The hand of time

Yesterday I went, with my family, to Jublains near to Mayenne in France. This town was invaded by the Roman Empire in 66 AD. The town became a fortified garrison for Roman soldiers and a large fort was built on the site. The walls of the buildings are a classic Roman construction of local stone interspersed with neat lines of red hand-made bricks and in one of these bricks I found finger prints.

 The prints on the edge of this brick set deep in a wall under many feet of overlying construction was of a flat red clay about an inch thick. The person who made this brick had picked it up after making it, probably by smacking the clay into a wooden form and slicing the top off with wood or perhaps an iron scraper. In the process of picking it up, three fingers left a mark on the end of the cast and one of his finger nails scraped up the brick as he dropped it onto the stack where it was left to dry.

His fingers were pretty much the same dimension as mine and I was able to place my own fingers in those same traces that he had made so many years before. Those marks and the trace of that person's existence had stayed there untouched and possibly even unseen for nearly two thousand years when I chanced upon them. In that instant I imagined the person, stood at his work, trying to keep up his numbers, maybe working to get a bonus or maybe he was a slave from local Gaul pressed into service by Roman masters. He probably never knew that his hand had made such a mark and certainly never imagined that so long after, his own story would become such a personal experience for someone such as me.