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.