Category: Civitas

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Verulamium Museum and Park

On By Paul Coby and Sally BlandfordIn Civitas, Museum, Roman BritainLeave a comment

Overall Impact **** 4 stars Museum with excellent artefacts wonderfully displayed with thematic exhibits of Roman civil life

Roman Features ***** 5 stars Mosaics are many of the finest in Britannia, plus a lead coffin, wall paintings, a late antique horde of solidi and much more

Display **** 4 stars Thematic rooms work hard to bring the exhibits to life and explain how the inhabitants of Verulamium lived

Reconstruction **** 4 stars The restored rooms with wall paintings are superb

Access **** 4 stars Modern museum with good access. Car park handy for both Museum and Park.

Atmosphere *** 3 stars The Museum and Park are both branded Verulamium, but it is quite hard to visualise what the Roman city would have looked like: maybe some more illustrative boards around the park would help?

Other ***** 5 stars We reckon this is the second-best Roman museum in Britannia – and the best museum of civil life of the period. (We still have to give Vindolanda Museum the top spot!)

We were inspired by publishing our Brading Villa blog recently and, since the sun was shining, we thought we should have look at another Roman site.  (Our first idea was Silchester and the finds in Reading Museum’s Roman galleries but, alas, Reading Museum is not open on Sundays. )

So our choice fell on Verulamium Museum and Park at St Albans.  Thirty years ago we used to live in ‘Snorbans’ and a fine and distinctive city it is. Since then the old Museum – already good – has been refurbished, given a circular Roman-inspired entrance and had new galleries added.  Thank you National Lottery Fund, once again!

Is this the best dedicated Roman museum in Britannia?  

Original wall paintings restored in a reconstructed room

We think so – at least as far as civilian life is concerned (the latest incarnation of Vindolanda is simply stunning, obviously with a more military focus). Verulamium Museum sets out to be the museum of everyday Roman life and with dedicated galleries on trade and industry, life and death, and much else, it succeeds.  Verulamium was the 3rd largest Roman city in Britannia (presumably after Londinium and Camulodunum?) and the quality of the finds excavated by Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler in the 30s and by Shepherd Frere in the 70s are tremendous.  This thematic approach is quite commonplace these days but it’s carried through here with confidence and illustrated with some remarkable finds. Our favourites include:

1). The lead coffin from around 200AD from King Harry Lane with its scallop shell decoration and a rather witty video by the deceased (here wittily christened Postumus) describing his life and subsequent rediscovery. 

2).  The display of carpenters’ tools left behind while escaping the great fire of Verulamium in 180AD.

3).   A tiny statuette of Mercury with his ram, tortoise and cockerel, and wearing a tiny torc.  

4).  The remarkable Sandridge Hoard of 156 gold solidi, found by a fortunate metal detectorist testing out his new equipment.

5).  The inscription from the new Forum built in the reign of Titus which (most probably) mentions the Governor Julius Agricola, developing the pacified parts of the Province just as Tacitus describes. 

This is before we have mentioned the real star exhibits of the Museum – the mosaics and the wall paintings from the fine mansions of the Roman city. There are 3 mosaics in the main museum hall – a shell image in the centre, with a horned figure (possibly identified with Cernunnos, a woodland god) to the right, and a lion and stag to the left.  

The wall and ceiling paintings have been imaginatively displayed in reconstructed rooms, with the missing plaster and colours filled in. The overall effect is to give a real feeling of what a grand provincial mansion looked like.  What  strikes you are both the striking colours and compositions and the relative crudity of the actual workmanship – the representation of marble, for instance, is not at all convincing!  

The first galleries cover pre-Roman Verulamion: the area was a centre of the Catuvellauni, who under Cassivellaunus led the resistance to Caesar in 55BC. Later the Catuvellauni were ruled by Tasciovanus and by 10AD Cunobelinus was in charge. He conquered the Trinovantes and moved his capital to the Colchester area, but continued to rule Verulamion. Whilst Cunobelinus successfully avoided Roman intervention, under his sons Caractacus and Togidubnus in 43 AD the kingdom was invaded by Claudius.

