Roman villa

We managed to get to Brading Roman Villa this year, with last year's visit not getting past their café for tea and cake - probably one of the chewy slices described at Roman somethings, a sort of fruity flapjack set on a layer of chocolate and probably containing more calories than a Mars Bar. A fine café with splendid views over the down lands to the south.

BH claims to remember going to the Villa before the current, rather grand shed was built in 2004, but the best I can do is notice of a visit in 2008 at reference 1. Perhaps every other year after that.

A web page

On entry, I was struck by a circular replica of part of a mosaic, about 4 feet in diameter, possibly the head in the screen shot above, taken from reference 2. A bit strong at several thousand pounds, but it might do rather well as a centrepiece in the floor of a casual dining area - provided you had a big enough house and went in for casual dining. Screen shot also included as an example of the bad habit of graphics designers of placing text on top of pictures, with the result that the text is more or less illegible. The booklets sold by heritage sites seem to do it quite a lot too. Does no-one tell these designers that this particular wheeze does not work?

One of things that Villa does is to put on travelling exhibitions from elsewhere in the museum world, and some of them have been very good. Put on in a specially secured room at the back of the villa, a room boasting a door which would not disgrace a bank. This year the subject of the display was hoards, mostly of coins. So we learned that defacing of coins and weapons before placing them in a grave was common, presumably, at least in part, to deter grave robbers. That a single hoard might contain as many as 50,000 coins packed into leather bags. That a small screw topped bottle containing a two or three inch stack of 20 dollar gold coins had been turned up in Hackney. And one set of coins, curiously, had been donated by HM Treasury in 1973, perhaps some obscure working of the treasure trove system.

We were left wondering how ancient coins were made, with BH opting for moulding and with my opting for stamping them out of strips of metal. Inquiring this afternoon, the top of Bing's list seems to be coin dealers who include a bit of history in their websites, for example reference 3. The important bit seems to be that coins were stamped out of blanks using a top die, rather like a chisel or screwdriver in shape, and a bottom die which acted as the anvil. Making the blanks and the dies was another matter, and may well have involved some moulding. But I think I win on points.

We also took their roast chicken lunch, very much the sort of thing you might get in a public house, for example, Wetherspoons, but good value and served in quiet, pleasant surroundings.

We then spent a bit of time looking at the remains of the villa itself. Which included a poster which told us that the roof of one of the bigger outbuildings would have weighed of the order of 100 tons - which sounded a lot to me. Guessing, the tiles on our roof, replaced maybe ten years ago, might weigh around 10 tons. And checking with Bing, he says modern roofing tiles might come in at 10lbs/square foot, which works out about right if we say our roof amounts to a 60 feet square. So something to be checked with the Roman Villa people next time we are there. Maybe an email a little before we arrive to warm them up?

We closed the visit by spitting down the well, said to be around 60 feet deep, and seeing how long it was before one heard the splash. Which turned out to be several seconds. Something else to be done properly, with a stop watch (or telephonic substitute), next time we are there.

Mystery tree

Mystery tree enlarged

Home to take a walk across Brading marshes, starting from Quay Lane and heading in a St. Helens direction. The first item being a mystery tree in someone's garden. A small deciduous tree with compound leaves, ash-like but not ash. My this afternoon's guess of acacia fits the images turned up by Bing, but I do not feel confident enough to claim a full tweet yet.

Lots of swallows and crows. And several old iron opportunities, although no old drain covers to be seen. Perhaps if we had gone back during the week, they would have turned something up, but we did not get around to it.

Lake one

Lake two

And I came across a private fishing lake towards the St. Helens end of the Eastern Yar, the river which once flowed into Brading Haven, an important harbour in the middle ages, before the sheep cattle grazers moved in.

And so home.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=brading+archeological+process.

Reference 2: https://bradingromanvilla.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.capstonecoins.com/the-making-of-ancient-coins/.

Reference 4: https://www.bradingcommunityarchive.com/history-of-brading/.