Chester's goddess of war and wisdom has suffered from Victorian snipers, the 'rubbing of cattle' and 1800 years of British weather. But what remains of her is currently totally unprotected...
Across the river from the walled city of Chester is an
outcrop of sandstone left when the Romans
stopped quarrying here. And on the south face of the
rock are the remains of a shrine to the goddess
Minerva. It is surrounded by a late-Victorian
sandstone frame that previously housed iron railings
for protection. But for almost all of its existence, the
outcrop of sandstone left when the Romans
stopped quarrying here. And on the south face of the
rock are the remains of a shrine to the goddess
Minerva. It is surrounded by a late-Victorian
sandstone frame that previously housed iron railings
for protection. But for almost all of its existence, the
statue has been unprotected - and it shows. Anyone
looking at the statue without any other information
can find it hard to make any sense of what they are
seeing.
from all possible angles reveals no extra clues to the
original appearance of the statue. If anything, it just makes the damage more obvious. Fortunately, an older technology can help us see what the shrine looked like almost three hundred years ago.
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| William Stukeley: Wikimedia public domain |
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| 'A Roman carving on a rock": William Stukeley 1724 Photograph of original copperplate print: private collection |
trench across a site; a technique still in use today. Some of his later ideas, such as druids being responsible for stonehenge and descended from Israelite prophets, might seem at home in the dafter suburbs of today's internet, but the work of his first three decades made an immense contribution.
When he arrived here in Chester in 1725, he drew what he saw on the rock in Edgar's Field and the result was transferred to a copperplate, so copies like this one could be printed. By fading in Stukeley’s drawing over the 3d model, we can make sense of much of the time-battered goddess in the Chester Park.
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| 3D scan with colorised and rectified image from Stukeley. Check out the film to see this more clearly |
'I wonder it has escaped ruin so long, placed so near a great city, and so low that it is subject to all manner of injuries.'
He mentioned ‘rubbing of cattle and ill-usage’ as the perils it had survived. He also stated that the gaping hole next to the shrine was created just to make a seat.
Around 150 years later, this drawing by Amelia Reid shows a significant loss of surface features on the sculpture. She was a skilled artist capable of intricate detail, as we can see on her drawing of this Derbyshire Country House, so it’s likely she drew all the elements visible on the shrine twenty years into Queen Victoria’s
reign. Her drawing was reproduced as an anastatic print: then a comparatively high-tech process.
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| 'Minerva's Shrine': Miss A.M.Reid 1857 Photograph of original anastatic print: private collection |
After Amelia Reid was here, something much worse than bovine back-scratching was to occur: an archaeologist wrote in 1886, that Minerva had recently been ‘used for rifle target practice’!
We can scoff at Minerva’s Victorian snipers, but what's happening to her today is only a more lingering attack. If what’s left of this important semi-survival of Roman Britain is going to avoid disappearing altogether, she needs proper protection from today’s weather and potential vandals. All of which would take money.
Meanwhile, a cost-effective way of improving public understanding of the Shrine and make it a more satisfying tourist experience would be to use Augmented Reality.
Here’s my very amateur first draft of a 3d model, based on Stukeley’s drawing. It can be seen on the Sketchfab website through AR on some mobiles and tablets. A professionally produced version of this, linked to a short film could be viewed at the site: there is good 4g coverage in the area. This wouldn’t of course restore the effects of time on Minerva’s Statue, but could at least give her some sort of virtual afterlife…
