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Reader, have you ever relaxed in a sauna? Or a jacuzzi or a hot tub? Yes? Congratulations – you have experienced some of the pleasures of a Roman bath. But have you ever smeared yourself with oil, sweated until you were scarlet and then removed the dirty oil and sweat with a curved metal blade known as a strigil? Following up when you were clean with a long relaxing soak in hot water, while chatting to your friends? Or indeed to people you have never met before and never want to meet again? How about the ghastly shock of plunging into a pool of cold water afterwards?

Taking a bath in the proper manner was part of being a Roman, even if some sturdy citizens considered that all the scented oil and massage was a bit self-indulgent.  If you were wealthy, you might have your own private bath house attached to your mansion. If you were a soldier, there would be a bath house attached to your fort. But most people would have gone to a public bath house, paying a small fee for the privilege. Public bath houses were like modern leisure centres. As well as bathing facilities, there were usually exercise areas, massage rooms, libraries, food outlets and gardens for strolling in. Baths were not just a place to get clean and relax, but also an important place to socialise, meet your friends and business associates, and show off how important you were. Some of course had better facilities than others. In the course of my life I have visited a wide variety of Roman bathing establishments in various parts of the empire.

I was loosely attached on one occasion to the excavation of a site which included a private bath house. It was a small Roman country house or ‘villa' in Hertfordshire, at a place called Turners Hall Farm (See Current Archaeology 198). A team based at the museum where I worked excavated it, and I spent some time at the site, although not while the bath building was being excavated. The modest villa, apparently built of timber on flint and chalk foundations, was built at the site of a previous Iron Age farm, presumably by a family who had adopted Roman ways. The bath house had warm and hot rooms and a plunge pool. Perhaps a local British family succumbing to Agricola’s introduction of baths and banquets as part of their enslavement? (Tacitus, “Agricola”, Chapter 21)

That was the nearest I have come to working on the excavation of a Roman bath house, but I have looked after hundreds of  boxfuls of the various sorts of tile required for building them, which filled up many a shelf in the museum store. The basic requirement for any Roman bath house, aside from a good water supply, is a hypocaust, a floor with a space underneath it which can be filled with hot air from the fire in a furnace on an outside wall. The hot air is then led up through the wall through flues or a hollow wall and escapes just under the eaves of the roof. The tiles come in various shapes : flat rectangular tiles to make the floor itself; flat square tiles to be cemented on top of each other to form the pillars which support the floor; box tiles to make the flues; lugged tiles to make the double walls. Even broken bits of them are quite recognizable. All these I have been familiar with since my youth.

There were alternatives to tiles. When I moved north I visited a small Roman military bath house attached to a fort on the Antonine Wall in Scotland. Bearsden bathhouse, in a suburb to the north of Glasgow was built of stone, which is readily available in the area. I found this a fascinating contrast after a lifetime spent with brick and tile. When you visit Bearsden, which is now set unromantically in the middle of a housing estate, you can wander through the foundations of the various rooms: a changing room leading to the usual cold room, two warm rooms, a hot wet room, a hot dry room, a hot bath and a cold bath. There was even a loo. Must have been pleasant after a hard day marching up and down the hills in the freezing rain and driving snow, although the thought of plunging into ice cold water when you have only just warmed up seems a bit macho to me.

At the other end of the scale I visited an enormous public bath house in Rome itself. The Baths of Caracalla were begun by the emperor Severus in 206 CE, and opened in 217CE under the emperor Caracalla. Later emperors completed various areas. The facilities could accommodate 1600 people at once, and thousands of people would use them in a single day. A special aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, was built to provide the massive quantities of water needed by these baths, which included a swimming pool of Olympic proportions. To someone used to seeing only the foundations, the height of the surviving walls and the decoration of the floors of the rooms is stunning, although much of the original marble, statues and decoration have long gone. Unfortunately when I visited, the underground areas were not open. These included not only areas where the water was distributed, and furnaces stoked by an army of slaves using an estimated 10 tons of wood per day, but a temple to the god Mithras, who was usually worshipped in underground shrines.

