Before I left for the Isle of Wight, my father sent me a cutting from his history magazine which he knew I’d find interesting. I hadn’t even heard of Brading Roman Villa before, but I looked it up and it was an easily-manageable day trip from where I was staying.
Too good to be true?
I got a bus from the end of the road into Ryde, and then caught a train to Brading. That in itself was quite an experience – the Island Line is a short length of mostly single-track electrified railway line between Ryde and Shanklin. The tunnel outside Ryde has too low a roof to allow standard trains to fit through, so the rolling stock is made up of super-annuated tube trains from the London Underground which should really have been retired decades ago!
From the station it was a short walk along the side of the track and through a housing estate to reach the villa, which was protected from the weather by a modern building housing a giftshop and a cafe. The mosaics were good, but in my opinion nowhere near as good as promised in the advert – they certainly weren’t amongst the best in Europe. I’ve seen far better in Sicily and mainland Italy, for a start. I think it would be fairer to say that they were “among the best-preserved mosaics displayed in-situ north of the Alps”, but that probably wouldn’t bring in as many punters.
The cock-headed man
Nevertheless, the villa and mosaics were well worth the visit. The meaning of this one of a “cock-headed man” has got lost in the mists of time, but clearly was relevant to the owner in the late third century AD.
The Medusa mosaic at Brading
This room-sized mosaic of Medusa gives a feeling for how luxuriously-decorated the villa was. Unfortunately, the colours of the tesserae are heavily faded, partly due to salt-encrustation from flooding off the nearby fields. The ground-surface has raised by several feet over the last 2000 years, so the surrounding fields are now well above the Roman floor level, and contaminated run-off from the fields has badly damaged the mosaics, leading to fading and subsidence. Hopefully, some recent flood-prevention work should stop the situation from getting worse.
All together, it was a very interesting and enjoyable visit, even if I thought the original advert overplayed its hand!
