Father's Day. Minus One, Plus One.

This is my first Father's Day since my own father died.  And my first one as a Grandfather.

I am on my own this weekend, the kids up and out, the wife off on a trip.  She worries that it is unseemly to leave me alone on Father's Day.

Nah.

Guys don't make a big deal out of it.  I don't want or need any silly gifts that traditionally get handed out today.  I don't wear ties for work any longer.  I already have a barbecue grill.

My sons are all turning out just fine, and in my book no better gift on this or any other day could be had.  My own father would not have been one to put it into words but pretty much felt the same way.

So I guess that means I am bereft of soft, sappy feelings on the day - designated by the makers of cards, ties and barbecue grills - for soft sappiness.

Well.  We were cleaning the garage the other day and found a trove of old sports equipment.  Some just had to be tossed out but there were a few keepers.  One thing we found was this very small baseball glove.  It probably belonged to our oldest son.  We spent a lot of time playing catch out in the yard but this glove is so small that he likely outgrew it very quickly.

They really do grow fast.  So I decided that my son, a Father himself now, should have it.  He can get back to playing catch in his own yard shortly.

On Parade in Carlisle Castle

A day off from digging, what to do?  After a debate over pints the night before we settled on a visit to Carlisle.  Plenty of history, a nice drive, and a fabulous bookstore to visit.  Seriously, Bookcase is one of the best bookstores I have ever been in.  A quarter of a million volumes, thirty rooms on three stories, reasonable prices and that impossible to either define or to mistake faint odor of old, delightful books.

While we were enjoying a snack in the affiliated tea room there came from the street the brassy martial sounds of a marching band.  I ducked out in time to see an odd procession.  A band in formal uniform, a contingent of older chaps in bowler hats and bemedalled blue suits, and finally a loosely organized column of very young looking soldiers.  I was slow with the camera and they were off down the street in brisk - if somewhat unmilitary - order.

Our own little band of ragamuffins then dispersed to follow individual interests.  Carlisle has a nice cathedral, a really good museum, and so forth. Some of us lingered in the bookstore for quite a while.

But I was off to Carlisle castle.  I had visited once before on a dismal rainy day.  For whatever reason - probably I just was feeling contrary - I did not go in on that visit, just circled the perimeter looking up at walls.  Now it was time to drop in.

The location has been a fortress for as long as history has been recorded.  The Romans built an early stronghold here in 72 AD.  The few glimpses we have of dark age Carlisle courtesy of Saint Cuthbert speak of high walls and a still functioning aqueduct system in the 7th Century.  When the Normans turned up in the 11th Century the first thing they did was fortify the old Roman site, upgrading a century later to stonework that still survives in spots. Today it flies the Dread and Puissant banner of English Heritage.

As I was admiring the place I was surprised to see the mismatched parade come in through the front gates.

They lined up for review in front of barracks buildings named for scenes of great British valor.  Gallipoli, Arnhem, Ypers.

The picture just above captures the mood pretty well.  The Older Gents on the right are clearly veterans.  They wear assorted head gear and are comfortably chatting with each other.  The band stays in the back.  They appear to be Professionals, I assume Regular Army.  The younger soldiers are Cadets, here displaying much improved military bearing now that the Regimental Sergeant Major, the Colonel and the Colonel's Wife are on hand to inspect them.

From chatting with the office staff at the Castle and doing a bit of post travel research I now understand this picture better.

Carlisle Castle is a base, mostly ceremonial these days, for The Duke of Lancaster's Regiment of the British Army.  The family tree of British Regiments is fairly complicated, with massive wartime expansions and increasing peacetime amalgamations.  But it is fair to say that the Lancasters can be considered to be in the lineage of the troops who fought so hard in the battles commemorated by the barrack's names.  In fact their antecedents defended these very walls against assorted Scottish marauders.  Probably, although this is lost to history, their far distant ancestors stood on both sides of the Roman walls long ago.

