It is smaller than you’d imagine. You can get closer to it than you think. And aside from the other people and the ropes and whatever curious, cosmic thing the location was doing to my camera lens, this isn’t a bad little atmospheric video:
Here we are:
Nearby are early Bronze Age burial mounds, knowns as Cursus barrows. The people buried in those mounds lived a few centuries after the stones were put in place. A huge earthwork enclosure was built about a millennia before the stones were raised. You can walk the Cursus enclosure, and if you figure out their purpose, you’ll be the first one. No one knows for sure why the early Neolithic people put in the effort.
If you know how to look for it, you can see the Avenue, which are parallel banks of ditches. It links Stonehenge to the river Avon. (One of the four Avons, as we learned in the previous post‘s video.) The Avenue was put into place around 2300 BC, around the time the bluestones were being rearranged. The part nearest the stones are still low earthworks, the rest are plowed flat. The section lines up nicely with the midsummer sunrise and midwinter sunset.
Click to embiggen this one in a new browser tab:
The ruins you and I know are several different stages of work, starting about 5,000 years ago, with the big circle. A few centuries passed before the sarsen stones were placed in the horseshoe and then a circle with the bluestones put between them. Some time later the bluestones were rearranged. Some have fallen since then, some have been removed. Then, during the middle of the 20th century some were reinstalled during a 45-year restoration project.
Still in Bath, at the historic feature that defines and named the town. The touring here is almost entirely indoors. You need more time than we were allowed, to be honest. And the design of the tour, which is 100 percent determined by the historical plumbing, is not conducive to the number of people they let inside at one time.
If you’re interested in the history of the Romans in Britannia, this is a great place to come, but do it during a slow period. The foot traffic was all but intolerable.
Nevertheless, there is plenty to see here. You first get a view of the famous bath from above. And you’re told to not drink, swim, dive, touch, lick, perspire in, think about or wink at the water. But you can go right up to it, later in your self-guided tour.
Best part of the tour:
There are statues of the Roman governors of the province of Britannia. Mixed among them are likenesses of Roman emperors with particular connections to Britain. I’d like you to meet them now.
This is Julius Caesar. He invaded Britain twice: in 55 and 54 BC. The first time it was late summer, and less than a full-scale move. It was unsuccessful, giving him no more than a beachhead toehold at Kent. During his second visit the Romans installed a king friendly to Rome, but there wasn’t a lot of territory conquered. There were between one and four million people in Britain at the time.
Here’s the emperor Claudius. The Roman conquest started under his reign, in 43 AD. Literature and monuments suggest he won with minimal bloodshed. The locals were already beaten.
That brings us to Vespasian, who fought for Claudius before, a few decades later, oversaw the Roman expansion in the modern British Isles.
Here’s Ostorius Scapula, a Roman general who governed Britain from 47 until his death five years later. He was more of a tactician than a politican, and is thought to be buried somewhere nearby in Wales, where much of his military campaigning took place.
Suetonius Paulinus came to power as governor in 58 and his first two years on the job were considered successful. He was the lead man for more than a few battles, perhaps the largest being when he stood with an army of 10,000 Romans against a mob of Britons estimated at almost a quarter-million strong. The Romans and their discipline won, and won big. Some 400 Romans were killed, compared to reports of almost 80,000 of the locals. It turned into a slaughter.
He was, perhaps, too good at his job as a military governor. The Romans took him out of the job, fearing that his fighting would lead to stronger and more bitter resistance.
Julius Agricola was given a military command in Britain, where his military career had also started. When it ended in 73, he was made patrician in Rome and appointed governor of Gallia Aquitania. In 77 he was tapped as consul and governor of Britannia and he completed the conquest of what is now Wales and northern England. He marched on the far northern territories of Scotland and established forts across much of the Lowlands. He went home in 85. He died eight years later at the age of 53.
Here’s Hadrian, emperor from 117 to 138. He rebuilt the Pantheon and constructed the Temple of Venus and Roma. Perhaps you’ve heard of Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the northern limit of Britannia. He visited in 122, after hearing of a revolt there in the previous years. but never saw that wall finished. He went off to fight some rebels in Africa and then visited his beloved Greece, then Asia and then Egypt and finally back to Rome in 133, ending the ultimate road trip. He never returned to Britain.
Which brings us to the last statue, of Constantine the Great. He was the Roman Emperor from 306 to 337 AD. As a younger man he fought north of Hadrian’s Wall. His dominion consisted of Britain, Gaul, and Spain. He therefore commanded one of the largest Roman armies, stationed along the important Rhine frontier. He founded Constantinople, of course, and also stopped Christian persecutions and legalized Christianity. In 325 he summoned the famous Council of Nicaea.
The Temple pediment is one of the highlights of the Bath tour, and it is one of only two truly classical temples from Roman Britain. An animation shows how the pediment would have looked in Roman times.
The pediment features the image of a fearsome head carved in Bath stone and it is thought to be the Gorgon’s Head which was a powerful symbol of the goddess Sulis Minerva.
Inside the temple you would have found the statue of the goddess Sulis Minerva. The gilt bronze head is one of the best known objects from Roman Britain. The head may well date from the first century AD. There are six layers of gilding. The first two use a technique known as fire gilding and the four later layers are applied as gold leaf. There is corrosion which has affected it in parts where it lay in the ground for over a thousand years. And you can also see a rectangular cut beneath the chin, thought to be a repair from a casting flaw.
The Bath from ground level. I just imagine Roman lifeguards yelling “No running on the deck!”
The engineering is impressive, still in operation and the tour lets you see some fine examples of Roman handiwork and ingenuity. There are plenty of video screens and dioramas trying to explain life in Roman Britannia. There are tin scrolls where people wrote out curses against those that wrong them. There are impressive coin displays, with currency covering a span of 1,700 years. The oldest coin is as far removed from the newest coin as we are. It is remarkable to consider in terms like that.
