How the Romans lived on the Great North Road

Some really exciting archaeological finds from Ancient Roman times have been announced today. I feel like dancing up and down with delight. But that would make blogging rather difficult, so I’ll stay at my desk long enough to tell you about them.

Archaeologists have found remains of a village, or vicus, outside a Roman fort, at Healam Bridge in North Yorkshire. All forts that were occupied for any length of time soon acquired a civilian settlement around them, where craftsmen, traders, and military suppliers provided the garrison with anything they wanted from new boots to a good night out. Some became towns in their own right which survived long after their founding fort was abandoned.

The Healam Bridge fort has been known for some time, and was partly excavated in the 1990s. Archaeologists then were of the opinion that there’d be a vicus close by which could well be important, and now it’s been found.

Fort and village stand on the A1, formerly the Great North Road, which follows the route of the main Roman road east of the Pennines running from the south all the way up to the northern frontier. The Romans knew how to pick a good route for a road, and the only thing wrong with the A1 is that it can’t cope with today’s traffic and needs upgrading. In this sort of project the archaeologists always get a look-in first before the developers start work.

Among the buildings they’ve found is a water-powered flour mill, quite unusual in Roman times, when most grain-milling was done using animals or by hand. Other nearby buildings seem to have been used for butchering animals and brewing beer, and, one assumes – though the reports I’ve read haven’t mentioned it – baking as well. The objects unearthed from the ancient village include coins, pottery, brooches for fastening clothes together, and animal bones.

These are the details I’ve gleaned so far from today’s media coverage. I intend to find out more by contacting English Heritage and asking if I may talk to people involved in their dig.

Because – and this is the REALLY exciting bit for me – these finds may bear directly on the book I’m writing now, my fourth Aurelia Marcella mystery. Its main setting is another fort and vicus on the old north road, Isurium Brigantum (Aldborough.) And Healam Bridge is the very next fort up that road, only a few miles away. So the information about the village there will almost certainly be relevant to the village at Aldborough where Aurelia will stay.

How much of the newly investigated village was in existence at the turn of the first and centuries, when Aurelia visited Aldborough? Could Aldborough have had a water-mill too, or did the fort there get its flour from the Healam Bridge mill? Were any written materials, inscriptions or such, found that refer to Aldborough?

There’s one more thing that pleases me about today’s announcement,  and it’s a personal one. I’ve been very slow in completing the fourth Aurelia book, due mostly to problems entirely unconnected with writing. I’ve been feeling guilty about not having the job done sooner. But my oh my, wouldn’t I have been sick if these wonderful new discoveries had hit the headlines after, not before, I’d finished my manuscript?

You can see more information, including a good video, at the link below. You have to sit through a bizarre commercial first, but stay with it, it’s worth it.

http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/8351550.Roman__industrial_site__unearthed_in_North_Yorkshire/

Time flies, or does it?

Time flies, you can’t they fly too quickly…

That’s the oldest joke I’ve perpetrated on this blog…yet. (I might bring you some Ancient Roman humour one day, so be warned!) But today I’m puzzling over time itself, and the way that, whatever the scientists say, it passes on Planet Earth at different speeds. Sometimes it gallops, sometimes it crawls. That’s when we’re experiencing it in the present, of course, minute by exciting minute or day by tedious day.

But have you ever thought how, and for that matter why, the speed of time varies when you look backwards, at different parts of your life?

I’ve been thinking about time past, having been to a wonderful reunion of friends I met at University 50 years ago. Much of my undergraduate life back then feels recent, vivid…especially the good bits.

And since I got home from the reunion, the media here in Britain have been marking another past event, (of even more global importance it must be admitted:) Winston Churchill’s famous speech of August 1940 about the RAF winning the Battle of Britain. “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

That was 70 years ago, only 20 years before my first term at Westfield. It’s a shock to realise I went up to University just 15 years after the end of World War 2. Just 15 years? Surely that’s no time at all. When I look back from now to 1995, a lot of events are as real as yesterday, or anyhow last week.

