Vunderful Vunderful Vindolanda!

What a day! We're all delighted that we ditched Thursday's Skiddaw climb in favour of today's walk to Vindolanda Roman Fort.

Another scorcher of a day saw the 'SAGA Six' start the day at around 7am before piling into the farm shop for bacon butties and hot tea. What a relief to have a break from bacon flavour super noodles! Refreshed and fortified we set off on the relatively short hike to what I suspected would be a mildly interesting set of Roman ruins staffed by volunteer weird beards that I would be bored with after half an hour. As it turned out, it was a set of Roman ruins and the occasional weird beard could be made out amongst the small army of volunteer diggers but it was all done so very well-you could, and should, spend all day there-it's brilliant!

Vindolanda is a fort built upon a fort built upon a fort....in fact there is evidence of 11 forts built on the same site over many hundreds of years. It's on a huge scale and the Roman fort, from the buildings remains, was clearly on a grand scale. It must have been hugely impressive, but then just about everything the Romans did was.

As we arrived we were greeted by a friendly receptionist who was helpful and informative and then ushered through to a wonderfully cool air conditioned room which housed a full sized model of the fort as it would have looked in Roman times. From there you walked out onto the main site and I was immediately aware from the bustle of activity, archaeologists and others digging, scraping, humping wheelbarrows and generally looking incredibly enthusiastic, that Vindolanda really is a living museum, a real archaeological dig-not a Disney mock-up with dodgy actors and people with fake smiles. As we approached they were more than happy to pause and chat about what was going on, what had been found recently, what they hoped to unearth in the future-they were people who were a pleasure to talk to and we all genuinely enjoyed the experience. From there we moved on to a reconstruction of Hadrian's Wall as it would have looked like, which put our previous days walk into perspective and then we went to look round the museum. Some museums, from my experience at least, can be as dull as dishwater - Vindolanda's museum is fab! It's crammed with artefacts, thoughtfully exhibited, accompanied by clear and unfussy descriptions. Special mention has to go to the 'Vindolanda Tablets' voted by the British Museum as the most significant historical find, ever, in Britain - these are thin wooden tablets, Roman bits of paper in effect, which were discovered at the site and which retain the original hand written script, invaluable evidence of everyday life- things like birthday invitations, letters of complaint, accounts of military resources-incredible stuff that has never survived and been found until now at Vindolanda. These tablets provide accounts of everyday Roman life that are absolutely unique to this site-artefacts that we should be incredibly proud of as a nation. After our time in the museum we had lunch in a lovely airy tea room before venturing out to explore the fort's remains proper. It was a wonderful day and I thoroughly recommend you go and see it all for yourself if you get the chance.

So now we're all sat in the Twice Brewed - only for the free wifi you understand so I can write this blog - and, although it's still stinking hot, the cloud is beginning to bubble up quite dramatically on the horizon. Maybe we're due some rain on the hike tomorrow. Whatever, we've been exceptionally lucky up to now!

Hope you enjoy the attached photos.

Russ