Vindolanda 2016 Day Nine

The days pass.  We scrape our trowels back and forth. Wheel barrows are loaded with dirt and rock, laboriously pushed up the spoil heap and tipped over the side.  The pottery shard bag bulges with the "oopsies" of ancient times.  Clouds gather, threaten and toss us a few token drops of rain as they scud over the hills silently saying "just kiddin'".

The morning flies past as hours tend to do when your holiday is nearing an end.

A good time to ponder small marvels.

A bit of Roman glass.  It gets put into the pottery bag where it will be cataloged and stored away on the off chance that some future researcher will be interested in knowing what sort of upper status drinking vessels were on Hadrian's Wall in the Second Century.

1800 years since it last saw the light of day. And you can still hold it up and see through it, noticing the fancy ridges and the swirling pattern of bubbles.  It would be a good thing to take a drink out of.  But of course the great appeal to us of the Romans is how much kinship we feel with them.  They enjoyed a quaff of well earned fermented stuff at the end of a hard day, and so do I.  In my case ale instead of wine.

Oh, the "Where's Walldo" hunt for what should have been a whopping great wall along the side of the road.  Well now.  What have we here?

Yes, it is a wall.  Of course it is running north-south instead of the east-west it should be following.  And the type of stone suggests it is earlier than it ought to be.  And we might, or might not have a corner under the big whopping stone.  Under that stone there are mysterious hollow cavities.

One day left to try and make some sense of it all.