Vindolanda, Northumberland

Markers of significance

Oh I do like a good sign. Shop signs, inn signs, ghost signs, road signs. Signs that tell us to ‘Commit no nuisance’; signs that implore us to adjust our dress before leaving. Signs that transport us to other times and other ways.* When our hosts took us to the wonderful Roman site at Vindolanda, they had a bonus to show us: not one old sign, but two close together, from vastly different eras. First, the stone column in the upper photograph. That’s a Roman milestone, and the only one in Britain that survives both intact and in its original position. It was one of a series marking the miles on the Stanegate, the Roman road that once linked Corbridge and Carlisle. The Stanegate, and the forts along it such as Vindolanda, date from the time in the 1st century CE when the Romans were advancing into what is now Scotland. When their progress was impeded in 79 CE they withdrew, so that the road became in effect the empire’s northern frontier. Hadrian became emperor in 117 and visited Britain in 122, probably staying at Vindolanda, when he ordered the wall to be built. Milestones marked the distance to the next important place along the road and had an additional propaganda value because their inscriptions mentioned the emperor. Sadly the inscription on this one has worn away, but its survival reminds us of a once essential route for the Romans, at first as a point from which to advance and later as a route for the defenders of the frontier.

As an antiquity of great importance, the milestone was put under the care of the Ministry of Works in the 20th century. The object in my second photograph is one of the ministry’s admirable cast-iron signs naming the monument and its location, and warning the reader that damaging it will render the culprit liable to prosecution. There used to be hundreds if not thousands of signs like this and their iron construction made them very durable. This one would have been put up during the lifetime of the Ministry of Works (1940–62); in 1962, the body was renamed the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, which it remained until 1970, when it became part of the Department of the Environment. The sign refers to this monument as the Chesterholm Milestone, Chesterholm being the name of a nearby 19th-century house built by the antiquarian Anthony Hedley. Before the name Vindolanda became known (in 1914, when an altar to the god Vulcan inscribed with the name was discovered), ‘Chesterholm’ was often used to describe the fort and objects found there. Although the sign was put up after 1940, people had obviously been referring to the stone as the Chesterholm Milestone for many years and the name was still in circulation.

When I started visiting castles and other ancient monuments as a boy with my parents in the 1960s, both this style of sign and the ‘Public Buildings and Works’ signs that replaced them were commonplace. Most of them have been replaced by later signs, but a few, like this one, survive. Where did all the others go? Who knows? Most of them probably went for scrap. A few must have been snapped up by collectors. Signs hold a lasting fascination for many, whether for their design, their historical associations, the nostalgia they can evoke in the beholder, or personal connections. I know of a café not far from where I live that has an old National Trust sign of similar vintage, I have friends who own old advertising signs and other antiquated notices. I am pleased that such things have found good homes, but I also like it when such a sign can still be found in its original setting, just like the more ancient and highly significant the Roman milestone.

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* For a lighthearted post on old signs, see The signs of yesteryear, from 2018.

Stourhead, Wiltshire

The great indoors, 2

The other day I did a Google image search of ’Stourhead’ and eight of the first ten pictures it produced featured the Pantheon, the garden’s great domed and porticoed temple. For many, the Pantheon is the climax of the garden, a visual focus whether viewed from near or far; seen across the lake from the end of the garden nearest the house, it is a goal for anyone about to walk around Stourhead’s glorious landscape.

‘Pantheon’ means a temple dedicated to all the gods, not just one deity as was the norm in the classical world. The Stourhead version is modelled loosely on the much larger Pantheon in Rome, one of the best preserved of all Roman buildings. The Roman Pantheon has a large dome and a portico with eight massive Corinthian columns. Stourhead’s version is smaller and its portico has six columns and unlikle the Roman prototype does not stretch right across the front of the building. This leaves room for a large niche at either end of the facade, containing a statue of a deity, Bacchus, god of wine, on one side, Venus, goddess of love, on the other. To be more precise, the love goddess appears in the form known as Venus Callipygos, Venus of the beautiful buttocks. Apart from her physical appeal, Venus is probably here because she was the mother of Virgil’s hero Aeneas – when laying out the garden, Henry Hoare made several allusions to Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, although the scholarship in this case was in part an excuse for the male gaze to linger over an image female beauty.

