Milia Passuum LIII

Usually, when I say goodbye to Dan and Abi it's because they are leaving my house to go school, so it feels a bit odd when they leave part way during the day as they did today. (It's a bank holiday and their mum was taking them out shopping.) Suddenly the house feels a bit empty. The best way I have found to deal with this is to distract myself by going off and doing something. 

Recently, I read that a Roman milestone was once found near Middleton, which is just up the valley from me, and that it had been re-erected on a hill not far from where it was found, so I thought I'd go and take a look. I had a map reference, so I checked it out on Maps, and then drove up to Middleton.

I parked up as near as I could and made my back down the road and into a field. The land was undulating and there was no obvious hill, so I jogged about, looking for anything resembling a milestone. Nothing. Now I thought about it, it did seem odd just to put the milestone in a field, uncurated.

Looking north, I could see the church and it occurred to me that that would be a good place to put an interesting artefact so I jogged down to the graveyard. And there it was! Just by the wall, with its own little information board. 

It was found in 1836, when it was hit by a plough. It was originally simply put up in a field by the landowner but was moved to the churchyard in 2016. The inscription reads 'Milia Passuum LIII', which translates as 53 Roman miles (about 49 modern miles) and that is the distance to Carlisle. 

With my back to the church, there was no other building to be seen and I wondered how different this area might have looked two thousand years ago. A lot more trees, I guess, but the landscape would have been much the same. I ran my fingers along the grooves of the inscription, imagining the Roman who carved the letters, two thousand years ago, and thought how wonderful that this milestone had been found, recognised for what it was, and not lost to history. Hats off to Mr W Moore of Grimeshill, the landowner who found it (commemorated by the additional inscription, added by a Dr Lingard: SOLO ERVTVM RESTITVIT GVL MOORE AN MDCCCXXXVI.)

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-10.1 kgs
Reading: 'How Art Made Pop And Pop Became Art' by Mike Roberts