On Friday, Form 2 experienced a Roman day at Fishbourne Palace, near Chichester. The workshops were lots of fun, with all pupils trying their hand at writing in Latin, playing Roman board games, wool spinning, cooking in the kitchen and even constructing mosaics with 2000-year-old Roman tiles! The pupils particularly enjoyed learning all about Roman clothes, they all tried on a slave tunic and some lucky pupils were dressed as wealthy Romans.
Fishbourne has been a famous site since the mosaics were accidently discovered in 1960 and it is not hard to see why. The pupils marvelled at the dolphin mosaic which contains 375 000 tiles with Cupid riding a dolphin at its centre! This was a building of unprecedented size and most probably belonged to a powerful figure with personal connections to the Emperor himself in Rome.
Form 2 were fascinated to see that the site had later been used as a medieval graveyard. Gravediggers were unaware of the Roman artefacts and a skeleton can now be seen in the centre of the mosaics.