After the Roman conquest the Trinovantes were conquered and a Colonia of legionaries planted at Camulodunum. However, the Catuvellauni become a client kingdom, possibly under the leadership of Adminius, another son of Cunobelinus who had fled to Rome before the Conquest. The burial from Folly Lane dated to AD50 appears to be the leader of the Catuvellauni under Roman domination. The rich burial features a chariot, an iron mail coat (above) and quantities of silver, all placed on the funeral pyre.

The Museum sits close to the site of the vast Forum of Verulamium, on which the Church is built. So all round you are the hidden remains of the City. There are three things to see in the Park – the mosaic from one of the town houses, the battered remains of the City Walls and the site of the London Gate.

Reconstruction drawing of the vast Verulamium Forum

Musée Romain de Lausanne – Vidy

On By Paul Coby and Sally BlandfordIn Civitas, Museum, Small Town, SwitzerlandLeave a comment

Overall Impact:                **** 4 stars – small Museum but some stunning finds well set out

Access                                ***** 5 stars – easy access by all modes – it’s Switzerland after all!

Atmosphere                      **** 4 star – works admirably hard to relate finds to excavations

Other                                  *** 3 stars – great to find so much so well done for what is, when all said and done, a quite minor site!

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A reconstruction of the Roman house where the Museum is situated – note its suggested grand entrance pillars

The best finds from Roman Lousonna are displayed in a modern building situated within the surviving foundations of a very grand Roman merchant’s house with warehouses attached (or that is what it appears to have been).   You enter pay your CHF8 (concessions CHF5 and children free) then climb upstairs above walls with preserved painted wall plaster.

The quality of the finds from this small Gallo-Roman town of the Helvetii rather put the finds from small Roman towns in Britannia to shame – or at least it felt that way to us.  Here are just a few examples:

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A complex locking bar and key

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A bronze votive showing a libation being poured over a bull prior to sacrifice

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The standard of carving is very fine – note the reference to Lousonna

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The extraordinary horned head – maybe the god Cernunnos who appears on the Pillar of the Boatmen from Lutetia (Paris) now in Musée de Cluny?

The quality of carving on the various inscriptions is very fine. We thought the finest single artefact was the small but very detailed bronze relief of a priest pouring a libation over the unfortunate bull prior to sacrifice, thought to be a decoration from an altar.

The models of Lousonna are of the highest standard, comparable to the wonderful building models in the Museum of London’s Roman Galleries.   There is an English catalogue you can borrow to carry round with you, although sadly not available to purchase.

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Finally, the Museum goes to some effort with a re-construction of a sizeable cross-section of the excavation in a mock-up of a site hut, together with finds records etc on the wall to show how the dig had taken place.

So if you are in the area, don’t miss Lousonna!

Roman Civitas Walls, Exeter

On By Paul Coby and Sally BlandfordIn Civitas, Roman BritainLeave a comment

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Overall          1 * the lower courses survive in some sections

Display         2 ** good wall walk published by Council covering all periods

Access           4 **** easy throughout the entire length on streets and parks

Atmosphere 2 ** you can get start to get a feel for the shape of the Isca Dumnoniorum

Isca Dumnoniorum inherited the site and presumably many of the buildings of the former Legionary Fortress of II Augusta, when the legion vacated the site in c75CE.

In Ptolemy’s Geographia of the 2nd Century Isca – which means ‘water’ in Celtic – is one of the four ‘cities’ of the Dumnonii, and is also the termination of one of the routes of the Antonine Itinerary.

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The Civitas capital of the Dumnonii was twice as large than the preceding Legionary Fortess of 17ha and was enclosed by a ditch and rampart enclosing 37ha (92 acres).   In the late 2nd Century a stone wall was constructed.  The circuit of stone defensive walls is on the Roman foundations but has successively been rebuilt and raised by Saxons, Normans, Plantagenets and in the Civil War. The layers of wall can be clearly seen in the Northenhay section above.  The Roman layers are the squared grey volcanic ‘trap’ at the bottom.  The Alfredian section is the white stone above.  Further examples from the same sector are below.

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Not much of Isca has been discovered in excavations and there is even less to see.  There was a civilian bath house and there is evidence of copper and bronze working. A possible stock-yard has also been identified.

Many coins have been discovered from the early 4th Century but hardly any later than 380, suggesting that at least its role as a regional market centre ended several decades before the end of central Roman rule.