The Old Gentlemen are indeed veterans.  I think the varied hat colors relate to the several regiments that were combined to form this one in 2004.

The "kids" are not actually in the Army.  They are members of The Army Cadet Force.  Here in the US we don't have an exact equivalent to the ACF. Think of a mixture of Boy (and Girl) Scouts with more than a dash of Military School.  Most never go on to serve in the military.  From what I saw they appear to be enjoying the experience.

As did I.  The British Army has such a long and storied history.  I think its great that the youngsters and the Old Soldiers appear together on parade.  It is an interesting mix to my historian's eye.  You have the pomp and ceremony of a brass band, which practically invites you to march along.  On the march through downtown Carlisle people in fact did just that.  But they are not trying to hide the tragic side of things either.  It is eyes straight ahead when the Colonel is inspecting the ranks.  But behind them the signs still stare out with the doleful names.  Ypers, Gallipoli, Arnhem..... So many lads not much older than these marched there.  So many did not march home.

A Saturday Stroll - The False Wells

My annual archaeology pilgrimages to Vindolanda have typically been two week stints.  Oh, one year I could only manage a single week, and I have given brief whimsical consideration to doing a doubled up four week session next year if my then 60 year old carcass could stand the wear and tear.

But usually it is a week of excavating, two days to relax, then another week and home.

Naturally in the weekend of designated rest I don't sit still.

Being an "old timer" now it has come to pass that I have met quite a few folks, and usually my excavator pals and I concoct some kind of history themed activities for our non digging weekend. Today and next time you are invited to come along.

On a Saturday with extremely variable weather we set out to do a walk.

Our starting point was the parking lot at the Hadrian's Wall fort of Brocolita.  This is one of my favorite ancient place names.  It appears on the few ancient sources we have, and delightfully seems to preserve a Pre-Roman name.  "Brock" meaning badger is a very old Celtic word.  Brocolita has plausibly been interpreted as "the place with badger holes".  Now, since my nick name with my digging pals is "Badger" (based on being from Wisconsin and somewhat black and white in color scheme), what would be more historically apt than Badger at the place of Badgers?

In the photo above I am standing not at the fort site but in a shrine just outside same.  This is a very nicely preserved Mithraeum.  The altars are reproductions, the originals now safely in a museum in Newcastle.

This was one of three shrines in a complex to the west of the fort.  In some ways the coolest one was actually Coventina's Well.  Coventina was (is?) a Romano-British water deity whose existence is basically only known from this site.  Near where I am standing there was another enclosure in the middle of which was a spring.  When excavated in 1876 it was a fabulous treasure trove.  Altars, incense burners, votive offerings....and 13,487 Roman coins!

So, where is the well today?

Tempting, tempting, but this ain't it.  Sure, its a well and just outside of the fort.  And, yes, almost certainly that is Roman stonework.  Why it even looks as if it were excavated a century or so ago, and I have seen pipes left in sites for various reasons.  But, wrong place.  This is a remnant of some farmer's miserable little stead.  Rock and scruffy grass did not make for prosperity even if you could save money by simply pinching nearby bits of stone work for construction.

The actual site of Coventina's Well is unmarked.  It stands to reason that if there were 13,000 Roman coins excavated then there could be a few still in the ground.  So the Management has not made the site blatant and I will abide by that wise policy.

Up and down the hills we went north of the Wall and into Disputed Territories.  We stopped in a little hamlet called Simonburn.  It has a very pleasant Tea Room.  While there I browsed through their local history book and noticed that there was a 13th Century church, St. Mungo's, that was on the site of even earlier sanctuaries.  In fact, it was said that Mungo himself had visited and had baptized Dark Age Pagans at "St. Mungo's Well" near the church.

Ah, sacred wells, pagans, a guy named Mungo....had to visit.

The hunt for the wells started at the church, then went down a ravine to the south and over a small creek.  High up on the other side we found several possible suspects...