For many, the point of the Pantheon is what it looks like from the outside and how it enhances its garden context. But of course the building also has an interior and a use – the family held supper parties there and used it as the setting for picnics. These forays away from the dining room in the house took place in a stunning interior. Beneath the coffered ceiling of the dome are panels of classical scenes in relief, but the walls of the circular building are dominated by a series of seven large niches containing statues of deities. The most famous is a Hercules by Michael Rysbrack but for a change I show his statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. The others are: Livia Augusta, a Roman empress (she was Virgil’s patron and her statue at Stourhead is an ancient one, acquired by Hoare from another collector); the ancient Greek hero Meleager; Flora, goddess of fertility, flowers, and gardens; Isis, the Egyptian mother goddess (also worshipped by the Romans); and St Susanna (a saint connected to the city of Rome). Livia is an ancient Roman statue, acquired by Hoare from another collector. They seem a miscellaneous collection, but several have garden or country connections, a couple are heroes like Aeneas, and Livia has a close link to Virgil; they also, in different ways, reflect Hoare’s interest in collecting and in commissioning art. Like so much at Stourhead, they also embody Hoare’s liking for a mix of scholarship and the pleasures of beauty, nature, food, and wine. I’ll drink to that.

Leigh Brockamin, Worcestershire

 

Marking the way

Milestones go back as far as the Romans. The invaders who did so much for us erected a marker stone every 1000 double paces, or 1618 yards, the standard Roman mile, along their principle roads both to delineate distances between towns and to promote the name of the emperor who paid for them – milestones had political as well as navigational importance. However, there was a much later heyday of the milestone in the 18th century, when turnpike trusts were set up to build and improve roads as long-distance coach travel became more widespread. Turnpike trusts began in 1706 and lasted until the late-1880s (by which time signposts similar to those we use today were becoming more common) and during this period thousands of milestones were erected on Britain’s roads.

‘Milestone’ is the name used for any roadside distance marker in the form of the short, vertical stone or post and not all are made of stone. The one in my photograph, which I happened to see when visiting the medieval barn in my previous post, is by the side of a quiet rural road in Worcestershire and shows distances to Worcester and Bromyard. Helpful pointing hands (manicules) indicate the direction of these two places. The form of this iron milestone is quite a common one – it’s triangular, with a sloping top so that the name of the location can easily be read by a passing rider or coachman looking down on it. I rather like the fact that it provides this additional piece of information. I had no idea that I was in a place called Leigh Brockamin – I’d seen it marked on a map as simply ‘Leigh’.

Reading that unfamiliar name, I was reminded of being lost years ago and pulling up by a remote rural post box. Getting out of the car, I read the name of the box’s location on the label that showed the collection times. Once I knew where I was, I could orient myself, and confirm that I was heading in roughly the right direction. Post boxes no longer show this useful information. Many milestones used to do so. Now they are disappearing. The Milestone Society* estimate that around 9000 may be left in the UK. They’re worth preserving, and worth more than a passing glance.

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* They aim to identify, record, research, conserve and interpret for public benefit the milestones and other waymarkers of the British Isles’. See their website, here.

Sudeley, Gloucestershire

Hidden treasure

A few miles from where I live, hidden in a wood on a slope of the Cotswolds, lie the fragmentary remains of a Roman villa. The site was excavated in 1882, when some mosaics were uncovered, the remains of a few walls were noted, and the plan of a courtyard villa, which had developed from an earlier corridor-based structure, was made out. The ruins did not fare well in the years after the excavation. Damage due to frost, burrowing rabbits, and visitors occurred, and Emma Dent, the owner of the land on which they stood, removed one of the mosaics to her home, Sudeley Castle.* She had part of the site protected by wooden sheds to help preserve it, but those sheds have long rotted away and most of the remains are now all but enveloped in undergrowth and concealed by trees. One mosaic is protected by a low shelter roofed in corrugated iron. By bending down into the shelter and peeling back some sheeting held down by stones, one can see the mosaic, fragmentary but beautiful, its patterns of loops, curves and diagonals standing out in the gloom.