Yet to my 18-year-old undergrad self, the war seemed a long time ago. Not that I was ignorant of it; though I wasn’t yet four when it ended, there were plenty of family experiences and memories to absorb as I grew up. Dad and other relatives served abroad in the forces, or endured the blitz in London, and Mum and the womenfolk kept the home fires burning. And I remember rationing too, especially sweet rationing and how it ended, which was great for morale and dreadful for the nation’s teeth.

But I wasn’t brought up to hate all Germans, or Italians or Japanese; just the evil things that some of them had done. In the 1950s I visited Italy with my parents, and Germany on a school trip, and enjoyed both. When I got to College it seemed quite unremarkable that among us were some German students.

So the war was real to me – but not recent. Weird, isn’t it?

It’s to do with being young, I suppose. Everyone has so much going on in their lives during their years of growing-up that time somehow expands, so that when looking back over it, they feel it’s a longer period than the calendar shows.

And on balance it’s a good thing that each new generation views the world afresh, and doesn’t always carry the grudges and grievances of the past. I don’t want World War 2 to be forgotten; there are too many lessons to be learned from it. And I sometimes get annoyed with today’s youngsters when they don’t know enough of our history. But provided they are taught about the horrors and the heroism of the past,, if it seems a long time ago to them, that must be for the best.

50 years on

I’ve just spent a marvellous weekend that I’ll remember always, a get-together of old friends from University days.

The occasion: a reunion of former students who, like me, started university life at Westfield College, University of London, 50 years ago. We thought the big 5 was worth celebrating. It was.

The place: our old alma mater, the aforementioned Westfield, which isn’t an independent college these days, but a campus belonging to Kings. We stayed in rooms that today’s students still use in term-time. I hope when they look back in 2060, their memories of Westfield are as happy as ours.

The people: a couple of dozen of the women who came up to Westfield in 1960. Some I’ve kept in regular touch with, and they are still among my closest friends; others I hadn’t seen for 40+ years.

It was a magical mix. We all got on like a house on fire. We reminisced, comparing memories and old photos, chatting and drinking endless mugs of coffee and tea as we used to do, though not into the wee small hours the way we did as youngsters!

We agreed we’d enjoyed our time at Westfield, and were lucky to have been there. It had high academic traditions and standards, yet it was a small friendly college so we knew everyone, and we had much more time in small-group tutorials than did our contemporaries at the larger places.  And its Hampstead location was perfect – pleasantly green, but very handy for the centre of London, theatres, concerts, shops…

It was a wonderful time to be young in London, with so much to see and do, and the feeling that life was opening up and anything was possible for us. It was the start of what they later called the Swinging Sixties, and don’t let anyone tell you that “the sixties were nothing special really.” They were very special. I know because I was there.

Westfield was unusual even then, because we lived in College for all of our three years. Some of our old rooms are still there, though we found plenty of changes, not all for the better in our view. But I still felt at home as I strolled round the buildings; even more so as I meandered down Memory Lane, drinking coffee in a student kitchen and talking the hind legs off several donkeys.

After our Saturday night dinner, a gorgeous buffet, we took turns to tell everyone what we’ve been doing since we graduated. Careers…travel…families…often surprising, all fascinating. And we sang a few of the old songs that we’d written and performed in the student revues we put on almost every term. The photo shows me and my friend Janet Lee, strutting our stuff fifty years on. The audience laughed in the right places and sang the choruses, and you could probably have heard us on Hampstead Heath.

Aficionados of crime fiction will know Janet by her pen name: Rhys Bowen, author of the best-selling Royal Spyness and Molly Murphy books. And there must have been something in the Westfield air back then that encouraged writers; another of our singers on Saturday was author and playwright Sandra Freeman. We three always knew we’d end up as writers…

None of us in 1960 could have predicted how much the world would have changed by 2010, let alone how good it would be to re-unite and share our thoughts and memories. But we did it, and it was wonderful. We’re already planning another reunion in three years’ time.

A star at 90

P.D. James, the queen of British mystery writers, turned 90 this week. She’s one of those rare people who deserve the adjective amazing.

Most people know her mysteries, featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh or young PI Cordelia Gray, both interesting sleuths who solve twisty, mind-puzzling crimes; if you haven’t sampled these yet, you’ve a treat in store. And their author herself is as interesting as any of her creations.

