England

The final stop on our Roman Empire odyssey took us to the City of Bath in the West of England where the natural hot springs were harnessed by the bathing-crazy Romans almost two thousand years ago...

Emperors, legionnaires, merchants, and their families, bathed in this lead lined swimming pool in mineral water that has poured from this natural spring at a constant 45 degrees Celsius for thousands of years…

A million litres of hot water a day flow from this spring and the Romans believed it was sent by the gods. Pilgrims came from all over Europe hoping that, by bathing in its sacred waters and making sacrifices to the gods, they would be cured of illness and granted good fortune.
After the fall of the Roman Empire and the invasion by the Christian Normans in 1066 the ‘gods’ of Aqua Sulis were no longer in vogue and the baths were largely destroyed. However, pilgrims of a different kind flocked back to Bath in the 18th century when the aspiring aristocracy simply had to ‘take the waters’ and have a residence. This was a time of fabulous wealth when architects and builders vied to create the most opulent pseudo-Romano villas and buildings. This is The Royal Crescent…

From October to May each year, the idle rich would gamble away their lives, and sometimes their fortunes, while taking the health-giving mineral waters, attending balls, and attempting to climb higher on the social ladder. Jane Austen lived in Bath at the turn of the 18th century and wrote extensively about the complicated norms of the day in her novels. James attended school and college in Bath and regularly swam in the hot waters. His old swimming pool is now a fancy spa where we swam in the rooftop pool in the moonlight and thought of the Romans and Georgians who had swum in the waters before us. History surrounded us as we walked the streets of Bath, but Britain is a steeped in history. For example, on our way to London we stopped for lunch at this quaint thatched inn at Clifton Hampton...

This is the Barley Mow, the very place that Jerome K. Jerome wrote into in his classic 1889 novel Three Men in a Boat.
With Christmas approaching we returned to the capital for a carol concert by the King’s College Choir and a tradition unbroken since 1947. Every year the people of Norway gift their finest Christmas tree to London’s Trafalgar Square in gratitude to the British for liberating their country from the Nazis in WWII…

The tree was somewhat slimmer than usual, and it was unkindly suggested in the British press that to save money the Norwegian government may have shipped it to London as carry-on baggage on Ryanair.
To cap off our visit we returned to arguably the most beautiful concert hall in the world – The Royal Albert Hall – for a concert of Christmas music by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the renowned composer, John Rutter…

And finally, a trip down memory lane as we wandered London’s historic streets to view the Christmas lights…

After three weeks in London during one of the mildest Novembers on record, the temperature has plummeted and there is a hint of snow in the air. However, the warm weather brought a false promise of spring and fooled many plants into early bloom…

But, with winter on the horizon it’s now time to head home where the snow is already flying.
Thanks for travelling with us on our quest for the Roman Empire and we hope you will join us again soon as we head off on another Blissful Adventure.

While most Brits think of themselves as belonging to one of the four island races, the truth is that we are just about the most mixed up people in the world. When the Romans invaded Southern England in 43 AD there were nearly 50 distinct tribes in England and Wales and more in Scotland and Ireland. The Romans brought legionnaires from all over Europe, North Africa and the Middle East who inter-mixed with locals and, following the Romans, there were successive invasions by the Saxons, Vikings, Normans and anyone else with a boat looking for a good place to live. Little has changed. Britain is still a magnet for people looking for a nice place. And what nicer place could there be than our current ‘home from home’…

This is Lumley Castle in County Durham where we were given the key to an appropriately named suite…

This is the first time we have stayed in a genuine medieval castle and thankfully the furnishings have improved since it was built around 1390 by Lord Ralph Lumley…

Unfortunately for Sir Ralph, he was beheaded following The Holland Rebellion of 1400. However, the castle was given back to his family in 1405 and has been in the Lumley family ever since. The castle was actually a fortified baronial manor house with guard towers at each corner and a maze of corridors, staircases, dungeons and state rooms that left us lost on several occasions…

Today the castle, on the outskirts of Chester-Le-Street, is a fine hotel which is popular for weddings and medieval feasts. We would have stayed longer but we seized the chance to return to Edinburgh to visit the re-opened Royal Palace of Holyrood House…

This is now the official Scottish home of King Charles III and we were amused to hear Princess Anne describe it as an intimate and cozy place. We wondered just how cozy Charles would find it in this, the King’s bedroom…

Now we are headed south by train to London for one last look at Roman Britain before we take off for warmer parts of the Roman Empire. This bronze statue of Hadrian’s cousin, Emperor Trajan, stands in front of a length of wall built by his legions in the first century A.D…

This 30-foot-high wall completely surrounded Londinium which later became “The City of London”. And, while the rest of London grew outside the walls, the City within the walls is still an independent fiefdom with its own Lord Mayor, laws and police force, much as it was in Roman times.
Next stop - the Mediterranean island of Malta.

Julius Caesar unsuccessfully invaded Britain in 55 B.C., but Emperor Claudius did better a hundred years later. However, by 122 A.D. the pesky northerners just wouldn’t swap their haggis for pizza or their kilts for panteloni. So, under Emperor Hadrian, the Romans built this 15-foot-high wall 74 miles across the country to keep them out…

Our school day memories of history are fuzzy, but surely this great wall divided England from Scotland. And did we learn that the Romans came from Italy and this was the furthest north they ever conquered? Nope – wrong on all counts. And while we are confessing our ignorance, we might as well admit that we had no idea why the town of Wallsend on the Northern bank of the River Tyne was so named…

This column marks the beginning and end of Hadrian’s Wall at the Roman city of Segedunum at - you guessed it, Wallsend. Protecting the south bank of the River Tyne was another Roman city, Arbeia, This is a reconstruction of the entrance gate….