It’s not known for sure how old the villa is. Coins of the 3rd and 4th centuries were found on the site, and I’d guess that the building goes back well before that. That this much has managed to survive in its isolated and quiet location, in spite of animals, weather, and the removal of tesserae by ignorant 19th-century visitors, is heartening, and to me at least, somewhat moving.

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* She justified this removal because it was necessary to protect the mosaics from locals, who walked up to the site and removed handfuls of tesserae. A panel of the mosaic, having been removed to the castle, was apparently subsequently lost: its present location is unknown. A mosaic from another Roman site that Miss Dent removed had a happier fate: she had it restored and reinstalled in its original position.

Roman journeys

For my third pre-Christmas book review: Roman Britain revisited...

Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky
Published by Jonathan Cape

In some ways, the Romans made Britain. Cities, roads, classical architecture, a Latinate hoard of words – it sometimes seems as if the Romans built the foundations of the country and framed the way in which we talk about it. And yet the evidence on the ground is fragmentary – no standing Roman buildings remain intact in Britain. We have to make do with the occasional bit of wall, the odd arch, coins and mosaics in museums. So what would happen if one travelled the country in search of the Romans? Charlotte Higgins's book Under Another Sky is one answer.

Travelling, often puttering along in an old Volkswagen camper van, from Kent to Scotland and back again, Higgins surveys Roman Britain. In doing so she describes the Roman set-pieces – Hadrian's Wall, Bath – and little known sites like Lydney Park with its Roman temple or Scotland's Kinneil House, where there is a Roman fortlet. Her descriptions are evocative, whether she is surveying Silchester with its air 'sickly-sharp with the scent of elderflower' or contemplating the modern creations one must encounter when searching for Roman Scotland, such as the oil refinery at Grangemouth, where 'Monstrous pipes vermiculated their way around structures made on no human scale'. On the way the author describes not just the remains but the people associated with them, and an incendiary lot they are, from queen Boudica to Britain's breakaway Roman emperor, Carausius.

Good as it is to read about these journeys through Roman Britain, the book comes yet more alive with the author's meditations on others' encounters with the country's Roman past. In its pages we meet the 18th-century antiquarian William Stukeley, who advocated a study of Roman Britain as a kind of antidote to the grand tour, and his contemporary William Roy, who made meticulous plans of Scotland's Roman forts and the Antonine Wall. We read about the response to Rome of the members of the Scottish enlightenment and of the historian R G Collingwood. The excitement of discovery is brought to life in Higgins's meeting with the translators of the Vindolanda tablets. And then there are the literary responses to Roman Britain, from Joseph Conrad in The Heart of Darkness and Rosemary Sutcliff (in The Eagle of the Ninth and all) with her sharp eye and retentive visual memory, to W H Auden and his radio play Hadrian's Wall. The treasure trove here is Benjamin Britten's song 'Roman Wall Blues', written for the play but thought lost until 2005, when a copy of the vocal line turned up. Colin Matthews has now written a piano part, and the song has been recorded.

Higgins also helps to make some of the complexity of Roman Britain clear. She devotes several pages to the ethnic diversity of Roman Britain, patiently explaining the clear evidence that people from Africa and Syria, for example, lived in Britain in the Roman period. She also describes the torrents of abuse unleashed when a tabloid newspaper referred to this diversity as 'Roman multiculturalism' and its readers lambasted the careful work of the archaeologists as 'neo-Marxist, multicultist [sic] propaganda'.

