Roman remains, and eagles

I'm not that interested in their beaten gold necklaces, their large glittering rubies set in silver. I much prefer fragmented scraps of ancient leather sandals, a thin awl made of bone, the piled up remains of a midden. I get sick of the array of golden objects in museums. These items only give us just a small clipped part of their large, sprawling, messy story that we are, still, a part of, if only because we have the responsibility of telling it.

Old Roman mosaics because they are a mix of all these things. They tell us legends, they tell us about the people who lived in those places, and they tell us a little bit too about the history of an area based on how well they have survived, or not. Imagine all those feet that walked across those tiny carefully arranged stones, in their leather shoes, and why they walked where they did.

A farmhouse, on the way to the Lullingstone villa - perhaps, centuries away, someone will visit the foundations of this site,
shift through fragments of dinner plates and bathroom tiles and admire the peak of a leather cap.

The Lullingstone Roman villa in Eynsford, Kent, is fantastic. We went there on a gorgeous day and, after a false start, found our way along the road to a side track through some farmland. The upper fields were filled with golden wheat, the border trees were green. I could not help but think it idyllic.

The villa at Lullingstone, protected in the centre of the Centre. 

And it seemed, when we reached the villa visitor centre and had a look around inside, that it must have been that way for a long time - idyllic, pastoral, a place to want to live. With the river nearby, good soil in the ground, and a reasonably warm climate, it's long been a place humans have been. When the Romans moved into England it was one of the areas they settled, for a time.

The Lullingstone villa was built in the 1st century, and went through various expansions, modifications and occupations over hundreds of years until  it was destroyed by a fire sometime in the 5th. Today the foundations and parts of the lower wall remain, along with fragments of art and daily life. The story of the building suggests changes in architectural fashion, fortune and occupants, and culture. My favourite example is the pagan shrine where inhabitants could worship local water deities and spirits, which was later plastered over, the old niche in the wall filled in, suggesting a shift towards the worship of household deities in this cult room. Later still the space was altered to house a Christian chapel above, decorated with the Chi-Ro symbol and art that today graces the British Museum's walls. It's possible that, even with the chapel in place, pagan ritual continued in the cult room below.

I think the villa is best known for its mosiac, though. The site was rediscovered because of the mosaic when a farmer, digging a post into the ground, struck it.

The mosaic, from the British Heritage website.

The mosaic shows a scene from one of my favourite stories as a child - Pegasus. It shows Bellerophon riding on this magnificent creature, slaying the chimera, with the faces of the seasons and geometric patterns surrounding it. There are also some things that may be slugs with lion tails, I'm not sure, I just know I wouldn't have liked to meet them in the cult room or the chapel.

The detail is beautiful. It's amazing this could have survived so well, underneath the ground, underneath time, and kept its colour. The mosaic could be a demonstration of pagan worship, or an allegory for Christian values. It could be both. And as for why I loved the Pegasus story so much, I don't know. I never liked horses that much, unless they had wings or horns.

It was also interesting to be able to see some of the other odds and ends that were excavated from the earth around the villa, including skeletons and burial ware from the family tomb, carved marble faces of strangers, goose remains from a doubtless delicious feast near the kitchen, a tiny baby's bones that would have died too young to be recognised as a person or to deserve a resting place in sacred ground. Ten days, they say. That's how long you needed to live before you were human. It seems unfair, and tragic, but I think it's also practical, and a way of managing grief in a time where infant deaths were far more commonplace.

A view across to some of the displays, above the villa remains.

They also had on display a recipe for milk-fed snails (in modern script). I don't recall it exactly, but I know it involves soaking a vast quantity of snails in a bucket of milk until they are so swollen they just fall out of their shells. I think the next step is to eat them.

Later we went for a walk down into Eynsford itself, a small and idyllic village surrounded by trees and fields of livestock and golden wheat. I had never see a field of wheat before, somehow. It seems odd that I hadn't, when fields of wheat are such a staple of literature and Western diets.

We visited the ruins of an old Norman castle, near the edge of the river. There were flowers at the edge of the water, and bees everywhere.

And we discovered Eagle Heights because of a road sign, and visited that as well, managing to catch the end of one flight display and the entirety of another. It was well worth it. They are spectacular creatures, birds, and it's easy to forget it when you see them most days - little sparrows, thrushes, blackbirds. I like those birds, but birds of prey are something else. Some are huge and, as they fly above the crowd their wings brush your head and you are delighted but also glad to not be small. Some are so fast you are afraid as they wizz past your head they will crash through you like a bullet.

I had just read H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and it was exciting to see some of these birds after just reading about training a goshawk.

The occupants of the Roman villa, whether Roman or Briton, must have sometimes kept birds of prey like these - probably not bald eagles, or fishing eagles, but peregrines perhaps - to hunt. 

