Roman Garden

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The Roman Garden was established in 1949, either by Graham Webster, then curator of the Grosvenor Museum, or Charles Greenwood, the City Engineer, as Chester's contribution to the 1951 Festival of Britain. It is an oasis of calm in a busy part of Chester. Besides the Roman remains displayed here, there are marble benches and newly planted cypress trees and other plants originating in the Roman world.

[edit] Civil War

The Roman Garden was not always peaceful, however. If you stand in the garden and look at the stretch of city wall visible through the shrubs you can see a section "so wide that six horses might have marched up in rank" that clearly differs from the masonry around it. This is a repaired breach made by Parliamentary bombardment from the churchyard and tower of St. John's Church in September, 1645 during the Siege of Chester. The commander of the Royalist defending forces, John, first Baron Byron (an ancestor of the poet Lord Byron) had ordered the pulling down of the tower to avoid just such a situation, an order that was never carried out. His stirring account of the bloody events that took place here includes the following: "Thrice that night the enemy was upon the top of the wall, but at last quite beaten off. Seven of them were killed...who afterwards fell into the street, and were the next day buried by us. There were some of them taken alive, but much hurt, and so drunk that the scent of them was most offensive."

If you view the approaching south-east corner of the city wall from outside, you can see clear evidence of the cannon and mortar (grenado) damage inflicted by Parliamentary guns firing from the chuch and from across the river. The wall's great strength, however, ensured its survival, give or take the odd tower, unlike the hundreds of lesser structures both within and without the walls which were destroyed during the conflict.

The walls viewed from this area are quite magnificent and clearly show the different styles of masonry employed over their many centuries of rebuilding and repairs. The ancient lower courses on this corner of city wall are now so weathered it is difficult to distinguish them from the sandstone bedrock upon which they stand.

[edit] Cock fighting

Chester historian Frank Simpson, writing as recently as 1910, described a "beautifuly laid-out bowling green", and also that "on the north side of the green and just beyond a small orchard, stands the site of the old cock pit". In Batenham's Stranger's Companion in Chester of 1823, we read of this spot: "Looking across the orchard beneath, we see the venerable tower of St John's Church, nodding over its mouldering base". (It fell down less than sixty years later and that mouldering base is all that remains) "At the end of the orchard, under the wall, is a mean thatched circular building, used as part of a pipe-manufactory, but occupied during the race-week for the cruel practice of cock-fighting", the charge for admission, he tells us, being five shillings a day.

"William, sixth Earl of Derby, in 1619 made a faire cock-pit under St. John's in a garden by the riverside to which resorted gents of all parts and great cocking was used a long while". Long after its disappearance the site continued to be known as 'Cock-fight Hill'.

This cruel sport was engaged in at numerous locations around the town including several inns and the specially-built cockpit long existed in the Roman Garden. The wooden structure was replaced in 1825 by a brick building with a slate roof, paid for by the sportsmen themselves. It became the custom during race weeks at the Roodee for gentlemen to spend their mornings at the cock fights while their ladies visited the shops. So popular did the activity become that, should the cock fighting overrun, as occurred in 1834, the start of the horse racing had to wait until it had finished!

[edit] Source

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