[citation needed] The Carvetii are not mentioned in Ptolemy's Geography, nor in any other classical text, and are known only from three Roman (third and fourth century AD) inscriptions, one of which is now lost.

enclosed settlement site a couple of miles south-east of Penrith in the Eden Valley, that Clifton Dykes was the "logical location for the 'caput Carvetiorum' " ('the centre of the Carvetii').

"[4] The Brougham area, with its seeming importance in the cult of Belatucadrus, its strategic position in the Eden Valley with its route to the east across Stainmore, its nearby history as a meeting place with three henges, as well as with "the presumed pre-Roman tribal capital at Clifton Dykes",[6] may have been the settlement focus of the Carvetii, at least before the Roman military campaigns in the AD 70s.

[8] The Carvetii may have been part of the neighbouring Brigantes confederation, and some, including Higham and Jones, have speculated that Venutius, first husband of the Brigantian queen Cartimandua and later (69 A.D.) an important British resistance leader in the 1st century, may have been a Carvetian.

The series of marching camps set up by the Roman governor Quintus Petillius Cerialis, in his campaign in the early 70s, stretched away from Stanwick, across the Stainmore Pass towards the Eden Valley, suggesting that the Carvetii were the "centre of Venutius' power base and the prime objective of the ...