Roman Around the Prince’s Garden

All right, I admit it. I like Prince Charles. He has a 2.1 in History from Oxford, loves art, is a keen environmentalist, is an effective philanthropist and has loved the same woman for a very long time. Monarchy may be an immensely stupid institution but that doesn’t demean poor Charles. Alexander of Macedon was “the Great” and he was a murdering, philandering and drunken arsonist who thought he was god. Today we visited Prince Charles’ Highgrove Estate. This was Lyn’s treat but first we had to get there.

On the way Lyn saw a sign for Roman Villa and said we should explore. Thus began a genuine Cotswolds experience: single-lane roads, blind bends, stunning vistas, cute villages and pheasants (not peasants) in the fields. The villa turned out to be the tremendously important Chedworth site, brilliantly presented by the National Trust. We parked in the woods car park and I was struck by the birdsong. If the English language had developed in Australia nobody would have invented words like ‘peep’, ‘trill’, ‘warble’ etc to describe what birds sound like. Here it makes sense. It was idyllic.

Lyn was intrigued by the pheasants we saw everywhere and these were the only birds to make an Australian-like squawk.

Lyn actually enjoyed the villa and learned all about Roman life in Britannia without me saying a word - or not many anyway.

Mosaic

Hypocaust

Nymphaeum

Mosaic and hypocaust

As is often the case with the Romans, it all came with a view.

Then we drove on to Cirencester (sirensesta) to see the Corinium Museum. I cannot praise this place enough. It was clearly designed with children in mind. There were dress up stations, puzzles and lots of interactive media. This didn’t make the artefacts any less fascinating for adults. 

Finally we raced off to Highgrove. Thank goodness Google knew where it was because there were no signs at all. Pleasant policeman checked our names off the list and checked our photo ID - we had booked months ago. It was all very nice and British and there was security everywhere if you looked closely.

We admired HRH’s watercolours, ate in his restaurant and then joined our guided tour. All the staff had very proper accents. We watched a DVD of HRH welcoming us and then spent two hours tromping through the organic gardens. I have never taken in so much information about plants in my life. It was fascinating. Sadly there were strictly no cameras or phones allowed. (This was clearly NOT a rule to be broken. There were probably SAS snipers in the shrubbery.)

So, all in all, the world was turned upside down. Lyn enjoyed Roman around and I loved the Prince’s garden. 

We returned to Stow to find that the town was besieged by holidaymakers for the Bank Holiday long weekend. Bloody tourists!