Today, Year 4 we went on our school trip to Arbeia Roman Fort in South Shields. This used to be a key place for the Romans where supplies were kept for all the soldiers who built Hadrian’s Wall. The wall separated Scotland from England and stopped the Scottish people, called Picts, from attacking the Romans).

When we arrived at the fort, we went to see all the Roman artefacts in the museum which was called  ‘Set in Stone’. We saw a female skeleton from Roman times! With her, they had buried a vial, hair clips and a round red disc. The Romans were buried with special belongings like they are today sometimes. As this body is so old, nobody knows what happened to her.

We also saw a key piece of stone from an arch, called an aqueduct, which is a bridge with water running over the top that fed water to the people living on the site. The stone had an inscription for Septimius Severus Alexander. His successor wasn’t happy with this and had his name erased from the stone!

Other artefacts we saw were alters like tombstones for Brigantia, of the Briganti tribe and Neptune, ruler of the sea. We found that there were inscriptions on the alters in Latin. Luckily, some people can still understand Latin so we are able to understand what they say.

Next, we went to a place called ‘Time Quest’ where we were able to dig for old things that the Romans would have lost during a big fire that had taken place. We found so many different things such as a skull(!), a deer antler, a roof tile and pottery. We were also able to do some really fun activities such as building forts, making wax rubbings of inscriptions, putting together broken plates and pots that had been broken and we made mosaics (patterned pictures) out of different coloured stones. We also dressed up as Romans!

After that, we went to the Commander’s Offices and house where we looked at a reconstruction of all the rooms that they would have had. We explored his summer dining room, his office and his bedroom. By the way, it was in ruins when it was discovered and it was rebuilt on the ruins in 2022.

Finally, we went to the West Tower-we could see for miles!

We had a fantastic day out at Arbeia and really got to see how the Romans lived when they were in South Shields.

‍

‍

‍