Category: Small Town

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Roman Alcester Heritage Centre

On By Paul Coby and Sally BlandfordIn Roman Britain, Small TownLeave a comment

Overall Impact ** 2 stars – rather nice local museum with some good exhibits from local digs well displayed.

Roman Features Nothing Roman survives above ground in Alcester!

Reconstructions None

Access *** 3 stars – museum is within the new Alcester library, with helpful volunteers, and you can park at the nearby Waitrose

Atmosphere ** 2 stars – you need to use your imagination

Other *** 3 stars – it’s well set up for children’s activities, and two audiovisuals bring the finds and the market to life.

Looking for Roman interest before seeing Shakespeare’s King John at the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon, we googled ‘Roman Warwickshire’ and found the Roman Alcester Heritage Centre. This is a fantastic example of a local community enthusiastically embracing its Roman past, with the newly-built town library incorporating a room dedicated to exhibiting the finds from the Roman ‘small town’ of Alauna, modern Alcester.

Elements of military harness.

During the conquest period it is thought there was a fort on the hill with views dominating the valley of the River Arrow, which then moved down into the valley before being evacuated around AD75, no doubt to move north or west for the Flavian conquests. There are some fine military finds exhibited in the cases in the museum. The forts were at the crossroads of the Roman north-south and east-west road grid (the so-called Ryknild Way and the Salt Way from the Fosse Way to Droitwich).

Impressive but heavily weathered statue

As the area became part of the civilian zone and of the northern civitas of the Dobunni people, so Alcester became a flourishing town of some scale. The finds suggest a degree of prosperity with finds of fine imported Samian tableware, simple mosiacs and wall paintings, and a possible mansio. Alauna was clearly the market for the area.

A noteworthy local find was burnt some asparagus seeds, reportedly the earliest evidence of its cultivation in Britain!

Milestone with inscription:
FL VAL/CONSTANTINO/PIO/FELIC/INVICT/AUG
‘For Flavius Valerius Contantinus the dutiful fortunate and unconquered Emperor’

There is a fine milestone dating from Constantine the Great’s reign, and in the 4th Century AD, as the world became more dangerous, a wall was built around the core of the settlement on the original fort hill. The walls involved demolishing a granary and covered less than half of the original town’s full extent.

Model in the museum depicting the demolition of a granary and construction of the defensive wall mid C3rd

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!

Lousonna (Lausanne – Vidy)

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

Overall Impact:               *** 3 stars – a nicely presented and well-maintained small town

Access                                ***** 5 stars – carpark next door, cycle, walking and Swiss buses

Atmosphere                      ** 2 stars – perfunctory pond for former lake-edge helps, as do the inventive Swiss visualisations

Other                                  ** 2 stars – you can get a feel for what it would have been like

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View over the offices along the north side of the Basilica.  One of the curious Swiss reconstruction viewing boxes can be seen.

As excellent as it was unexpected, we stumbled across the Roman small town of Lousonna on a visit to Lausanne, Switzerland, last week.

If you walk, cycle or drive along the shore of Lake Geneva (Lacus Lemannus) westwards from the Chateau of Ouchy, in the direction of Geneva, in about 2km (just past the modern offices of IMD) you come to a well-signposted Site Romain.  (Ouchy, by the way, is where Lord Byron wrote “The Prisoner of Chillon” in a comfortable lakeside cafe and where the Peace Treaty of Lausanne with Kemal Ataturk’s resurgent new state of Turkey  was signed in 1923.)

There is an extensive car park at the site, for those enjoying the lake and its many leisure facilities.  The site is open and generally well-cared for. Its reconstituted walls that will remind any of us who, as children, visited castles and abbeys across the UK of the well disciplined approach of the old Ministry of Public Building & Works!

 

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The plan is clear and presumably simplified for display purposes to a single final phase: here we see Lousonna at the height of its prosperity in the C3rd.  It is particularly helpful for understanding the site that the location of the former Roman waterfront of Lake Geneva has been recreated by a (slightly brackish) linear pond.   There are several plans set up around the site showing the key buildings, which consist of a rather impressive but curiously one-sided Basilica with the Hall on the lake-side and rooms opening off it on the land-side only.  The Basilica was 71m long by 19m wide with large pillars.  It is dated by the excavators to AD40 with later additions.

 

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The Basilica with its substantial pillars – note the very solid consolidation.

The Basilica has a open Forum behind it with a typical square ‘Celtic’ temple familiar from Britannia.  On the lakeside next to the Basilica there is a ‘sanctuary’ with three ‘chapels’.  Here, according to inscriptions and figures discovered there and interpreted in the explanatory leaflet, Neptune, Hercules and Mercury were worshipped in order to safeguard Navigation, Voyages and Commerce.   There was also on the lakeside another very solidly built building, possibly a warehouse?

Across the site are reconstructions interpreting the remaining foundations, which can be viewed through eye pieces set in very-solidly Swiss-built metal viewers.

 

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Looking through the viewer at an optical reconstruction based on the site foundations: here is the Temple.

All in all, you can get a feel for what this prosperous small Roman town on the lakeside grew into at its height.  The excavators estimate the population as 1,500 to 2,000, composed of merchants, fishermen, craftsmen and their families.  It was situated in a prime position on the routes between the Rhine and the Rhone, with good farming land beside the lake and a very pleasant climate facing south across the Lake.  Vines still fill the slopes of the Swiss Jura, with excellent wines that the Swiss very sensibly keep to themselves rather than export.

However, there is more: if you walk north-west past a (rather disappointing and poorly maintained) mosaic in a cover building in a road embankment and some current IOC construction, then through an underpass under the main road, you reach a modern Roman site Museum constructed within the foundations of a very grand house attached to workshops/warehouses: see our review of the Roman Museum of Lausanne – Vidy.  

 

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Reconstruction of the ruins of Lousonna in the C5th (in the Roman Museum).

In the C4th the town was partially abandoned and the inhabitants move to the defensible hilltop of medieval and modern Lausanne Cité.  There could be no clearer indication of the impact of the failure to secure the Empire’s border on the Rhine against barbarian raids in the C3rd and C4th.