Salisbury and Cotswolds Holiday Day 8–Cirencester and Home–First Post

On our final day, after leaving our lovely farm bed and breakfast, we visited Cirencester before beginning the journey home. We ended up spending most of the day there as it was just great.

My hubby took me to the amazing museum which celebrates the rich Roman history of the town. The museum is of a very high standard indeed, with the exhibits beautifully displayed. Just as we arrived, a school party from Oxford also arrived, and we spent some time going around with them, and I was very impressed with the standard of teaching, and the responses of the children. It was clearly a very good school and the children behaved very well throughout.

Adjoining the shop on the way out was a small gallery where they hold temporary exhibitions of local art, and the current one was based on William Shakespeare. I have done a separate post about this – more delicious art! We’ve been so blessed with it on this holiday!

The entrance lobby of the museum was screened off with a glass wall through which we could see the first of many displays of mosaics and wall paintings. Cirencester was an important Roman settlement and many very fine mosaics and other artefacts have been unearthed.

Looking through the lobby to the Roman Garden beyond.

Throughout the museum we found this beautiful logo, sand-blasted onto various glass panels, reflecting the museum’s emphasis on mosaics.

In the first photo you may have noticed a large hare in front of the mosaics on the wall. Cirencester is currently holding a “hare festival” and various shops and other venues have these large figures, each decorated in a different way. The museum one was embellished, appropriately, with mosaics. A lovely piece of work.

You can read more about the Hare Festival here. Lots more images here.

There were quite a few life-sized displays of figures illustrating life in Roman Britain (and other periods too – our time was limited so we just concentrated on the Romans). The school children were particularly fascinated by the mounted Roman cavalryman – or more particularly by his horse!

I am always fascinated that the Romans did not use stirrups, which were invented much later, and the horses are understood to have been unshod. Despite this, they were still a force to be reckoned with.

Walking in on this display, I almost apologised for disturbing a man sitting on his bed!

The Roman soldiers certainly had pretty basic accommodation – this looks more like a scene from a concentration camp!

A closer view of the Roman Garden. You can see the beautiful wall paintings beyond, and the mosaic logo on the glass partition.

The reconstruction of a Roman hypocaust found in Cirencester. I am fascinated by this form of underfloor heating – not just the simple but effective technology, but perhaps it has something to do with the word itself? It has a wonderful sound that rolls off the tongue (I love words…).

This display of Romans relaxing at home was very interesting. We listened to the teacher explaining that the installation of a mosaic in one’s home was a huge labour which would have taken many months, or longer, depending on the quality. This was a major investment, and proved that the owner was a person of wealth and status. They would have taken great delight in showing off their mosaics to their friends and neighbours. When they moved house, they would have to leave it behind as there was no way of lifting it and transplanting it to the new house, so I am sure that having quality mosaics would increase the sale value of the house. (I wonder if the wall paintings I left behind in our old house will have the same effect? Lol!)

Viewed from the balcony above, the famous Hunting Dogs mosaic could be seen in all its splendour. This is a very fine mosaic indeed, with small tesserae, and a great deal of detail. The muted colours come from the local stone, carefully selected and cut.

A reproduction pillar with an original Roman capitol in the Corinthian style. Each of the four faces depicts a Roman god – in this case the god of wine, Bacchus, surrounded as usual by grapes and vines. What particularly intrigued me was his wand, or thyrsus – in this case, the shape of it was exactly the same as the labrys or double-headed axe of the Minoan civilisation – my father brought me back a beautiful heavy silver pendant in this shape. It was a sacrificial axe, and it gave its name to the famous Labyrinth of Knossos, where Theseus slew the Minatoar in Greek mythology. With further research I may be able to establish the connection with Bacchus but no time at present!

From the Christian period of Roman occupation, this Sator square was found in Cirencester. It is an acrostic which spells “Pater Noster” – “Our Father.” It was probably a coded message passed between Christians, much as the simple image of the fish was used. There is plenty of information about this online.

Finally from the museum, a fine example of a wall painting in the form of panels – a popular design in Roman villas.

I took plenty more photos but could not possibly include them all here – this is a good representative sample.

Some pictures of Cirencester streets:

It’s a beautiful town, with very classy and intriguing shops. We came across this book shop with lots of flying hippos and bunting in the window!

Then… more chocolate heaven! I managed to restrain myself from going into this particular shop, and contented myself with photographing it from the windows! The first photo reflects the Hare Festival and features a large hare made of chocolate.

What about these chocolate cakes?

Yummy, or what? More pictures of the inside of the shop. First, a stunning chandelier consisting of carefully arranged hanging crystals, illuminated by small spotlights from above.

After this we found a very nice place to eat – a bit expensive but certainly worth it! This is the window seat with a set of lovely brown cushions in different fabrics. My hubby’s hat tones very well, don’t you think?

