College Record 2014

again there were photos, but no dimensions recorded. Fortunately I had worked in
the relevant museum as a young graduate before coming up to Oxford to research
Roman gemstones, and I had been given the chore of measuring these stones, so all
I needed to do in working on the Corpus of Sculpture from South-East England
(now in press) was to convert Imperial dimensions to Metric.
There have been other experiences. I traced a fragment of an altar depicting the
god Mars to a private house in Wotton-under-Edge. It was now set low down in
the surround of a modern fireplace, and I had to lie on my stomach on the thickest
pile carpet I have ever seen to photograph it. In the same county a sculpture from
Winchcombe, last seen in the 1870s, turned up in a cupboard at Sudeley Castle a
year or two ago, and I was glad to be able to confirm my earlier surmise from a
sketch that it was indeed a representation of a hunter god. Not all sculptures have
been ‘lost’ for so long. A brief report in the journal Britannia told me that a very fine
statue of a standing male figure had been found at Dover about 25 years ago. The
excavator denied all knowledge of it, but then to my satisfaction and his, discovered
it was the very same block of stone which had lain undisturbed under his desk for
two decades.
Fortunately it was discovered in time for the Corpus. And of course I have made my
own discoveries, amongst them a superb Roman imbricated (scale-covered) column
that had been re-used by the Norman builders in the Holy Innocents’ chapel in
Canterbury Cathedral crypt. This is by no means the only case of such re-use,
for amongst other examples I have recorded there is architectural stonework
incorporated in Atcham church, Shropshire, and the sculpture of a lion incorporated
into the late-Roman wall at Richborough. From a later period of re-use there is a
relief of a horseman still visible, set high up in the wall of a nineteenth-century
barn at Gill Mill, Ducklington, a site which in excavations conducted by Oxford
Archaeology has produced two other images of Roman gods.
Of course sculpture is being recovered by archaeologists all the time, most recently
a superb eagle from the site of a Roman cemetery in the Minories just east of the
City of London, carved in Cotswold stone. I have been involved from the beginning
in studying this iconic find, which evidently graced the mausoleum of a very
important inhabitant of first-century London and was carefully deposited in a ditch
when the mausoleum was apparently demolished soon after.
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