I O U

I owe you blog posts. It's just that weve been busy not only doing travel things, but general life things, like working and commuting and making dinner and trying to find a place to live more permanently. Then catching flights.

Currently we are in Luxembourg - on a boat cruise on the Moselle river as I write this, though I'll have to post it later in the hotel when I have teh internetz. Luxembourg is in one side of the river, Germany the other. Its a sunny day. We are in wine country.

We have been to Kent, and seen Roman villa remains and birds of prey and a castle.

We went to a Greek play in Islington.

I went to the MacKenzie Highland Games in Stathpeffer with my grandmother - every five years they have an international gathering, and this year there were 13 from NZ. It was fantastic to be in Scotland again, and to go to a new part of it with some of my history. And, of course, to see the tree planted for my grandfather on the castle grounds.

I have been fighting tube strikes by working from home where possible. I have been reading lots of books.

We went to Cologne in Germany last Saturday, exploring that city and taking day trips to Bonn and Aachen. We took the train to Luxembourg on Friday morning. And now it is time to continue looking around - mostly, at the moment, at rows of vines going up Luxembourgish hills and across German flats.

Legend tells of a lost operating theatre

I want you to picture Raymond Russell in the mid 50s. He's of a medium-height, English, with a pair of rounded glasses and an impressive Doctorate in History. He's sitting in the Archives, probably at Kew - rows and rows of old information, books to ceilings, at a small table with papers spread out. He makes notes in a long scrawl that runs nearly off the edges of his spiral bound notebook. At least, that's how I like to picture him.

Legend tells of a lost operating theater - but quietly, only to those who take the time to listen. Dr Raymond Russell listens because he is researching the history of St Thomas' Hospital. When St Thomas relocated to Lambeth in 1862, all the entrances to whatever herb garrets and operating theaters for women it may have contained were blocked up. Time passed. The people who knew about it kicked the bucket - though papers, those very same papers Russell was poring over, kept its secrets.

Russell decided to investigate in St Thomas' Church, which still stood and had been part of the original hospital. He looked first to the ground, for a secret basement operating theater, and found nothing. He looked next to the high space above his head in the rafters of the church. One story tells that he climbed up into a space in the attic, stepping out into an old empty wooden space, dusty and dank, where some corners still held dusty dried herbs. Another says that he broke through the church wall into the theater itself, disturbing a century's worth of dust to rediscover what instantaneously became the UK's oldest known operating theater. Either way, all was completely dark - the skylight replaced long ago by slates and all other windows blacked over with smog and dirt.

Imagine Raymond Russell's torch going dramatically out as he came into the room, pulling out the matchbook he got from St George's pub, and lighting the space with long vague shadows that trembled under the thin weight of his breath on the flame.

Today the operating theater and the herb garret have been made into a marvelous, small and quirky museum. You can follow a set of tight winding stairs upwards to pay at the desk before one more (less winding) short journey to the entrance of the garret. You will discover an assortment of herbs and fragments of animal - and some recipes - reflecting medieval health care. There are displays showing some of the tools used in early surgery, which will fascinate you and make you very glad for advances in medicine and science. There are a few slivers of liver and a chunk of preserved human brain.

There are dried opium poppy heads, which the stories said were found in the rafters soon after Russell rediscovered the space, but where actually found by someone called in to do pest control in the 50s. As you might imagine, after a century of being left to their own devices, there was a thriving community of furry and scaly creatures up there. He discovered there were layers of floor boards - the doctors of old were no carpenters and, when old boards started to rot, they simply built over them - and discovered the poppy heads down underneath them. The museum knows this, because the man himself showed up a couple of years ago and identified the dried poppy heads (which he had varnished! Never varnish an archaeological find! Not even in the 50s). He was apparently quite delighted to see them there, and to see the space had been so well used.

And there is, of course, the operating theater itself. It dates from 1822, when part of the herb garret was converted to provide a space for women in need of surgery (or help producing babies, which looking at some of the implements they once used to "assist" this process was very akin to the surgery of the day). In the 1800s, your chances of surviving surgery (possibly childbirth) were 50% on a good day.

So now you need to imagine yourself in a small wooden room, lying on your back on a slab of wood. There is a skylight above you to let in natural light, and candles posted around the room to add a little more. Around you, rising up like a small amphitheater, are rows of benches. These are all occupied by curious and eager men wearing the garb of student doctors, toting whatever scrolls and notepads they took to such sterling opportunities to observe a master at work.

You are most likely tied down, especially if you have damaged a limb (they will either need to amputate this, or dis- then relocate it) or have some kind of internal trouble (they will need to open you up) or, well, anything really. You're tied down. But they've given you opium to help ease the pain you're currently experiencing, because it's about to get a helluva worse. On the table beside you are a variety of saws in different sizes, some scissors, a selection of knives with different edges, and a whole collection of instruments for grabbing and pulling and twisting. They are all incredibly sharp and all very silver and shiny. 

They don't stay shiny for long.