A Day Out in St Alban's

To take advantage of the extra-long Jubilee weekend, the humans and I took a day trip to St Alban's yesterday, and discovered a gem of a town, pretty much on our doorstep. We spent most of the morning at the Verulamium Museum of Roman Britain, which was lovely from the outside.



Inside, there were a variety of displays and exhibition rooms, detailing various aspects of life in the area, around the time of the Romans. The humans were very impressed to be able to look at items that were nearly 2000 years old.



There was a skeleton from AD200, in its original coffin, with a reconstruction of what the man might have looked like.



There were also areas where models represented what the people would have worn and activities they might have done.



The mosaics were incredibly impressive, though we had to look this one up to establish that the central creature is a lion with a stag's head in its mouth.



This was our favourite - so much expression achieved with tiny blocks of stone!



I particularly like this display of tiles with animal prints embedded in them. The one on the right has a dog print and a pebble, suggesting that someone might have thrown the pebble at the dog, to try and stop it walking over the tiles while they were drying!



We were also impressed by the level of pattern detail and range of colour in some of the fragments.



Some things never change - apparently, humans have been playing noughts and crosses in essentially the same way for thousands of years!



After the museum, we strolled into the town for lunch and to do some caching. Along the way, we came across this fine fellow, wearing his Jubilee best.



We found a couple more caches in the vast and gorgeous park.



It was a lovely day out, in a place we'll definitely return to. The humans even thought they might like to retire there!