the boundaries of the historic Colonia Ulpia Traiana. It is a large but almost empty area. Near …

Frontiers of the Roman Empire - Lower German Limes, together with the Dutch Limes TWHS, is scheduled to be nominated in 2021. Together they form the 3rd of 4 clusters of separate stretches of the Roman frontiers up for inclusion, after the already inscribed UK/German one plus the ‘western Danube Limes’ (2019) and before the ‘eastern Danube Limes’ (2022). The Lower German Limes is concentrated along the river Rhine, which acted as a natural border of the Roman province of Germania Inferior.

I had ‘been’ to its Dutch counterpart already in 2011, which was a very underwhelming experience. Both Lower German parts together are said to comprise 55 locations. Among the locations in Germany, it’s hard to say which stand out so much that they warrant a visit. I choose Xanten, which is home to 4 of the locations ánd has a well-developed archaeological park plus Roman museum within its borders.

Xanten is a mid-sized town just across the Dutch/German border near Nijmegen. In Roman times it was the site of the Roman city of Colonia Ulpia Traiana. The proposed locations include a road, a defensive structure, the late Roman fortress Tricensima and the legionary fortress Vetera. The tentative site description at the UNESCO website puts them somewhere off the coast of Somalia, but by turning the coordinates around I could trace them back to modern day Xanten. At least Tricensima is part of the Roman archaeological park, the others may be slightly outside.

The Xanten Archaeological …

The Dutch T-List nomination for an extension of the Frontiers of the Roman Empire has come as a surprise to me:

a. The Advisory Committee had concluded in 2010 that there was no coordination between the provinces and cities along the former Roman frontier line in the Netherlands on this subject. So there was insufficient steering and power behind a possible nomination.

b. There is nothing left to see!

The Romans arrived around 15 B.C. in what is now The Netherlands, and stayed intermittently for some 300 years. They constructed a number of fortifications along the Rhine river. Roman objects have been found in the moist ground along the river, and sometimes they even have been fished from the water.

The Roman remains in the Netherlands have the obscurity of the Pile Dwellings in the Alps or the Struve Geodetic Arc. Except for a single stone or two, there's nothing to warrant a visit. Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen probably is the best option to get a feel of what impact the Romans had on the Netherlands. In October 2011 I spent about an hour there, enjoying the sometimes surprisingly precious objects. The photo attached for example is a decorated silver Roman beaker.

Visited the site and was not impressed...

I really wonder why this site is on the tentative list of Unesco World Heritage... Must say that the site is important to Dutch archaeology/history/heritage, but this site does not have a significance for world heritage. A backwater Roman settlement of which hardly anything remains?? The submission text claims "the remains ... are extremely well preserved"; for Dutch standards: yes. For European standards: NO!