Kevin and Sarah's Wedding

Wednesday, June 13^th

 

We woke up this morning to blue skies!  Even though it did rain on us twice, it was definitely a lovely day.  We started out our morning at Wroxeter Roman Town.  It’s a partially excavated town (mostly the baths) and it’s also got a modern Roman villa.  The original Roman town was HUGE.  It was first a fortress, then a town, then housed soldiers again, then disappeared and no one knows why.  It goes all the way underneath the nearby town of Wroxeter, and we noticed that English Heritage owned all the sheep fields around the Roman City, so we figure that it’s underneath all the fields as well.

One really fun thing – when we drove in, we did not take the main way (by mistake) and ended up on this TINY little road.  We could have stuck our hands out of the windows and both touched hedges on the same time.  Well, when we got to Wroxeter, we figured out why.  One of the reasons Wroxeter is so darn big is because it was built along Watling Street, a Roman road that went all the way to Rome.  The street we drove in on is built over Watling Street.

The site itself is pretty neat.  It is the excavated (and sufficiently restored to not come crumbling down) ruins of a giant Roman bath house.  There was the foundations and column supports of the indoor exercise arena, which was about 75 yards long, and then there was a lot of the front entrance wall to the actual baths remaining, as well as foundations for the cool, warm and hot rooms, the furnaces, and the nearby market stalls.

 

Across the street from the excavated ruin is a pretty cool project – they took 6 modern builders, and gave them the raw materials that the Romans had, and said “Build a villa!”  They had to make their own tools, cut their own wood, make their own A- frames to lift all the stuff, and so on.  They’re still working on some of it, but it was cool to see how they built it, and how a real building might have looked, because it’s hard to imagine such enormous buildings from just tiny walls.

After Wroxeter, we went on to nearby Blist Hill.  Blist Hill and the general area of Irongorge are interesting because they are one of the very first truly industrial places.  Blist Hill had (has) three giant blast furnaces, that allowed them to smelt and work iron on a huge scale.  The blast furnaces are large enough to probably contain a small two story house in each one.  They are fed with air by this giant double pump called David and Sampson.  It’s a steam powered bellows, and the bellows themselves are probably a full 20 feet high.  The flywheel for this thing stuck out the top and bottom of a 3 story shed thing.  At the center of all of this is the foundry itself, where they purified and worked the iron ore coming out of the nearby mine.  Iron could be heating to melting, poured into molds, and if they didn’t feel like pouring it, they could hammer on it with a steam hammer that took 5 people to work.  Let me rephrase – the things they were hammering took 5 people to control.  The hammer… well, it weighs some 20 tons, without the force of the steam behind it.  Doubt any one person could control it.

There is also a clay mine, and tile, brick and china factories in the nearby area.  But one particularly cool thing is that they have re- done the little town to how it would have been in the Victorian era when all the mining and so on was in its heyday.  So they had all the shops open and people were selling things and making things, and there were little historical things all over.   You could change your money into really old English money, with ha’pence, and shillings, and it was very confusing, but kind of fun.  We went into the bakery, the apothecary, the post office, the tinsmith, the bank, the forge, the haberdashery, the plasterer, the sweet shop, the butcher, the fish and chip shop (where Kevin got fish and chips for lunch for the 3^rd day running), the printer, and a variety of other little houses and shops.  There was also a very cute little Victorian style carnival, and we rode this fun double swing.  It’s like a boat, and you sit facing each other, and get a rope attached to a beam way up high.  By alternating pulling, you could really get the swing going.

After Blist Hill, we had one more stop, at the ruins of Wenlock Priory.  It is a very beautiful ruin, with flowers growing everywhere – the grass is full of daisies, and the walls were covered in places with these gorgeous little sprays of purple flowers.  It was first founded as a monastery by the Saxons, and then was a college of priests, and then a priory.  It was dissolved and partly torn down by King Henry VIII, in his Dissolution of the Monasteries.  Nevertheless, very very beautiful.  Also – what used to be the house of one of the Abbots, and is attached to the remains of one of the walls of the abbey – it’s totally someone’s house now.  Seriously.  Who even does that???