Ever wished you could travel back in time to look around some of history's amazing sites? Well, now you can! Well, virtually.
TIME TRAVEL MADE EASY
Our Virtual Vista Tours allow you to travel back in time from the comfort of you computer chair. Whether this is at your home, educational establishment or the inter-active screens of a museum, the experience is the same: fantastic!
The aim of these tours is to transport the 'traveller' on a journey of discovery that takes in the historical site as it is today and how it might have been in its past - either at one or many periods of its history. We've already created our first test site to show what can be achieved and are at present completing our second. The first, an Iron Age hill fort in Shropshire, England, is an 18 page tour taking in today, 540 AD and 300 BC. The second is the Romano-British city of Wroxeter (Viriconium), also in Shropshire. In this tour the visitor travels through the site as it is today and how it might have been when the public baths were opened around 160 AD. There are more details on these sites in the sidebar (left).
IT'S ALL IN THE TECHNIQUE
We have used nearly all the available techniques at our disposal to create these tours: photographs, articles, CGI stills, photographic/CGI montages and QuickTime VR's. We are slightly limited in what we can produce for the internet because of download time but if we were creating these for a computer based inter-active experience or presentation video, for instance, we could include far more or produce larger and higher quality images. We could also include camera animations. We chose not to use these for the online tour because of their file size and download time.
All the above are accessed via the tour's detailed articles, which also include links to other web sites that may cover a specific topic in more detail or to a map so you can see exactly what geographical location is being referred to.
'THE BERTH' IRON AGE HILL FORT
The Berth is a fascinating and undiscovered Iron Age hill fort hidden away from gaze in the privately owned farmland of the North Shropshire countryside of England. Almost two and a half thousand years old, its magnificent presence was once reflected in the waters of marsh and mere but now it stands, a shadow of its former self, in pasture land, looking like nothing more than a tree covered hill.
For an historic site that has been said to be the Welsh king, Cynddylan's Llys Pengwern (capitol of the kingdom of Pengwern) and even the historical Arthur's Avalon, there is very little known about it and no future archaeology planned for it. This is one of the reasons we wanted to bring it to our visitors and to the people of the part of Shropshire The Berth lies. Through all the techniques mentioned above our travellers learn about Iron Age ('Celtic') society, Roman rule and the not so dark 'Dark Ages' (Early Medieval period). They discover the Britain of the Britons and its ancient connection to the Iberian and Mediterranean worlds. They find out what the Berth might have been during its 800 year history and about the cataclysmic event that may have brought about its demise!
If you would like to take a look at the Berth tour now, click HERE to go to the Departure Gate. If you'd prefer to read the one page article about this site, click HERE.
WROXETER ROMANO-BRITISH CITY (VIRICONIUM)
UNDER RECONSTRUCTION
One of the lesser known, yet fourth largest Romano-British cities, Wroxeter was over 200 acres in size, with 2 miles of 'walls' and a population of about 5,000. It outlived the Roman occupation by 200 years before finally being abandoned with the arrival in the region of the Angles.
Viriconium was a civitas: one of the tribal administrative centres. In this case for the Cornovii tribe whose territory covered what is now Shropshire, Cheshire. part of Staffordshire, part of Herefordshire, part of Merseyside, Wrexham, Flintshire and part of Powys . This marvellous city may have been built with the blessing and help of their Roman masters but it was lived in and ran by the Britons of the region. The Romans knew how to subdue their subjects: give them all the trappings of the 'civilised ' world and they'll leave you in peace. It certainly worked with the Cornovii who knew they had a lot to gain from cooperating with the Imperialists!
We will be visiting the city's Public Bath Complex on the day it was opened in 160 AD (the actual date is not known). Our visitors will be one of the 'dignitaries' allowed a sneak preview to the brand new facilities before they were opened to the general public. You'll see the cathedral sized exercise hall - the basilica thermae: the first stop to work up a sweat before entering the baths. Since our baths will not quite be complete for the first version of the tour, you'll move on to visit the external exercise courtyard - the palaestra with its swimming pool - the natatio. (It's a good job we're visiting at this time as this pool didn't last very long... probably because of the British weather)!
To find out more about this up-and-coming tour, click HERE. To read the full article about Wroxeter, click HERE.
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