Cirencester Roman Amphitheatre

We've now left Bath on our whistle-stop tour of friends and relatives. We spent a couple of hours having coffee this morning with some lovely friends in Chippenham (once we'd negotiated the Bath traffic and the road works on the way into Chippenham!) - and we're now staying the night in Cirencester.

We spent a couple of hours in the late afternoon looking round Cirencester and liked it very much. The main attraction for us was the site of the Roman amphitheatre, shown in the main blip. It's one of the largest surviving examples of Roman amphitheatres in Britain, having been built in the 2nd Century AD for the entertainment of the people of Corinium Dobunnorum (the Roman name for the town). The large banks of earth which you can see in the panorama photo were built to support tiers of seating for up to 8,000 spectators. You can still see that there are gaps in the earth banks on each side of the photo where the entrances were. The site was not recognised as that of a Roman amphitheatre until 1780, and only properly excavated in the 1960s.

It's been an afternoon of sunshine and showers and we liked the rainbow over the main street (in the extra) - no doubt with a pot of gold in the Church of St John the Baptist!