Wroxeter Roman Bathhouse & Franklin & Sons Rhubarb Lemonade (@NLi10)

We took some friends (and their dog Poppy) to Wroxeter Roman City in the UK by Shrewsbury - which is an English Heritage property.  In the old days these places rarely had any food or drink (or loos) but today there was a drinks fridge with a selection of goodies - and a branded ice-cream fridge with Vegan Magnums.  Now I was too full after the picnic to try the latter, but I'll get there another day.

There isn't much of this 1800 year old city bath-house left, and the Victorians have fixed a lot of what was left meaning your more likely to be seeing their interpretation than a real snap-shot, but it's a great day out and a fun place to take...

Poppy the dog! She's a Bichon Friese and full of energy.  We'd jogged a lap of the site before her real owners had made it out of the gift shop - and that still didn't slow her down.

This is the entrance to the bath-house seen from the inside - surprisingly still in tact up to roof height (which would have been metal) with lots of lovely architectural detail.  It's confusing why this wasn't 'robbed' with the rest of the site when the locals wanted to build more interesting and useful things - it was likely incorporated into the 500 AD structures that occupied the site afterwards.

Poppy didn't think much of it and chose this location to poop.

More recently some experimental acrhaleologists and Channel 4 decided to build a Roman Villa from scratch, which is an amazing idea.  They then decided not to look after it for some reason so it's a little shabbier than it once was.  A nice look at what the site would have been, but a stark reminder of why Italian buildings aren't more popular in the North of England.

The main event really was the picnic - with lots of good tables, and chilled drinks to buy.  I chose this Frankin & Sons Rhubarb Lemonade which was tangy enough to be interesting, but ultimately refreshing enough to be drinkable.  Only 275 ML was my only real complaint - but I think that a full 500 would have also been too much - a balancing trick really.

Poppy was more interested in the plate of ham.

And on the way home she got to meet cows for the first time too!  She wasn't too scared, but I got licked by three of them.

Do let us know if writing more about the places we got the snacks is interesting - I know a lot of our readers are international and don't have Roman junk everywhere like we do (seriously - I grew up surrounded by this stuff, then studied it at Uni for three years) so I think I take it for granted more than I should! If it's something you'd like a few pictures of when we do make it out and about then let us know!