‘following Hadrian’: Carole visits Colchester Roman circus

On Saturday (21st February), Carole Raddato came to see the site of Colchester Roman circus. Carole is a dedicated traveller with a special interest in ancient history, especially Roman history, and especially the emperor Hadrian *. Carole maintains a blog – ‘following Hadrian’ – a Facebook page and online photo. galleries on Tumblr and Flickr, and she also Tweets about her travels. The Trust follows Carole on Twitter. This weekend she was in the UK and came to Colchester before moving on to Cambridge. In Colchester, she walked the Roman town wall, had a look round Colchester Castle Museum, and came to visit the site of the Roman circus.

Carole now lives at Frankfurt in Germany, but she lived in London for eight years and enjoyed exploring the sites of Roman Britain. Her tag line is ‘I came, I saw, I photographed… follow me in the footsteps of Hadrian’, and her fascinating hobby is following the emperor Hadrian’s travels around the Roman empire. Carole visits and photographs sites, remains and artefacts. So far, she has uploaded over 20,000 high-quality photo.s into her online galleries, to create a remarkable and valuable resource. Carole also uses Swarm, a mobile app which enables users to share their locations within their social network, check-in to a given location and check if anyone in their social network is in the same area.

Carole came to see the Colchester Roman circus for several reasons. She visited Colchester for the first time in 2011 but didn’t visit the circus site. She says that, as she wanted to write a blog post on exploring Roman Colchester, she had to come back and see it – the only known site of a Roman circus in Britain! She has also been keeping up with the Trust’s work on developing the circus site for visitors on Twitter. We have built reconstructed stumps of the starting-gates and, now, we are constructing a visitor walkway on part of the circus site in front of our building. Carole was particularly interested to see the developments at the circus site for herself as she donated towards our appeal in 2010 to buy the building and set up a circus centre for visitors. She thinks that the starting-gates look great and she will be returning to the Roman circus again, soon.

On the 5th February 2015, Carole reported the recent discovery of a bust of Hadrian in Spain, which was revealed to the international media on that day: see http://followinghadrian.com/2015/02/05/exquisite-marble-bust-of-hadrian-found-in-spain/ . In 2015, Carole will also be starting her ‘Hadrian 1900’ project, in which she plans to follow Hadrian’s travels by year, 1,900 years later. So, on the 31st March 2015, she will set off on her first journey, to Asia Minor.

Read Carole’s blog at http://followinghadrian.com/ and visit her Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/FollowingHadrian . You can see Carole’s photo. galleries at http://followinghadrian.tumblr.com/ and https://www.flickr.com/photos/carolemage/ . Follow Carole on Twitter at https://twitter.com/carolemadge . You can follow the Trust on Twitter at https://twitter.com/CATRomanCircus .

We are re-opening the Roman circus site and centre to visitors on Saturday 28th March 2015.

With many thanks to Carole. We look forward to seeing you again!

The image is one of Carole’s photo.s of our starting-gates.

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* Hadrian (AD 117-38) was a Roman emperor. He was born in Rome, but was of Spanish heritage. He served on the Danube and as governor of Syria, and the emperor Trajan adopted him as his imperial successor. Unusually for a Roman emperor, Hadrian travelled extensively throughout the empire, and had temples, libraries and baths built in the places that he travelled to. He had a huge palace built near Rome and public buildings built in Rome, including the famous Pantheon. He was, apparently, fascinated by the empire and its frontiers, and he was responsible for the building of the great Hadrian’s Wall in Britain. Hadrian was interested in Greek culture and philosophy. When his male partner Antinous died, Hadrian had him deified as a god. Hadrian himself became ill and retired to the Bay of Naples, where he died.

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