It started out as a folded wall chart progressed into a block mounted display and survived one house move, rested on several walls in several rooms and for a while was banished to the cellar.
It came in a Sunday Times booklet on Roman Britain, which I bought for £1.95 in 1978, and that too was for a while also sent down to the cellar and to my shame spent longer in that dark place.
Some of the scholarship will have been overtaken by new archaeological finds and by revisions and reinterpretations about the Romans in Britain but it is still a fascinating glimpse into how they lived.
And as ever here are some of my favourites from the “leather bikini trunks of a dancing girl or acrobat” found in the Thames mud to fine pictures of four Roman Emperors, an equally fine map of the Province and heaps more.
But the block mounted wall chart has not fared so well. Forty years of being exposed to the sunlight has caused it fade in places, while one edge was damaged and part of it has come away from the its backing.
All of which means bits of it no longer deliver the story of the Roman Army as they did, but enough survives to make it a talking point.
Most days I don’t give it a second glance, but occasionally I will stand in front of it, get lost in the detail, and reflect on how the Romans captured my imagination sometime around 1958 and still hold a power over me.
For others it will be the Vikings, the Tudors of the Industrial Revolution, and I do wonder what individually draws so many of us to a particular period or group of people ……. So answers on a postcard, preferably one with a historical image on the front.
Location; our house
Pictures from The Sunday Times Roman Britain “Full-colour wall chart, map and guide to Roman life”, 1978
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