Arbeia, a city that once housed more than 800 Romans soldiers, was destroyed by the Vikings in the Middle Ages and the site was completely covered by houses in Victorian times. It has now been excavated and buildings like the Governor’s house reconstructed…

Hadrian’s Wall is more than 60 miles south of Scotland in places, so it’s not the border. However, Hadrian’s son, Antoninus Pius, upstaged his dad and pushed further north into Scotland with a second wall between Edinburgh and Glasgow. Not much of that wall survives, but there is plenty of Hadrian’s Wall to see including the original communal toilets…

After Arbeia and Segedunum, we followed the path of the wall inland for 35 miles to the centre of the wall at Housesteads where a giant art installation by Morag Myerscough reconstructs the main entrance…

And this is one of the many sculptures found here…

So, now we know Hadrian’s Wall never divided England and Scotland and it wasn’t the furthest north the Romans reached, we are left with the question: where did the men who built this, the biggest Roman construction ever, come from?
The answer is that the legions who defended this wall came from as far afield as Spain, France, Romania, Bulgaria, Syria and even Iraq. While most of the centurions and governors may have come from Italy, the legionnaires were recruited from all over the Empire and any man who served for 25 years was automatically granted Roman citizenship. He probably deserved it, because Hadrian’s Wall crosses some of the coldest, wettest and bleakest moors in the British Isles.

We found no evidence of the Romans here in the warm autumnal sun on the banks of the River Aln, but lovers of Harry Potter and Downton Abbey should recognise this place in nearby Alnwick…

Alnwick Castle has been the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland since 1309, but this building was started by the Normans in 1096 and is nearly a thousand years old. The Dukes of Northumberland played a pivotal role in many medieval wars but more recently the castle has featured in numerous movies and TV series.
Much of the town of Alnwick belongs to the Duke’s estate and several stone gatehouses were designed to be part of its overall defence, but it seems that the adjoining curtain walls were never built. This is the Pottergate...

However, the medieval streets have survived nicely without a wall …

We stayed in a small hotel that was built in 1709, but one 17th century establishment, Ye Olde Cross Inn, at the far end of this street, has a window display that hasn’t been changed since 1725,..

When the landlord of this inn was cleaning the bottles 300 years ago his wife suddenly dropped dead. Fearing that the bottles were either cursed or poisoned, the window was sealed up and has never been re-opened. The dining room of The Swan Hotel, also has an interesting history…

In 1936 the Titanic’s sister ship, RMS Olympic, was scrapped in nearby Jarrow and the entire first-class dining room was salvaged and re-built here in Alnwick. Another oddity in Alnwick is the disused railway station that is now one of the biggest second-hand bookstores in the world…

There are more than 30,000 books on these shelves, (and not a single title by James Hawkins!).

Perhaps the oddist oddity of Alnwick is the man in Alnwick castle who claims to be able to teach people to fly on a broomstick just like Harry Potter…

We have to fly, (sans broomstick), as we are off to visit the seaside town where Sheila played on the beach with her family more than sixty years ago…

This is Whitley Bay just north of Newcastle-on-Tyne where the sea is still warm enough for swimmers and there are more crab sandwiches in our future.

From the northern boundary of the Roman Empire we have begun trekking south to its centre in Rome, and if we had the time we could walk most of the way as many ancient Romans may have done. But would they have had signs marking Northumberland’s coastal path?...

Maybe they would have stopped here on the island of Lindisfarne long before the Priory and the distant castle existed…

These are the ruins of the once vast Priory...

Lindisfarne is known as Holy Island because it was the centre of Christianity in Northern England in the 5th. century. The Priory of Lindisfarne was once the home of Bishop Eadrith whose beautifully illustrated 7th. century gospels are now in the British Library. The island is reached across this 3-mile causeway that can only be safely crossed at low tide…

At least one ill-informed motorist a month gets stuck in the rising tide and loses their car and belongings to the North Sea and we wondered how many drivers this heron had watched being rescued by the coastguards...

The Romans conquered this part of Britain in the early part of the first millennium, but they weren’t the first, nor the last, to invade, and it was the Vikings who did most of the damage to the buildings on Lindisfarne. However, it was neither Romans nor Norsemen who virtually destroyed our next port of call – Bamburgh Castle…

This enormous castle overlooking the sea dates back a thousand years but was largely destroyed during the Wars of the Roses in the 15th century. Only the keep, with 12-foot-thick walls, survived centuries of sieges and battles. The views of the Northumberland coast and the nearby Farne islands are fabulous on a sunny day…

Once castles became useless for defence most fell into ruins, but wealthy Victorian businessmen like local armaments engineer, William Armstrong, snapped them up and put on aristocratic airs. Armstrong bought himself a knighthood from Queen Victoria with his many patents and turned the remnants of Bamburgh into a stately home with a magnificent main hall…

Bamburgh Castle can be traced back to the 10th century, long after the Romans left Britain, but it stands on the bluff that was once the royal citadel of Roman allies, the Voltadinis, who helped the Romans invade Scotland in the 2nd century AD.
No visit to the Northumberland coast would be complete without a seaside treat and what could be more quintessentially British than enjoying a fresh crab sandwich on the quayside in Seahouses?…

Next stop – Harry Potter’s castle in Alnwick.