12th of August - hmm, first day of the grouse season! I don't know why I remembered that, but I did. I'd guess, there having been a fair bit of rain this summer, that it wasn't a particularly glorious 12th today - I seem to think that wee grouse babies don't do well in wet summers, so there probably weren't many birds to shoot.
Anyway, where was I before I got so badly waylaid by the sporting habits of our elders and betters? Oh yes, today. Anna (my daughter, age 9) and I charged North this morning, to spend the day around Hadrian's Wall. And a good day was had - it must have been good, as she slept all the way home! We didn't go to a lot of sites - just the Roman Army Museum at Carvoran and the fort at Vindolanda. We didn't have the two impatient members of the family with us, so we took our time at each site (and in each building, and at each display case in the museums, etc.) and soaked it all in.
I love going to Vindolanda - I suppose the first time I went I must have been about Anna's age and I've been back, probably at least annually, ever since. Because it's an 'active' site, there is always something new. At the moment, they're digging in the NW corner of the last (3rd-4th Century) fort (the little, playing-card-shaped, one that's had its walls excavated since I can't remember when) - and finding all sorts of new stuff - including a rather nice altar, which someone found on their very first day of digging!
They're also digging another area to the West of most of their other diggings, where they've got down into one of the earlier stone forts (which must have been more than twice the size of the last one). They're in the process of excavating the West gate. I talked to the bloke doing the digging this afternoon, and he was cursing his luck - they've dug practically the whole gateway, and they've found no dating evidence. My best guess is that it's probably contemporaneous with Hadrian's Wall itself. He was just starting to lift some of the roadway, to see if he could find anything to date it. I said that it would be good to find a nice coin nestling under a stone, to which his reply was that knowing his luck it would probably be from Mark Anthony.
So, after a day tramping around Romans sites, I'm even more 'fired up' again about Romans - as if I really needed to get any keener on Romans! There's something very satisfying about painting figures from a period, and to see building remains and original artefacts from the exact same period. I haven't looked at the photos I took yet, but if any are up to snuff, I might post them here tomorrow.
Oh, and I had a good idea too - thanks to "ironcow2103", who provided the inspiration: I am going to call my "Conflict between the Roman and Sassanian Empires in the Third Century AD" project "Fire in the East", after Harry Sidebottom's first 'Marcus Clodius Ballista' novel, which provided a lot of the impetus to get started on the project. I think it's a cracking good title - it's descriptive on more than one level - it suggests a war in the Eastern Empire, but the mention of fire also implies the involvement of the Sassanians, as fire was an important element in Zoroastrianism, the Sassanian state religion.