Here’s a 40-second video dose from inside the facility:
And, finally:
adventures / history / London / photo — Comments Off on The Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul 16 May 15
This is the Abbey, and on this spot there has been a place of Christian worship, in one form or another, for more than a millennia. Three churches have been there, the first, in 757, an Anglo-Saxon monastery. Norman conquerors destroyed that one and a cathedral was started around 1090, but it was rubble a few hundred years later.
The first King of all England, King Edgar, was crowned here in 973. The monasteries here were closed in 1539, and in 1616 much of the current building was repaired, with new pinnacles and flying buttresses added inside and out in the 19th century. You can see the interior here.
At the top you can just make out the statue of Christ in glory. That one was hard to shoot. But this is the one just above the door, a likeness of King Henry VII. It was placed during a restoration around 1900:
These are the statues installed on either side of the main door. One is Peter and the other is Paul:
You wonder what things people take from their young adult years, what stories they carry into their hopefully long and prosperous lives. Someone will tell a few of these stories for a good long while, for sure. These celebrations are in the cafeteria:
Pretty cool, huh? One of the tennis players has been in two of my classes. One of the track athletes has been in my class and he’ll be getting his second conference championship ring. One of his teammates is our sports editor this spring and he’s getting his first ring, as a freshman. All of that is nice, but I just thought it was a nice touch how the folks in the athletic department took steps to point out their team’s success.
Paper tonight, and a run today and a lot of time in the office working on class things. Sometimes it feels as if the grading will never stop.
You might have heard of the weekend storm in the Gulf. One sailor died in the squall, and the search is on for others still missing. Sad story:
“I’ve now sailed thousands and thousands of miles and I’ve never seen a situation come up so fast,” he said.
And yet it was on land that Creekmore got the most terrible news.
“He’s a wonderful, very brilliant, very bright young man,” Creekmore said of Beall, who owned Kris Beall Construction in Alexandria, La., and was from nearby Pineville.
Creekmore described Beall as “very passionate about sailing.”
I was downtown tonight, for pizza, and so this was a good night to also see this story, which has probably never happened here before:
As cities around the country look for ways to go green, a recent report shows Birmingham to be leading the way in terms of air quality.
Ozone and fine particulate concentrations in the Birmingham area are at their lowest-ever recorded levels, according to the Jefferson County Department of Public Health.
You don’t have to go terribly far back in time to see the city in an entirely different, cloudy light.
The air has been getting progressively better over the years. You can even see the skyline for miles. I remember days as a kid when you couldn’t say that.
“My biggest concern and the gravest concern of all of us was — we were surrounded there — can they keep us with enough ammunition?” the 94-year-old Kinney, who grew up in Cullman County and now lives in Calera, said about the battle.
“We had been sitting there for 13 days and the Japanese had us surrounded. We had no food and no water for five days,” he said.
Kinney, who had suffered two hits from shrapnel and a bullet across his helmet during the fighting, recalled the Nhpum Ga battle came to a halt on Easter Sunday morning in 1944 with a victory over Japanese soldiers. It was the latest of several hard-fought battles for the Marauders, named after their commander, Gen. Frank D. Merrill, but it wasn’t their last.
“When we were disbanded, there was less than 200 that were still fighting,” said Kinney.
Nothing little about that.
I tell students that obituaries aren’t about the way people died, but about how they lived. And, occasionally, that makes for a story worth telling grandly. Here’s the story of a woman who was abandoned at a train depot as a baby, who then lived for a century:
Ione’s 65-year-old daughter, Margaret Pacifici, a nurse, said, “She wanted perfection.”
Son Joe, 68, an organic chemist, said, “If you had done your best and it was not good enough, mother would tell you to do better.”
Joseph, her husband, died in 1984. After that, Ione traveled. She read. She drove a Buick until she was 92.
She drove a Buick. Whoever writes mine, a long, long time from now, I hope they remember to get in a lot of small details like that. In any kind of stories, I think, those small details are the one that make the imagery sing.
If any one thing inspired him, during this period, it was Kirke Simpson’s news story on the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Simpson was an Associated Press reporter.
“I cried over that,” Pyle told friends later, “and I can quote the lead or almost any part of the piece.”
Kirke Simpson, as an old AP man, won the Pulitzer for the piece Pyle was talking about, the first wire service writer to win the Prize. And that piece is an incredible piece of literature and history. The lead Pyle mentions:
Under the wide and starry skies of his own homeland America’s unknown dead from France sleeps tonight, a soldier home from the wars.
Alone, he lies in the narrow cell of stone that guards his body; but his soul has entered into the spirit that is America. Wherever liberty is held close in men’s hearts, the honor and the glory and the pledge of high endeavor poured out over this nameless one of fame will be told and sung by Americans for all time.
Toward the end:
Through the religious services that followed, and prayers, the swelling crowd sat motionless until it rose to join in the old, consoling Rock of Ages, and the last rite for the dead was at hand. Lifted by his hero-bearers from the stage, the unknown was carried in his flag-wrapped, simple coffin out to the wide sweep of the terrace. The bearers laid the sleeper down above the crypt, on which had been placed a little soil of France. The dust his blood helped redeem from alien hands will mingle with his dust as time marches by.
The simple words of the burial ritual were said by Bishop Brent; flowers from war mothers of America and England were laid in place.
Something fun … this is at Birmingham’s WBRC. Mickey Ferguson is the weatherman. Swell guy, lots of fun. Wonderfully comical. And this other gentleman stole the show:
This 92 year-old man got to dance during a weather forecast because the world is okay sometimes: http://t.co/zYWmxGX95g