The Baths of Caracalla were the inspiration for a painting by the 19^th century artist Lawrence Alma Tadema. It may not be strictly accurate but it does convey the atmosphere of luxury and pleasure and lots of people socialising.  My environmental-setting shower in the morning may get me cleaner and doesn’t require an aqueduct and a small wood, but it probably isn’t as much fun!

 “…the breakfast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, wherever he had supped he would breakfast in Scotland.” 

Thus spoke the 18^th century English writer Dr Samuel Johnson, who made a tour of the Western isles of Scotland in 1773. Although extremely rude about much of the food he was offered on the journey, he was whole-heartedly in favour of Scottish breakfasts. So I am currently living in the right country, and I strongly agree with the marmalade bit.

When I was working on a dig in France, we lived in tents in the field next to a small country restaurant. We had our breakfasts (jam not marmalade but it was good and the coffee was marvellous) on the terrace of the restaurant in the early morning sunshine, surrounded by tubs of petunias and geraniums. The owner of the establishment had an ancient father who used to come and sit on a corner of the terrace while we were eating. His breakfast consisted of a piece of salami and a large glass of cognac.  To each his own…

I saw an interesting breakfast in a Singapore café. A little old Chinese lady came and sat at my table, bringing with her a very large bowl of curried noodle soup. She was a tiny, skinny little thing, and I watched with interest as she steadily spooned and chop-sticked the enormous bowlful into her diminutive person. She looked very perky so it was obviously doing her good. Maybe I should try it. Probably this form of breakfast was the inspiration for my son’s current favourite, which is to take a pot of instant curried noodles, break two eggs into it, and pour boiling water over the lot. When the noodles have had their due time, the eggs could by a stretch be said to be poached.

I myself was eating the signature breakfast of the city, or at least part of it. This is coffee and kaya toast, eaten with two boiled eggs. I skipped the eggs as I am not fond of soft eggs in any form, and the eggs that go with this breakfast are so soft boiled that you are expected to break them into a bowl, stir them up with soya sauce and drink them. ‘Kaya toast’ is white toast made into a sandwich with kaya jam. Kaya jam is a combination of coconut milk, egg and sugar flavoured with pandan leaf, and is very nice. My first attempt at this breakfast was a bit oversweet, as I did not understand how to specify that I wanted my coffee without sugar.  I watched the man preparing it  put a tablespoon of sugar into the (glass) mug, then about an inch of condensed milk, and then fill it up with coffee. But once I had got the coffee sorted out it was a fine tropical start to the day’s sightseeing, especially when I started adding miniature, perfectly fresh bananas bought from a nearby supermarket. Oh joy!

The Full British Breakfast, in its English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish variants, is part of the pleasure of staying in B&Bs all over the British Isles. Sausage, bacon, egg, fried bread, baked beans, fried mushroom and fried tomato: a decadent combination of saturated fats to begin a day walking up mountainsides or along the seashore in the freezing rain and/or howling gale. I like the Scottish version (Lorne sausage and haggis) even better than the traditional English one. The Irish version (black and white pudding, soda bread and potato cake) is not to be sneezed at either. I haven’t yet tried a Full Welsh, which allegedly includes seaweed and cockles made into a patty with oatmeal, but it sounds promising.

But I think my favourite breakfast is the bacon butties you get on the local ferries to the Outer Isles of Orkney. Coffee and really good bacon butties munched as you sail across a brilliantly blue sea past small green islands on your way to visit a chambered tomb is the absolute best. Oh, how I’ve missed them during Lockdown!