I had the pleasure of hearing her speak at a St. Hilda’s Mystery & Crime Weekend. The British Detective Story: The Golden Age and the New Millennium was the title of her paper, and she was brilliant, stimulating and funny in its presentation, and incisive yet gracious in dealing with the variety of questions that followed. That was three years ago, when she was a mere 87.

At 90, to nobody’s surprise, she still has all her marbles, (and she always has had many more than average,) judging by the various media interviews she’s given this week.

The other day she was asked on radio the awful, inevitable question, “What does it feel like being 90?” She gave the perfect answer: “I suppose my body feels 90 sometimes, but  on the whole I don’t feel my age…but then having never been 90 before, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to feel like.”

Last December she caused a stir when she herself was in the radio interviewer’s chair, grilling the Director-General of the BBC, Mark Thompson. As a former Governor of the Beeb she knew what she was about, and took him to task over inflated management salaries, bureaucracy, and the quality of programmes. She said much that we, the BBC’s listeners and viewers, would like to have said. Mr. Thompson must have wished he’d been confronted by one of the regular BBC interrogators, like John Humphreys or Jeremy Paxman, who daily challenge public figures on our behalf. However expert they’d been, they wouldn’t have faced him with a more telling mixture of authority, knowledge and courtesy.

Many happy returns, Baroness James. You’re a star. Long may you continue to shine.

Happy Yorkshire Day

It’s Yorkshire Day, so I’m flying the Yorkshire flag – virtually, anyhow.

I was born and bred in Yorkshire, (Holmfirth, near Huddersfield, in the Pennines,) and I’ve lived in several different parts of God’s Own County: the Dales, the City of York, the Wold country, and I’m now happily settled on the fringes of the Wolds, very near the coast. I’ve fond memories of all of them, though we left Holmfirth before I was three so I can’t recall much about it.

It’s a great idea to have a Yorkshire Day, but if you know any Yorkshire tykes, you’ll realise we don’t need a special occasion for telling the rest of the world how great we are: we do that all the time.  We’re proud of our home county. Why not? It’s got vivid history, wonderful scenery, some of the industries that made Britain great (fewer of those than in olden times, alas,) and has produced many, many famous sons and daughters.

What’s special about Yorkshire people? Our reputation is for being hard workers, canny dealers, people of our word, and thrifty…extremely thrifty, which is the characteristic our detractors pick on. One of the best-known verses about us goes:

See all, hear all, say nowt;
Eat all, sup all, pay nowt;
Never do owt for nowt, but if tha must do owt for nowt, do it for thesen.
(Translator’s note on last line: If you must do anything for nothing, do it for yourself.)

True tykes are actually proud of this. We print it on mugs and tea towels and calendars and postcards and for visitors to buy. Q.E.D. (That’s Latin, tha  knowst.)

My mother, another proud Yorkshirewoman, used to quote a rhyme about the Yorkshire coat of arms. Not the well-known white rose pictured on our flag, an emblem going back six centuries to the Wars of the Roses, when the noble families of Lancaster and York fought over the crown of England. (The Lancashire emblem is the red rose; too garish, tha knowst.)

No, my mother said our coat of arms is a flea, a fly, and a bacon flitch. Another ancient rhyme:

A fly will sup wherever he can,
And so, by gum, will a Yorkshireman.
A flea will bite whoever he can,
And so, by gum, will a Yorkshireman.
A flitch is no good till it’s hanged from a tree,
And nor is a Yorkshireman, don’t you see.

Probably true. And it would be hard to make a heraldically pleasing design out of a flea, a fly and a flitch. We’ll stick with the white rose.

Until quite recently, I and my fellow tykes couldn’t legally have flown our flag publicly. Until a couple of years ago, it wasn’t properly “registered” – bureaucracy, you don’t really want to know. You could be fined for flying it. Now it’s legally recognised, so I could fly one if I chose. I’ve never possessed one, actually, but if I had, I’d have been happy to fly it in face of bureaucrats telling me I shouldn’t, but there seems much less point now, when it’s allowed.

Perverse? Who, me? No! Just typical Yorkshire.