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Wroxeter house recreation adds colour to Roman site

Good taste is not a feature of a new Roman house that has risen, with much sweat and cursing, from a flat Shropshire field at the genuinely ancient Roman town site of Wroxeter: painted bright yellow and oxblood red, the building can be seen a mile off,

The wall, which is 7 metres (23ft) high and stands on top of a metre-high mound, protects the remains of an real ancient Roman forum.

They had to take some shortcuts, including using some machine-cut roof trusses, in order to get the building finished before what proved to be the coldest winter in a century. He has already taken a kicking from some of his peers over that, and even more so over the oak shingled roof (rather than tile or thatch) and the bull's intestine windows in the bath house.

It took a team of seven builders six months, 150 tonnes of sandstone bricks, 15 tonnes of lime mortar and 26 tonnes of plaster – all mixed by hand – 1,500 hand-cut timber joints and 2,600 hand-cut roof tiles to create the house, based on a real building excavated at Wroxeter, which was once the fourth largest city in Roman Britain and is now an archaeology visitor attraction in the care of English Heritage....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)