Back in time

Today we ventured to Fishbourne to visit the Roman villa there.  It is the largest residential Roman villa discovered in Britain and has an unusually early date of 75AD.  In particular the floor mosaics are of interest as they include some very early designs, such as this one featured here.  They tend to contain many geometric shapes and to be made of black and white tiles which were apparently fashionable in Southern Europe at the time.  In the villa there are examples of more intricate mosaic designs (as you can see in Extras).  Here Cupid with his trident rides a dolphin flanked by sea-horses and sea-panthers.

Oliver's favourite part of the trip was seeing the skeleton found buried under the floor of one of the rooms and Emily's favourite part was seeing all the different patterns used in the mosaics - I think that was my favourite part too!

We lunched at a beach diner called The Deck and then returned home to collect Merlin from the kennels.  He had got along fine, apparently he had been very pleased to see the lady who did the early morning shift!  

The evening was spent eating spaghetti and playing Creationary.