All were suitably moss encrusted and had water in them and/or running out of them.  The water did not seem to have any particular influence on the less devout among our little band but perhaps the absence of St. Mungo was part of the problem.  The obviously later brickwork was not actually a deal breaker as it is common place for ancient springs to have some modern work on them either to protect the water source or to keep people and animals from falling in and coming to grief.

Ah, alas for mystery and history.  It seems that these water sources are newer and less holy.  Known as far back as the 18th century as "Mugger's Well" a vicar of Victorian times decided - for no particular reason - that this must be a typo of sorts and just renamed them.

A Mugger in this context means a travelling peddler who sold crockery.  I can imagine such folks using this as a nice campsite.  The alternate and more common use of Mugger is to describe a violent robber, someone who might hit you in "the mug".  It gets a little help along the way from a Hindu word that is used to designate a large and rather mean spirited crocodile which would be equally happy to grab hold of either end of you.

Vindolanda Update

So much, so very much cool stuff coming up since my departure.  The Vindolanda twitter and blog updates are better this year so I will at least for the digging season link to the latter over on the right side of this page.  I was really impressed for instance with the extremely pornographic pottery item that I imagine as being the tip jar for a brothel!

As to the nice anaerobic excavation that I left - slight tear in eye and catch in throat - at the end of my first week of digging.  Well here it was after we gave it a quick clean up on a muddy Friday:

We had to leave it be after that.  It was just such a complicated mess that the supervising archaeologists needed to get their cameras out and their thinking caps on to try and make sense of it. We were speculating that there might be a water tank underneath as various drains were present and the whole mess of stone slabs and oak planks appeared to be subsiding.

Well.  Here is a photo courtesy of my roving photographer mate Peter Savin.  You will have to rotate your orientation ninety degrees but the same structures can be seen.  Some of the mud and random wood has been cleared away.

It is now looking much more like a proper floor surface, albeit one that has not held up well over time. The flat bare surface on the near side of the trench is, well its something else.

Just for fun here's a close up from the later photo.  Pete's camera is a big fellow with plenty o' megapixels.

The round object near the top has striations on it.  This is a quern stone used for grinding grain. Usually you find them in a broken state, tossed into a pit as filler or onto a wall as a repair measure. But this close to a baking oven site, who knows.

I would like to imagine that the frondy looking stuff in the lower center of the photo might be bracken, the loose heather stuff that the Romans used as a floor covering.  That's where you find the really interesting little items.  Human beings drop things.  Maybe the Romans dropped more stuff as they had not invented pockets for clothing.  Imagine dropping something into very deep and slightly smelly shag carpeting.  You'd probably just leave it there.

Photos from the site are hit and miss for me now.  If I can get a later and deeper view I will pass it along.

Cirencester. Roman Britain's "Second City"

Cirencester is a nice little city in the west of England, down at the lower end of the Cotswolds.  It has a current population of 19,000...about the same as in Roman times.  That made it the second largest city in Roman Britain.  But visiting it today you would hardly know it.

Some cities with a Roman heritage highlight it.  Plaques on the side of modern buildings, preserved archaeology that you can glimpse through skylights, even entire conserved ancient structures.  In Cirencester you get this:

To be fair I will say that there has been quite a lot of archaeological investigation done.  But to find traces of "Corinium Dobunnorum" above ground you have to do some serious looking.

The most obvious remaining structure is the amphitheater.  It stood just outside the city walls and looked from my map to be a nice little stroll from the city center.  So I meandered in a generally southwest direction until I hit a Waitrose store.  This lay along the lines of the Roman wall and they had perched one sad little wall stone in their parking lot to act as a reminder.