Archaeology is a very badly paid profession for all but the very lucky. It is also very insecure, with many short –term contracts. It is regarded as non-essential to the well-being of society in many countries, although there are others so fiercely proud of their national heritage that they will put you in jail for picking up stones in the river bed in case they were prehistoric tools. In 2010, as the recession bit and redundancy loomed, some of us in the archaeology curators’ office at the museum where I worked had a discussion about possible alternative jobs…

One of my colleagues suggested becoming a private detective. As he pointed out, this would involve spending a lot of time sorting through the contents of people’s dustbins, analysing what they have thrown away and what it tells you about them. Perfect! As archaeologists we have all spent ages digging out people’s rubbish pits, the pre-modern equivalent of the dustbin, and drawing deductions from the contents, so we have loads of relevant experience. Well, sort of. As the museum’s specialist in medieval pottery my deductions tended to be along the lines of how much local as opposed to imported pottery the household was using, as a very rough guide to what date the site was, and an even rougher guide to how rich the household was and who the town was trading with. I yearned to get someone to do a chemical analysis of the cooking pots to see what they were boiling up in them, but there was never enough money.

Another colleague suggested becoming an undertaker, since we have all spent plenty of time exhuming corpses, albeit usually reduced to skeletons.  I dug up my first skeleton when I was still at school. Subsequent years of work in a museum involved caring for many boxfuls of human bones and crunchy bags of cremated ones. The latter contributed to the education of my son’s class in infant school. I was asked to talk to twenty five-year-olds about being an archaeologist. We all sat in a big circle on the carpet and solemnly passed round a selection of objects I had brought in. Before we started I had asked the teacher privately if she thought the children would be upset by a small bag of cremated dead Roman. Beaming, she said that would solve a problem for her, as they were supposed to “do death” that term, and she would now be able to tick the topic off quite painlessly. The weeny ones didn’t seem at all upset, although I’m not sure how many of them really understood that what was in the bag was the remains of a 2000-year-old person.

Sewage worker would also be appropriate. There is nothing like a really good cesspit. I had been working on the contents of a sixteenth century cesspit at the time. The pottery had wonderful green stains from the cess (sewage), and the soil samples contained things like blackberry pips and the eggs of parasitic worms that had gone right through the people who had used the loo. Most cesspits in the medieval town produced traces of parasitic worms; those poor medieval guys were full of them. But my favourite was one amazing latrine which produced a whole jar of 14^th century plum stones that someone had tipped down the loo.

Well, today’s job market is all about transferable skills….

People have often asked me what was the most exciting object I ever found while working in archaeology. Two finds stand out in my memory and I can’t decide between them, so I will describe both. They could not have been more different. One dated from the Ice Age, the other was medieval. One I uncovered on an excavation, the other in a museum.

The excavation was in south-west France. We were working in the cool shade under the overhang of a limestone cliff. Above us towered the cliff, below us stretched a gentle wooded slope. Saplings had grown across the entrance to the shelter and filtered the sunlight. Fourteen thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, people had lived there, blocking the entrance with a wall and lighting a fire year after year on the same spot to make a snug home for the winter. Now some of us were uncovering the hearth, slowly peeling off the layers of earth and ash, while others were working on the area just outside the living space, where they had thrown their rubbish. Strings weighted with fishing line sinkers hung from a frame across the ceiling, marking the ground below into one metre squares so that we could make records of the horizontal distribution of the finds.  A string triangle at the edge of the working area allowed us to record the depth above sea level of finds and surfaces.

I was working on the rubbish dump. As I gently scraped the earth away, I found two tiny flakes of fine bright yellow stone, each with minute chips removed from the edges to shape it. They were the stone barb and tip of an arrowhead made of yellow jasper. The wood of the arrow had decayed, leaving them lying in the exact position they had been in when they were still attached to it, one lying flat, one on its side.  They were quite beautiful, the fine yellow stone looking like solidified butter. And mine were the first eyes that had seen them, mine the first hand that had touched them, in fourteen thousand years.

