I stopped at the corner of Watling Street and the Whitefriars shopping centre to adjust my shopping, and looked up. There was Dorothy, more properly Rosa Dorothy Perkins, climbing up to the sun through a foxglove tree, Paulownia Tomentosa.
Summer is here!
Watling Street runs from Dover to Holyhead in North Wales under different names in places, but it’s an old Roman Road. There was a Carmelite monastery where Whitefriars now stands. St John Stone was a friar here.
Mrs T and I went to Richborough Roman Fort this morning, a few miles from Canterbury. There are high walls still above ground but much more remains underground. We had booked a tour to the excavations, along with several other adults and children. It’s one of those places where the sea has retreated. In Roman times it was an island, linked by a causeway to the mainland, famous for oysters. The former sea is now farmland, the sea a good 2 miles away. All change!
The tour was most interesting, led by people who knew their subject and could speak to the non-expert. At various times between 43 AD and the great Roman retreat, the place was a garrison and a trading port and there is a sizable town under the earth. The bit that was being excavated had been identified as an amphitheatre in Tudor times, but this was the first modern dig after a local surveyor had a peek in 1850 or so. His plan did not fit the one the technology found from drone flights, till the scientists allowed for the shift in magnetic North, which aligned the two plans exactly.
What we could see was of course trenches cut through the soil, but one of them included a section of the wall of the bullring, which was painted: only 17 others have been identified throughout the Empire. Experts are coming down to have a close look and try to interpret the painting, meanwhile the young archaeologists, and a couple of elderly ones, were still digging and cleaning the painting with smokers’ stiff toothbrushes. A nail brush would be too hard.
There was also a wall of what had been thought to be an entrance to the building but turned out to be the holding area for the beasts. Grooves for the hurdles to keep them apart. A few yards away, a complete cat’s skeleton was found, bagged up for analysis, and nicknamed Bagpuss. Coins, pottery, jewellery; there are many finds to be examined and recorded.
And now the archaeologists have to hurry as the farmer wants his land back in the middle of next month. The walls will be covered up again, but carefully, to ensure the safety of the relics for possibly a few hundred more years and to leave the surface safe and sound for cattle to graze over.
It was a privilege to see this amphitheatre; no photographs allowed at the dig, so no photographs in the blog either. The view above shows part of the remaining Roman fort.
The train from London and Ashford always edges slowly along the sea wall towards the tunnels and Dover Priory Station. Unless the weather is really atrocious the traveller can look up to the East and see the Roman lighthouse, the Pharos, rooted to the Castle cliff-top with the Garrison Church beside it – a church built in part from Roman bricks.
Today, between the downside track and the sea there was a foam of pink and white valerian, Centranthus Ruber, a plant said to have been introduced by the Romans. Mrs Turnstone loves it for the garden, but it is just as happy between bricks on the wall on in that crack between the asphalt and the garden wall, or springing up among the ballast on the railway.
As I cycled to eat my lunch on the beach, I passed the Roman painted house. It’s about time I called in again.
Will Turnstone 