From here it got a little tricky.  It seems some locations keep their purpose across many centuries. The spirit of the place - or Genius Locus as the Romans would put it - is a constant. Across the street from the Forum Car Park for instance is a modern day government center.  So also with the defenses of Corinium.  I could see the amphitheater site from the parking lot but there was no visible route to get there.  I had to go to the back  past the rubbish bins and hop over a hedge.  Then dodge traffic crossing the busy Bristol Road that runs the just outside the circuit of the old fortifications.  Thank goodness I have been to the UK so often in years recent that I now instinctively look in the correct direction to spy oncoming mechanical doom.  You see too many US visitors doing "The Colonial Swivel" and looking around in all directions.

I made it across.  Next came some dead reckoning navigation across the grounds of the local hospital. Back by the ambulance garage I found an unobtrusive trail and sign that said "NHS Woods".  A ramble through same brought me to:

What the heck?  You don't need too much of an archaeological "eye" to tell that this landscape has been heavily altered over time.  As it happens the amphitheater was built on the site of a Roman quarry.  So all those long vanished Roman buildings were made of stone that came from this spot. On to the amphitheater.

A pretty spot.  You would never guess that it was once all stone and that the whole range of ancient amusements were carried out here.  The only wild beasts present on this day were a dog and his owner, both of whom seemed entertained by the back and forth throw and fetch of a tennis ball.

The gap at the top of the photo is the north gate of the structure, presumably the main one as a road from there went straight to town.  So, could a stroll about there show us any Roman remains? Oh, if you look at dirt kicked up by rabbits you just might find some very old and corroded brick remnants..

For visible Roman remains that's about it.  Fortunately those needing a more intense Roman fix there is a very nice museum you can visit.  The folks at the Corinium Museum  were quite interested to learn that I was heading up North to excavate a Roman site and gave me a mini guided tour of some of the nicer bits in their collection.

The "Septimus Stone".  This dedicatory marker is the strongest evidence that Corinium was a Provincial Capital in late Roman times.  The earlier entity that united everything south of the Wall in one province had proved either administratively unwieldy or too prone to giving powerful men enough ambition to consider an attempt at usurpation...

A delightful little bronze and enameled bird.  This unusual item appears to be purely decorative. It was found in the grave of a little girl just outside the city walls.  Basically under that Waitrose parking lot as it happens.

Cirencester was a center for mosaic production.  Many swell examples in the museum but I find that they never photograph well from a distance.

And here is an oddity.  This is an example of the Rotas-Sator cryptogram.  They pop up in odd places around the Empire; Egypt, Pompeii, Dura-Europa, Budapest.  And this, the sole example from Roman Britain.  Scholars have expended many gallons of ink trying to puzzle out whether this is a sneaky way of putting some early Christian message up in the era when going public would lead to martyrdom....or was it just an inside joke now lost to history?

For those who enjoy all things Roman Cirencester is a nice little visit.  Of course I would have liked to see more on display but it comforts me to know that there is a lot - an awful lot - still in the ground. Good for Cirencester then.  Without the "help" of the Luftwaffe and the still more destructive forces of developers the past is still asleep underfoot.

Baby Bird Update

In light of yesterday's post I should mention that these baby birds are also without question, dumb.

But they are past the pastel egg stage and almost through the naked-stubble stage.

Good luck little guys, your mom seems a bit scatter brained and really should have picked a better camping site.  So I suggest you work on that whole flying and finding your own worms business with dispatch.

Dumb Birds of England

Our feathered friends are in general not exactly the Einsteins of the natural world but perhaps life in a gentle land where predators are scarce has made them a little less smart.  For instance:

A sign on a small country church north of Hadrian's Wall:

When walking the the Cotswolds we spent a long stretch of time going around the edge of a private forest preserve.  We kept seeing these odd little stile-gate combinations.  Eventually we figured out that the gate was to let a hunting dog through and the stile was for its master to step over.  The small yellow tag on the post has a number and the legend: Support the Code of Good Shooting Practice.

We stood at this spot for a few minutes and, lo and behold, a pheasant strolled by ready to be shot...or perhaps dispatched by chucking a rock at it!