Concrete

Every school project on The Romans taught us that famously they built using concrete. This is true, from about 300 B.C. onwards. It is also true that they introduced the making and use of concrete to Britain in the wake of their conquest of and 400-year dominion over our green and pleasant island. They gave it the name we use today (from the Latin concretus, meaning compact or condensed) and they were certainly the most prolific users of concrete across their vast empire. But it didn't begin with them. Its origins were much earlier, back in primitive times.

Nabatean Bedouin enclaves in southern Syria developed the use of concrete for flooring and for rendering external walls, several thousand years before the Romans. That knowledge and practice then spread chronologically to the Egyptian and Greek civilisations. Pyramids from before 2,000 B.C and Greek palaces built around 1200 B.C. made extensive use of the material, and by 700 B.C. concrete construction was common practice around the Mediterranean and Middle East. Coincidentally, it was discovered quite separately in the Americas by the Mayan civilisation at about the same time as its use by the Romans (from 200 B.C. onwards).

It surprised me to learn that concrete is the most widely used building material, in tonnage per year exceeding aluminium, plastics, steel and wood combined. Apparently it is also the second most used substance in the world, after water, So what exactly is concrete? It's a man-made composite material consisting of fine and coarse aggregates (limestone, gravel, sand et cetera) bonded together with a fluid cement, that hardens and cures over time and can be as strong as rock. Certainly elements of the concrete constructs of Nabatean, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Mayan builders have proved its durability. 

In slightly less primitive times - I'm thinking early 20th century here - parts of the coastline of England that faced Europe were adorned with a series of strange concrete devices (see example below) whose purpose was to 'listen' for the sound of approaching enemy aircraft. They were known colloquially as 'ears'. Their more technical name was parabolic acoustic mirrors.

Before the invention of radar and all of the other sophisticated surveillance techniques that have been developed from World War II onwards, it was hoped that these early warning devices would pick up and amplify the soundwaves of German aircraft approaching Britain from across the North Sea before the planes became visible to the naked eye, thus affording our defences something of an early warning. 

Of course these listening posts had to be manned, but to their credit, they actually worked and were truly the fore-runners of the immense observatory dishes that capture and amplify signals from deep space radio sources today.

Early Warnings, the latest poem from the imaginarium, backs up one-and-a-half millennia and conjectures fancifully on how the Romans might have employed such concrete amplification devices to warn of the impending invasion of Britain by marauding squadrons of Germanic tribes in the 5th century A.D. I'm referring to those  Jutes, Angles and Saxons who eventually made us largely what we are today, an island that is predominantly Anglo-Saxon, (though overlain with Danes and Normans, and not forgetting the devolved Celtic fringes).

In reality, although Britain still nominally had a Roman provincial governor, Rome had largely given up on the territory by 400 A.D. (in order to deal with trouble from the Goths and Vandals nearer home), and the Germanic arrival was creeping and gradual, spread over a century or more, but I'm compressing the action for poetic effect and not letting the brute truth of history get in the way of a good conceit.

"Engle and Seaxe upp becomon, of[v]er brad brimu Britene sohton..." (Angles and Saxons came up over the broad sea. Britain they sought...)

Early Warnings
Juvenal is reciting Ovid lovingly to his girl, 

but she listens with merely half a pretty ear, 

for laying prone in that grassy sweet spot 

where far-off sounds converge and amplify, 

she also strains to hear the things she dreads:

the crumbling of a distant empire, the menace

of warlike oars racing toward her native shore,

early warnings of a dark wave breaking.

Fion knows, as certain as summer ends, he'll go

with his father back to Rome, intuits also,

without a seer, it doesn't augur well for them,

this romance of a senator's son and his slave-girl.

When he finishes reciting, she returns his smile,

they share their picnic of soft fruits, wheat bread,

a flagon of palm wine, their wistful kisses already 

intimations of a dark leave-taking.

That's it, so far, though it may eventually be joined by a third verse that is forming somewhere just out of earshot. Thanks for reading. Stay tuned, S ;-)