But you don’t have to be working on site to make an exciting discovery. Almost equally thrilling was a find I made when I was doing post-excavation work on the pottery from a medieval town. All the potsherds had been washed clean and marked with the code for the site and the layer it had come from. This was done in a shed on site while the excavation was going on. Then it was my job to lay all the pottery out on a huge table and see if any of the broken bits would stick together, before proceeding with the cataloguing. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle, but with half the pieces missing, because for various reasons, we never found all the bits.

One of the medieval pits had produced a number of very large sherds of coarse grey unglazed pottery made locally in the thirteenth century. I fitted them together to produce the best part of two dripping dishes. Dripping dishes were shallow pans that were placed under the roasting spit in front of the fire to catch the fat and juices that dripped out of the meat. Mine were semi-circular in shape, with a straight edge on the side nearest the fire, and a handle on the round edge away from it. Each corner had a lip for pouring off the fat. And the best thing of all was that these two dripping dishes had actual medieval fat still sticking to them, where it had burnt onto the lip and the edge against the fire. Just like the fat burned onto your barbecue or your roasting pan, but seven hundred years old.

The thing I found exciting about both of these finds was not that they were made of gold or silver or had an enormous financial value. It was that they connected me to my fellow human beings, who had made and used them long ago: the hunter from so long ago who chose to make an arrow using a stone which was beautiful as well as functional; and the medieval housewife cooking her chicken or leg of lamb on a spit in front of the fire, basting it from time to time with the juices and fat collected in the dish below it. I could almost smell the roasting meat…

Have you ever heard of the Kirkwall Ba’? It is a form of street rugby traditionally played in Kirkwall on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. There are two teams: the Uppies (Up the Town, the south end) and the Doonies (Down the Town, the north end). In medieval Kirkwall, the south end of the town, the Laverock, was the preserve of the church and the Bishop of Orkney, while the north end, the Burgh, was the domain of the earl.

The first time I saw the Ba’ was on a New Year’s Day shortly after I came to Orkney.  It was a clear sunny day, with brief showers which came and went. I parked my car near a friend’s house and walked into the town centre.  You don’t want to park too near the scene of the action, or your car may suffer. The shop fronts all had stout wooden bars fixed across them at about waist height. The Ba’ starts at the Merkat Cross (market cross), on the green space in front of St Magnus Cathedral.  The green is raised above the level of the road at about waist height, and as one o’clock approached, people started to gather all around. One man climbed up a tree with his camera. I found myself a good place on the edge of the drop with a lamp-post to hang on to.

Just before one o’clock there was a ripple of excitement among the crowd and the two teams approached. To my left, from the south end of town, the Uppies team came marching towards the Merkat Cross. They looked like a rather large rugby team, tough and determined men dressed in a motley collection of rugby shirts, t-shirts with and without logos of various irrelevant kinds, and heavy boots fixed to their feet with a binding of duck tape. The ends of their jeans were also bound tightly round their ankles with duck tape. Then the Doonies arrived from the north end. There were twice as many of them as the first group – apparently there is no rule about how many men per team. They were dressed the same way, but looked even more ferocious. There also appeared to be no age limit. They included everything from wild hairy men in their twenties to bald and white-haired men who appeared to be about sixty. They looked quite terrifying as they scowled their way towards the opposing team and surrounded them completely, squashing them in hard, everyone facing the Cross waiting for the Ba’ to be thrown in.

The cathedral clock chimed one, and the Ba’, a round football-sized effort stuffed with sawdust, was thrown into the scrum from the Merkat Cross. I hoped no-one got it on their head. I knew how heavy the thing was, as I had helped to pack the museum’s collection of ba’s when they had to go into storage temporarily.

