Entered on 11 August 2003 at 8:57 a.m..
What Have the Roman's Ever Done For Us?
This weekend I was up in Carlisle in the Cumbria region of the UK, having a bit of a Roman weekend. The whole point of my visith was to see (and climb on) Hadrian's Wall. This is a wall which was erected in the 3rd century by the romans under a few different emperor's, the last on being Hadrian. It was built to keep the heathenistic Scot's out of the Roman Empire. Think of it as a mini Wall of China. It was about 5 feet wide and about 8 feet tall. It is gone or burried in most places now, but they've just completed a massive clean up effort and, you can now walk the lenght of the wall from the North Atlantic to the Irish Sea. In true English style however (dispite the blistering heat everywhere else in the country) it was raining when we got to the wall. So we didn't walk along much of it, but just hit the high spots, of an excavated fortress, and an active archeological site. I was really impressed with the active site, I've never seen such beautifull pottery and glass jar. Everything was in amazing condition due to lack of oxygen in the soil. I've also discovered that in the modern world, very little is new. We stole everything from the Romans from plumbing, to tools, to jewlry and almost everything in between. Amazing.
I also got to see around the town. Carlisle is a beautiful little city. I've never seen so many flowers in a city before. According to my host the've really been working on revitalizing the town center over the past 10 years. Carlisle has both a Cathedrial and a Castle which are made out of red sand stone. A lot of the other buildings are also made out of the same material, and it gives the city a rather warm quality (which is probably of little comfort in the winter).
On Saturday we went to a country show with livestock judgeing, arts and crafts etc. The highligts for me were the lace makers and the Cumbrian wrestlers. The lace making was incredible, and the wrestling was really funny. We got to the show early, but the wrestling didn't start until much later, so we only got to see the younger kids. Highly amusing. Especially because most of the competitions were so one sided. Often times the bigger kid would hold his opponent in mid air and gently lower him to the ground. Additing to the amusement is that the traditional costume for this kind of wrestling is white long-johns and some form of bright underware over top. Here's a picture that was on the BBC website of the show I was at.
The down side of the show was that it was HOT. In the mid 90s with no shade to be had anywhere. The poor sheep. I'd never seen a sheep pant before, but those little guys seemed to be really suffering. Also early in the day I got stung by a bee. Not fun. What really made me mad about this, was that it was an unprovoked attack. I was just standing still taking a picture of a tractor, when he got me on the underside of my upper arm.