This book, of course, is always on the side of the evidence and its thoughtful interpretation. It contains vivid, sometimes haunting, descriptions of Roman remains and places, while never losing sight of the fact that archaeological evidence is sometimes ambiguous and difficult to make sense of. There is a wonderful story from 1904 about the scholar Edward Nicholson translating a faint inscription on a small lead tablet, but getting it completely wrong because he was holding the tablet upside-down. Amusing as this is, for Higgins it's a salutary tale about the whole business of interpreting Roman Britain. Look at the evidence one way and it seems to say one thing; turn it around and the message is utterly different. This is the story of all interpretation, and also its fascination.

Brixworth, Northamptonshire

Not dark yet

I have never forgotten an early school history lesson during which we moved from the Romans to the period after they left the shores of Britain: the Dark Ages. Except, as our history teacher insisted, they weren’t really dark. Illuminated manuscripts, Anglo-Saxon sculpture and jewellery, the vigorous beginnings of English literature, and the very origins of England as a united kingdom – all of these belonged to the post-Roman period and told us that there was really quite a lot going on, some of it wonderfully illuminating.

Forty years on, I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told that Dark Ages weren’t really dark. TV historians and archaeologists seem unable to abandon the term, or the notion that, in telling us that the Dark Ages weren’t really dark, they are letting us in on some newly discovered secret about this remote and mysterious period.

And yet, reading of the hail-battered and rain-sodden landscape portrayed in Anglo-Saxon poems like The Seafarer, or grubbing about in dark little Saxon churches, some of them almost windowless, the Dark Ages in England do seem somewhat crepuscular. Where are the polychromatic churches of Ravenna, glittering with mosaics? Where are the marble-clad walls of Byzantium? Where the great spaces of early Christian basilicas of the kind we find in Rome?

Well, there’s one English church that still gets near to this kind of light, spacious, early Christian architecture: All Saints’, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, though not a glittering jewel box like the churches of Ravenna, is large, light, airy – and Saxon. With its large nave and rows of imposing arches, it has been described as the most impressive 7th-century structure north of the Alps. And it’s an indication as clear as any in England, that the Saxons, builders of small churches like Odda’s Chapel in Gloucestershire or the one at Bradford-on-Avon, could also build big.

Churches like Brixworth were regional religious centres, and on another level from small, privately endowed chapels like Odda’s. They were monastic foundations – Brixworth was apparently built for monks from Peterborough – and also no doubt places of pilgrimage. They are testimony to the wealth and faith of Mercia, the Anglo-Saxon Midland kingdom, in around 675.

The other remarkable thing about this church is the arches. They originally opened on to aisles or side rooms known as porticus, the use of which is unknown (side chapels? homes for holy relics? ossuaries? the jury it out). The porticus have gone, and the arches are now filled in, but their striking construction is still clear. They are made from bricks, and those are Roman bricks, reused from some earlier structure. It’s an inspired bit of recycling, the bricks fulfilling their role both structurally and visually. And it’s a reminder that these Dark Age buildings, which look forward to later churches and cathedrals, are also close to the preceding Roman era. It’s good that these Roman bricks are still enjoying their time in the sun.

Rousham, Oxfordshire

English Elysium

Rousham House, built in the 1630s and altered by William Kent in the mid-18th century, is set in a 25-acre garden that is one of the most enchanting in England. Close to the house are formal walled gardens that evoke the Stuart period when the house was first built, but beyond these, a remarkable landscape garden extends towards the countryside, a series of spaces at once very English and very Classical that is the work of Kent at his best.

Vistas open out towards the countryside, an arched ‘ruin’ forming a focal point on a distant hill. Paths lead from lawns down slopes and into woods, where there is a surprise around every corner. One’s route curves past statues of Roman gods and dying gladiators. Glades appear, with more statues and grottoes. Water trickles through rills or into pools. Temples and classical gazeboes cling to slopes or are framed by trees or laurels.

