The fabled Romans, their flaws, and their foes – an introduction to three posts

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A photo I took on my Brownie 127 camera when I was about 10, of the remains of the Roman Wall of Verulamium, with St Albans Abbey on the hill above, the lake, and some intruders

Although I was steeped in history by my Mum* (practically from birth!), I’m not a historian (and was dismissed, thankfully, from my school Latin class, I loathed it!), so this set of posts make no claims to be anything other than an enthusiast’s exploration of a place where a ruined Roman town became part of my world when I was a child. I know this place very well, it’s where the Roman city of Verulamium once stood, in St Albans (Hertfordshire, England), the town where I was born and lived for the first 25 years of my life.

This trio of illustrated essays are based on my personal relationship with the area, and a growing understanding of the departed Romans – and their predecessors. My own (perhaps idiosyncratic) perspective is supplemented by a fair bit of historical and archaeological reading over the last year, so I hope the essays will offer some thought-provoking entertainment, and maybe even some insights, for others who also find fascination and inspiration in the past.

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“Me and the Romans” – growing up in Verulamium

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Remains

The only remaining free-standing section of the Roman Wall in the park, beside the 1930s’ lake

You couldn’t ignore the Romans if you lived in my home town – St Albans (Hertfordshire, UK) – especially in the area where I spent the first ten years of my life in the 1950s. Although our house was quite new the road in front of it was an ancient track, possibly very ancient; in the 1930s most of it was still a lane and it marked the southern edge of this modest-sized, but expanding city. What would become our neighbourhood had been identified as a location for new housing and during preparations for building, Roman-era cemetery sites were discovered in the vicinity, including one in the fields behind the site of our home-to-be, along with Belgic (Iron Age) ditches and earthworks. After I’d left St Albans in the early 1970s, further house building at the other end of the road revealed additional ancient, historic finds that were excavated and proved to be an important Iron Age cemetery – more of that later.

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Unravelling the Romans

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What the Romans did – to vex me; a biased (though considered), personal commentary on their role in my history!

For context from the previous post: at the age of about 9 or 10 a feeling began to surface within me that I really didn’t like the Romans: “from what I’d come to understand they were show-offs, broke their promises and seemed to me to be greedy, cruel bullies – all those qualities I’d been taught weren’t “nice” behaviour! Something about them made me feel uncomfortable.”

Dissing the ancients

Decadent Roman dining – as imagined from the early 20th Century! From an Edwardian encyclopaedia
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Verlamion: the distinguished ancestor of the Roman upstart, Verulamium

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Old sign to Worlebury Iron Age Camp, near Weston-super-Mare.
Photo Liz Milner

Invaders

Eight decades after Julius Caesar’s attempts at invading Britain in 55 and 54 BCE, another invasion was ordered in 43 CE by the Roman Emperor Claudius, desperate for a military triumph to prove his questionable status in Rome. So the Romans came, they saw, but they didn’t actually conquer Britain straight away (or barely at all in the far north), and we largely retained our various native languages.

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East Sussex: excursions and diversions, part 1 – Hastings

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Back in 2012 my partner and I took a week’s touring holiday to South East England; it was partly for me to revisit places I’d known as a child when my grandparents lived in Bexhill-on-Sea, and that I’d not seen since, but also out of curiosity – we felt it was somewhere no longer familiar and probably worth exploring. We were pleasantly surprised by all sorts of things; I wrote about these, along with some other musings on South East England, in this post.

Through an odd turn of fate we’ve become more familiar with one part of this area when we began to visit our elder son who’d moved from Bristol in 2018 to the High Weald near Battle with his partner; her family have connections with this part of Sussex and it’s only a few miles to Bexhill where my grandparents lived. It’s an extraordinarily varied landscape with many contrasts – undulating hills and steep cliffs, marshes and dense, stream-filled woodlands (once the heart of a huge iron working industry in the 17thC that dates even further back to pre-Roman times), and seaside Continue reading →

East Sussex: excursions and diversions, part 2, St Leonards-on-Sea

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The charming St Leonards Warrior Square station, built in 1851

If you continue westwards from Hastings pier (see previous post) along the seafront, once you reach Warrior Square you will have arrived at the relative newcomer of a town, St Leonards. Warrior Square is unmissable – it’s an expansive rectangular park surrounded by very large 19thC seaside apartment houses, but the square is misleadingly-named. It’s less a memorial to fighters than smugglers; “the name Warrior is most likely a corruption of ‘Warehouse’ – smugglers being known to secrete goods in the vicinity”. St Leonards was originally conceived as part of a planned seaside resort in the mid 1820s – “a place of elegant houses designed for the well-off” Continue reading →

East Sussex, excursions and diversions, part 3, Bexhill

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Bexhill on Sea in the 1950s, unused postcard, photo from flickr by Phil Sellens,
Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

 

Four miles or so further west along the coast from St Leonards (see post here) is the odd (my personal perception!) town of Bexhill-on-Sea. I spent several summer holidays there in the mid 1950s staying with my slightly melancholy grandparents who’d moved to a utilitarian bungalow when my Grandfather retired. There were some recurring pleasures to our stays but even as a child the town seemed a bit dull and full of old people! I have only recently found out that comedian Spike Milligan (treasured by my family for his absurdist antics in the Goon Show) was Continue reading →

Glastonbury Encounters – Shops, Shoes, and Sheep

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Glastonbury Tor in the mist from the Mendip hills

Losing a sheepskin mitten, the imminent arrival at the start of February of St Brigid’s Day / the Celtic Festival of Imbolc / Candlemass, and rediscovering some photos from the 70s and 80s are the seemingly random reasons behind writing this linked set of posts about Glastonbury and the surrounding area. The process has been reinforced by the inability to travel [because of the Covid pandemic restrictions at the time of writing] beyond my “local area” (splendid though it is) and my constant impulse to put words and images together, especially in all this suspended time and wearying weather. Continue reading →

Glastonbury Encounters – “England’s mountain(s) green”

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35mm film contact strip of my first visit in the mid 1970s to Glastonbury Tor.

Going up the Tor

I’ve climbed Glastonbury Tor a fair few times over the decades, either as an ad hoc detour on the journey to or from my folks who lived not far from there (see this post), or as an outing from Bristol with family and friends, the weather often changing from sunshine on the climb up to showers or freezing cold winds that generated much complaint from the kids, but the vistas and exhilarating atmosphere at the summit usually won the day. The contact strip in the photo above is possibly from my first visit to Glastonbury in 1975. Continue reading →

Glastonbury Encounters – Springs and Wells

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On the way back to the car after our Glastonbury Tor climb (previous post) we passed the entrance to the Chalice Well Gardens, source of the Red Spring where Joseph of Arimathea is said to have placed the chalice of the Last Supper that also collected the drops of Christ’s blood at the crucifixion – the Holy Grail. I’d taken some German dowsers there in 1988 who were fascinated by the iron oxide-rich water and the powerful responses from their dowsing implements. It’s a lovely space, not just for the well and the water that threads through the site, but for the plants, the Continue reading →