G & J away from home

Thursday, 7 July 2016

A lazy start this morning as our plans only included one museum and two lots of Roman ruins.  As background I spent the morning following the local political disputes over the half-a-Roman-amphitheatre detailed on Steve Howe's excellent Chester website.  For a city with such a significant Roman history it seems incredible that so little is done to preserve and promote real Roman ruins.  After reading all the pages and pages of quite recent nonsense over the half-a-Roman-amphitheatre I take back my sympathy for a city trying to carry on in amongst such a wealth of history.


We started at the Grosvenor Museum:

At the Grosvenor Museum

It's quite a small museum with a massive collection of Roman tombstones found during wall repair where they had been used as filling and sealed away, so preserved for centuries.

Roman tombstones

Serif font!

As old and well preserved as they are I found the museum lacking a little in background information but perhaps that's only for me as somebody who didn't grow up knowing about the Romans coming to Britain - certainly the many class lots of children going through the museum weren't going to grow up not knowing these basic facts.

My favourite things were the luggage labels - bags still need labels after 2000 years!

Roman luggage labels (bet it still went missing)

After the museum we stopped for lunch (jacket potatoes) and then separated as I wanted to get my hair cut and Gary would walk down past the half-a-Roman-amphitheatre and through the Roman Gardens (where bits and bobs of Roman buildings have been stashed), then home.  As it turned out the hair cut was very quick and, with the inadvertent guidance of another of those school groups (these ones dressed in armour and carrying shields were being led through the streets by a Roman legionary), I found the amphitheatre soon enough that Gary was still there.

Half-a-Roman-amphitheatre (with two of the school groups)

We spent a bit of time there - though the amphitheatre itself couldn't be being made less of - watching the legionary (perhaps I malign him and he was a centurion?) organising his class into the classic tortoise formation.  What a wonderful way to learn!

The tortoise advances

Eventually we wandered back through the gardens by which I was prepared to be quite underwhelmed after reading about the wholesale, deliberate destruction of extensive remains of bathhouses in the mid-1960s while digging the foundations for the (now largely empty) shopping centre:

... we recall speaking with an elderly gentleman who had been employed upon the preparations for the precinct's foundations. He told us of the discovery of a large, finely-executed mosaic of an eagle, "made of pieces this big" (indicating with his fingers a distance of about half an inch)- "we got a wet cloth on it and it came up lovely, but when the boss saw it, he ordered it to be got rid of pronto".
He described how the shovel of a digger was then scraped across the surface, completely obliterating the treasure- which was never even photographed....

-- Steve Howe's Chester, http://www.chesterwalls.info/newgate.html

Don't offer me a fake park full of bits and pieces of relocated Roman nif-naf when you've destroyed magnificent ruins to build SHOPS, Chester.


However the park completely redeemed itself within a couple of steps inside its gate for it was full of squirrels!  (Grey squirrels, admittedly, but I'm not fussy.)  Cheeky little squirrels who were obviously comfortable with people in their park, though one did run from a dog when they came face to face. Because they were so cheeky and unconcerned about people I was able to get some great shots of them:

Squirrel photo #1

Squirrel photo #2

Squirrel photo #3

Is there no end to the these squirrel photos?  ;o)

Squirrel photo #4

 Apparently not!

Squirrel photo #5

(I actually did take some photos of the Roman columns and such-like, but the squirrel photos are more fun.)

Back in the room Gary spent another afternoon watching out the window at all the goings on below us; on the walls, the riverside walk, and on the river.  The river is tidal here and the tide came up past the weir this afternoon making it vanish, much to our surprise.


I haven't mentioned it before because I keep forgetting, but Chester smells beautiful!  I think it's the linden trees that are everywhere.  Not only do they look good and make nice shady patches on a hot afternoon's walk around the wall, but the smell is just wonderful.


I do keep remembering things I want to add to the blog after I publish it so am coming back to add this one.  I'm looking forward to getting home and re-reading Mabel Esther Allan's Changes for the Challoners which is the reason I'm here in Chester.  The Challoners move to a house above the shops in the Westgate Row in fictional Francaster (based on real Chester, probably on Eastgate Street) and the book's protagonist makes friends with a local boy obsessed with discovering Roman remains around the place - so much so that they start their own excavation just outside the gates.  Although stopped in this endeavour the boy does eventually make his longed-for Roman discoveries under the very house the Challoners have rented.  I had thought this was the somewhat typical children's story plot but now, after all my reading of the discoveries around and under Chester, the story is considerably more believable.  And, of course, I will be happier thinking that the Roman ruins were discovered and appreciated as in fictional Francaster, rather than discovered and destroyed in real Chester.

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