The imagery is from ancient Rome. A statue of a lion mauling a horse and another of a dying Gaulish gladiator evoke the ‘games’ of the arena. Venus presides over her own fertile watery vale (above). An imposing six-arched building is called the Praeneste, after a temple site outside Rome. All this links 18th-century Britain with the glory of the Roman empire – and with its gods, since in one version of the British origin myth, Britons are descended from the Roman hero Aeneas, who is in turn a son of Venus.

But for all this weight of meaning, Kent arranged this garden with a gentle touch. One’s impression on walking around it, poking about in its corners, and enjoying a picnic on its lawn, is of a beautifully arranged series of delightful spaces – spaces, moreover, that are very well cared for. Rousham has been in the same family since the house was built in the 1630s. We’re lucky that they’ve looked after their inheritance so well.

Dying Gaul, detail

Wroxeter, Shropshire

What the Romans did for us

The Romans – and those among the British who adopted the Roman way of life during the occupation – built a great deal. But most of their buildings in Britain, if they survive at all, do so as ruins a foot or two high. For example, only a few full-size Roman arches remain in Britain, and even Hadrian’s Wall, in all its windswept magnificence, is a shadow of its original self. The remains of a Roman town like Wroxeter, which survive as an acre or two of foundation and hypocaust, and a section of high wall, are impressive. But much more has vanished. Where on earth did it all go?

Well, some at least of the stone and brick was recycled. I have seen Roman bricks incorporated into the structures of Saxon churches, Norman castles, and gatehouses of uncertain age. The gateway to the churchyard of St Andrew’s, Wroxeter is testimony to just such a case of reuse. The two round stone columns come from the Roman site down the road, an inspired piece of recycling and rejigging - the bases are apparently from Roman farm buildings, the columns themselves from Wroxeter's baths, and the capitals from some other unknown Roman building in the locality. The walls of the church itself, which was first built in the Saxon period, though it has been much altered since, are also partly of stone blocks cut originally by the Romans. The Roman builders and masons did more for us than we sometimes realise.

Lincoln

What the Romans did for me

Some time at the very end of the 19th century, my maternal grandmother lived with her parents and siblings in a house close to the Roman Newport Arch in Lincoln. I’m not sure if it was the house just visible through the arch in the picture, but it was either that one or one very close to it. My great uncle was a chorister in the cathedral, which is only a few hundred yards away, and my grandmother and various great aunts were getting their schooling nearby too. And each evening they came home through the only surviving full-size Roman arch in Britain.

Lincoln began life as a fort for the Ninth Legion in about AD 60 or 61. The Ninth were succeeded by another legion, the Second Adiutrix, but soon after, as at many Roman forts, the legion moved on and the place was resettled as a colonia, in other words a town for retired legionaries and their families. It was fortified, at first with walls that followed the line of those of the original fort, though later the walls were expanded to take in a larger area as the town throve.

My grandmother’s Roman neighbour the Newport Arch formed the town’s northern gate and was built in the early third century. It would originally have looked taller – the road levels have risen over the centuries with the accretion of stone and tar – and it has been restored several times (including once in 1964 when it was partly knocked down by a lorry). But it’s still an impressive fragment and a tantalizing hint of the scale and grandeur of the Roman city.

I’m not sure how having ‘roots’ among the Roman remains of Lincoln has affected me, though I do know that a visit to the city when I was about eight years old opened my eyes to the beauty, fascination, and oddity of old buildings. More recently I’ve lived for long stretches in London and Gloucestershire, both places in different ways haunted by the presence of the Romans. Though so much of what they built vanished quickly, Roman remains surface in all kinds of ways, from the more predictable (artefacts in museums, place names, the routes of roads) to the surprising (such as Saxon churches built partly of re-used Roman bricks). And there are some fields on the Cotswolds where it is still possible to pick up fragments of Roman pottery. So a resounding ‘thank you’ my ancestors for tipping me off about our ubiquitous Roman neighbours.