After lunch we visited the outdoor market, and then an indoor antiques market – I had wanted to do this first thing, and was proved right because by the time we got there they were starting to pack up. In the antiques market I bought a length of cream coloured lace for art work but there wasn’t much else in the way of vintage linens or textiles. In the outdoor market I came across a stall selling beautiful bright coloured Indian clothes and the lady running it looked so beautiful that I asked for a photo, and she obliged!

After this we really felt we should be making tracks for home, as we’d stayed a lot longer than we intended. I didn’t want to go straight home after leaving the bed and breakfast, but wanted to take advantage of our last day away, especially as several of the days were spoilt for me by feeling so poorly! We were home in time to feed two hungry kitties who were, of course, absolutely delighted to have us home again.

I have composed this post on Saturday 21st June but kept its date in sequence with the rest of the holiday posts – last night I was much too tired to attempt it, and today I am having a rest and attempting to catch up with myself a bit – we’ve got a family get-together tomorrow evening and I need to be on top form for that!

Salisbury and Cotswolds Holiday Day 5–Villages and Roman Villa

Today I could well have done with another day of rest but we’re away for so few days that I thought I must make the effort! We had a lovely drive around various Cotswold villages and I slept in the car for most of the driving time. There are some villages called “The Slaughters” which sounds awful, but they are the most beautiful of Cotswold villages with the houses uniformly built of the warm mellow golden Cotswold stone – houses in different styles and intriguing arrangements that probably would not be approved by modern planning laws!

We spent a long time in Lower Slaughter, and met the junior vicar outside the church, riding her bicycle, and she stopped to chat with us. We also met some delightful Chinese students studying in the North of England and spending their vacation exploring other parts of England. Here are some pictures of Lower Slaughter.

A detail shot of a beautiful wall in Lower Slaughter.

We then drove on to Bourton-on-the-Water, which is one of the most famous of the Cotswold villages. Although it was very pretty, I didn’t take to it so much as it was very touristy and a lot of the shops were pretty grotty, although we did find one little road with some more interesting ones. There were lots of ducks on the river, over which were many small footbridges. In this village there is a model village (of itself) but we didn’t go – we had both visited it in the past and wanted to move on to the next place. We had lunch in the company of three delightful retired Irish ladies in the open air but the food was rather mediocre, but nice and cheap!

Pictures of Bourton-on-the-Water:

This sweet little boy was fishing in the river, with the water almost over his wellies! His young parents were delightful and had no objection to our photographing their son, and were pleased that we enjoyed watching him so much. What the ducks thought of him, we weren’t sure!

In the afternoon we went to Chedworth Roman Villa, now the property of the National Trust. It is an important archaeological site, being a large and opulent Roman villa from the heyday of Roman Britain, with some very fine mosaics. A long building has been constructed over the exposed mosaics to preserve them, and to make viewing them easier – there are slatted walkways to look down through, and a couple of observation platforms. There are extensive baths and a hypocaust (for under-floor heating) with a clever arrangement of a number of hollow pillars which took the hot air up to the second storey. There are numerous reception rooms where the owners would have impressed their guests with the quality of their mosaics. Apparently there is still quite an area to be excavated and no doubt more mosaics will be revealed in time.

This is the latrine at the villa, situated outside the main building.

The villa was discovered 150 years ago this year, by the Victorians, who for some reason built a hunting lodge smack bang in the middle of the site! They obviously wanted to impress their visitors, too!

Some restoration work being carried out on the mosaics.

The hypocaust.

The mosaics feature figures from Greek mythology, animals and birds, and geometric patterns.

In the visitors’ centre, they had a selection of replica artefacts that had been found, and fun and educational things for the children to do, including some of the mosaic patterns in brass which they could use to make rubbings from. I did some myself, and we met a mother with two young daughters, and I encouraged the girls to make rubbings of other things as well, such as the interesting texture on the stone tiled floor of the building. One little girl said “We could do this at home! There are lots of things we could do, like trees!” I love to see people beginning to think outside the box and using their imagination like that.

One of the baths at the villa. They had cool baths to begin with, and progressed through the warm bath to the hot bath, and then a cold plunge pool. Slaves would be there to minister to their needs, and would scrape off the sweat and dirt with a metal strigil – most useful before the invention of soap!

Bathing (and use of the latrines) was communal.

The hypocaust under one of the bath chambers.

The projection on the wall in the next photo is the remains of one of the hollow pillars to take hot air up to the upper storey of the building.

This is a view of the side of the building covering a corridor mosaic in the villa. This mosaic can be viewed through the windows on the right hand side, and at the far end you can see one of the metal observation platforms.

Some of the remains of the villa outside. The Victorians built some walls and concrete pathways to indicate where the different rooms were.

The tops of these little walls were capped with tiles. I love the pattern they made at the end of the wall.

These are the small pillars which would have supported the floor over the hypocaust.

Finally, a picture of the beautiful little model of how the villa would have looked in its heyday.

Another sleep in the car on the way back to our B&B, and then a quiet evening in their lovely conservatory (where the best Internet signal is!).