Dies Auri

That's me practicing my old rusty Latin...Anyone know what it means?

We have a fairly child-led perspective of home education, and we generally encourage the kids to pursue their interests and try to facilitate that. We also like to avoid segregating learning from life, and instead hope our kids view learning as something that happens everyday, all the time, anywhere, rather than in a classroom (or in our case, at the kitchen table.)

But part of letting our kids explore their own interests means exposing them to the great and beautiful things of the world so they know what is out there to be interested in :) I try to do this through the books we read, the places we go, and the ways we spend our time. And when I'm really on the ball (which is not usually) I try to overlap our reading with our exploring so the kids get exposed to a deeper slice of whatever it is I'm trying to expose them to. Recently, I've been ordering a bunch of books on Roman Britain from our library, and trying to coordinate our field trips accordingly. I mentioned the Roman Villa a while ago, and we're going to a fun-looking museum this week.

On Sunday, we went to the Dolaucothi Gold Mines in Wales. This was one of my favorite exploring-the-UK places we've gone to so far. Archaeologists and historians think that people started mining the area for gold over 2,000 years ago. They know for sure that about 1800 years ago the Romans conquered the Celtic tribes living there and created an advanced and elaborate mining operation to extract precious Welsh gold. After the Romans, Victorians, and later Depression-Era miners worked the mines again. It wasn't until the 1930s that people finally got deeper than the Romans had 1800 years ago. That's some impressive engineering!


Here are some of the Victorian-era cars they used to transport the quartz (with the gold in it) up from the mines.

 Here the kids are panning for gold in an area set up for the purpose. They found quite a bit! It reminded me of panning for gold in California gold country when I was little. Apparently, the pond where the water for the troughs comes from probably has the greatest concentration of gold remaining because it was the drainage pit for the Victorian and 1930s operations and they realized too late that their separation method was rinsing a lot of gold into the pond. Now that it's a protected area, they can't extract the gold, but they do use the water for this panning site.

After we panned for gold we went on a tour of the Roman mines. We all had to wear hard hats, and the kids got lights (which they constantly shined into my eyes once we were underground, not intentionally but I never realized how many times the kids look up at me in a fifteen minute period until they had bright lights on their foreheads...good reminder that they're always watching us! )

This is hard to see, but on the tour we hiked up out of the basin (with green roofs) you see in this picture. The whole basin was actually dug out by the Romans in surface mining operations.

Here we are about to enter a Roman drift mine. They certainly built their mine shafts to last!

And here we are inside. Please excuse the terrible photos. I was alternating between marveling at the incredibleness of the mine and being blinded by my excited kids.

My little miners. Actually, Justin could have worked in the mines in the Victorian era, which is a sad and sobering thought.

This is a pretty view. During Roman times, all this vegetation would have been washed away by their technique called "hushing" where they gathered huge quantities of water on top of a big hill and released it all at once to create a man-made flash flood. They had a huge system of aqueducts for this process. (Supposedly there is a Discovery Channel show on the Dolaucothi Aqueducts, if you're interested. I want to watch it!)

Another look back down into the gigantic pit the Romans dug out. Gives you a whole new perspective on what it would have been like to be a Roman slave...

Both kids loved this place. I haven't yet convinced either of them to be passionately interested in Roman Britain, but I'm going to keep trying for a few more field trips :) And then we'll be on to the Vikings and Saxons, as I think they come next in my vague understanding of British history...