Year 3 visit to the Roman Legion Museum

As part of our Theme ‘Roaming with the Romans’ we visited the Roman Legion Museum in Cawrleon, Wales.

We visited the amphitheatre. It was huge and would have seated 6000 people when full. It has a grass centre and stone walls. They used to say that from the top of the amphitheatre you could hear a pin drop! In the amphitheatre they used to put on events that lasted all day. Sometimes wild animals would fight each other and even people would fight the animals! Gladiators would also come to fight. When the gladiator was wounded the Emperor would ask the audience if he had done a good enough job to be allowed to survive! Year 3 performed a play about the gods in the amphitheatre in front of thousands of imaginary Romans!

We also looked around the museum and saw lots of different objects. This is my list of top 5 things I found interesting.

1. Roman coins – they had a picture of the Emperors head on them. They were used everywhere in the Roman Empire and at Caerleon some coins were found buried in a broken saucepan.
2. Jewellery and rings – These were made of gold and silver. They would normally have little gem stones in them like rubies and emeralds. They would be worn by rich ladies.
3. A Roman coffin – This was made of stone and is was a rectangle with curved corners. Science meant that they could work out what the Roman man inside would have looked like by using his skull to make an image on the computer.
4. The helmet – this was all in one piece and 2000 years old! It was dug up 100 years ago and was used to protect a gladiator or soldier’s head,
5. Grave stones – these had Latin writing on them about the person buried.

In the museum was also a giant mosaic that we were allowed to touch. It had a picture of a horse on it and a man with a sword. It was made of small colourful tiles stuck together to make a picture.

We also did a workshop about Roman doctors. Some of us pretended to be rich Romans and some of us had to be poor Romans. I was rich and the doctor carried out surgery on me because I had a bad head. He first cut the skin and pulled it back to get to my bones! He cut the bone with a bone saw and then they would say that all the bad would fly out! The doctor then would put a patch of metal over the hole and sew the skin back up. Only rich people had this done. There was a god of medicine called Asclepius and people would pray to him to be made better.

We visited the Roman barrack rooms which was the soldiers’ bedrooms. The beds were stuffed with straw and sometimes sticks. Normally, they would have lice and insects crawling in them. Covers were made of wool and horse hair. We tried on some armour and it was very heavy. Ms Appleby tried some on too, she wore a funny helmet that had horse hair on it.

Lastly, we went to the Romans Baths. We learnt how they cleaned themselves. There was the sound of Romans and an amazing projection of Romans onto the baths so we could imagine a Roman swimming and washing.

I had a brilliant time, thank you Ms Appleby!

By Isla Mills, Year 3