I watched with interest as the action began. It looked like a giant rugby scrum, with a circle of about seventy men pushing like mad into the centre. How any of them could tell where the ba’ was, I do not know. It turned out later that most of the time they didn’t. Some of the ones in the middle had one hand up above their heads for some reason. One tall black-haired young man in a red shirt seemed to be in charge of one of the teams, and was shouting incomprehensible instructions to them. I couldn’t tell which team it was, or who was directing the other side. Apparently both teams had planning meetings beforehand and had agreed on their tactics. From time to time, several men came running round the outside of the scrum from somewhere and joined in from the outside, pushing with mighty efforts. I was later told that the people in the middle of the scrum got so squashed and breathless that they had to move out to the outside from time to time. The spectators, meanwhile, were standing quite close to the players, leaving just a clear space about ten feet wide around the outside of the scrum. Cameras whirred and clicked.

The struggling mass of men didn’t move for about ten minutes. Then all of a sudden there was a lot of shouting from the spectators as well as the players, the crowd parted, and the mass moved across the street and plastered itself against the windows of the shops on the opposite side, or rather, against the crash barrier erected for that purpose. It stayed there for quite some time, while something went on within the interior of the scrum that I couldn’t see. Steam began to rise from the overheated players. A boot was thrown up into the air over the spectators. Then there was another howl and the scrum rolled over to my side of the street. Spectators scattered as it came closer and I lost my perch on the wall, but I could see that the players were climbing up onto the wall to get at things from above.  A player knelt on the grass close to me, clutching his anatomy. Someone gave him a drink of water and he returned to the game. The whole thing hadn’t moved more than twenty yards down the street in half an hour.

I was starting to get cold and nobody seemed to be going anywhere, so I nipped up a side street to a café for a hot chocolate and a visit to the loo. I asked the café staff how long the event was likely to last.  They told me it had lasted until eight o’clock at night on Christmas Day i.e. seven hours. The duration was not fixed, it just lasted until one team had got the ba’ into their goal. The shortest recorded Ba’ was the Men’s Christmas Day Ba’ in 1952, which was over in 4 minutes.  The Uppies’ goal was Mackinson’s Corner, at the junction of New Scapa Road and Main Street where the old town gates were originally situated, but the Doonies had to get it into the harbour, actually into the water.  When I went back outside, progress had been made. The Doonies had forced the scrum to the corner of a street leading towards the harbour, and over the next quarter of an hour managed to push the thing halfway down the street. Then somehow it got into a walled car park and stuck there. There were spectators and players climbing the walls, and I could see things were starting to get rough. The locals all say that scores get settled during the ba’. Players seemed to come and go, dropping out for a pee or a drink as needed and then joining in again.

At about two o’clock I left them to it and went home. It appears that I made the right decision. According to the local newspaper, the scrum remained in that car park for three hours.  Water was passed to the players as they pushed and shoved and several players had to be pulled out for first aid before rejoining the scrum. However, around five o’clock the outnumbered but fiendishly cunning Uppies staged a series of dummy runs in which they pretended to get the ba’ out of the scrum and run away with it, totally confusing the players and the spectators, who scattered in various directions. Meanwhile a small group of Uppies quietly walked the ba’ most of the way to their own goal before they were spotted. This is apparently known as a “smuggle”. The Doonies did their best to make a come-back, but the Uppies banged the ba’ off the wall at Mackinson’s Corner a few minutes later, thus winning the game. There then followed twenty minutes discussion over which member of the Uppies team deserved to be declared the personal winner and get to take the ba’ home. The honour was finally awarded to a thirty-nine-year-old airport firefighter who had been playing since he was six years old. According to the paper, the triumphant Uppies then went to the pub, and later to the hero’s home and spent the night in celebration, leaving the streets littered with a scattering of drinks cans and bottles, a couple of boots and a belt, and what looked like a torn t-shirt lying in the road.  

This year, alas, there was no Ba’ because of the covid pandemic. After nine years residence in Orkney, it seemed weird to walk around Kirkwall in the run-up to Christmas and see no boards over the windows. Hopefully, it’ll be back next year.