Walbrook Walk: Flowers for Venus Fire for Vesta

On Sunday 27 February (a day short of March1) five of us walked ‘Flowers for Venus Fire for Vesta’; the last Walbrook Walk. The series of walks started in November 2006 and traced the route of the Walbrook - one of London’s lost rivers.

The Walbrook appears to have been sacred to both the Brits and Romans and has been well excavated in recent years. Along its course an amazing array of objects have been found including hundreds of male sculls with missing jaw-bones (a sign of then being ritually deposited), many clay figurines of Venus, tons of Roman ironwork including knife blades, nails, pins and keys; iron being strongest magic.

Some of the clay figurines of Venus

found in the Walbrook now in the Museum of London

The walks have taken place on auspicious dates two or three times a year – dates linked to the Roman rites at the Temple of Vesta – the virgin goddess of the hearth (L. focus), home and family. According to Ovid, Vesta was the Earth itself and her presence was symbolised by the fire that burned in the central hearth of the home (the woman’s realm) and in her circular temples. 

And why Vesta?

The Bank of England sits at the centre of the old Roman city and the Walbrook flows under the middle of it. The architect John Soane incorporated into its curved western façade part of the circular Temple of Vesta at Tivoli – his favorite building. Its dome and curved colonnade of flower-decked columns stands on the corner of Princes Street and Lothbury – complete with a central ‘oculus’ to let the smoke escape!

Tivoli Corner at the Bank of England

showing the oculus in the roof

The temples of Vesta were always round - the shape of a Neolithic hut and were tended by the Vestales (vestal virgins were highly privileged women). Their tasks included making salted sacrificial bread ‘Mola Salsa’ tending the sacred fire; the flame was renewed on 1 March each year.

And Venus?

Well she’s there because she has to be! The goddess of love, beauty and fertility- saluted as the supreme generative force in the universe. Many clay figurines of her have been found on the stream bed.

On Sunday we walked from a conjectured tributary source in the grounds of a Saxon convent in Shoreditch, via Tivoli Corner where we rested and ate ‘Salsa Mola’ and then walked down Walbrook and the remains of the Roman Temple of Mithras that once stood on the western bank of the stream.



The remains of the mid 3rd centruyTemple of Mithras

which once stood on the bank of the River Walbrook



Cannon Street

is still the home of the Guilds of Tallow Candle-Makers and Skinners – stinky medieval trades necessarily situated on the shores of the River Thames.



Map showing the site of the Saxon convent grounds.

Curtain Road runs along its western boundary.

And so down onto the beach at Walbrook Wharf; a beach full of shards of pottery and clay-tiles, oyster shells and water-washed animal bones – hundreds of them. The waves and wakes of boats crashed onto the beach as we wandered and wondered.

The ‘Fire Pot’– filled with dried roses, herbs, twigs, and last year’s flowers was lit; it did not burst into flames but rather a strong wind blew from up-river and fanned a wonderful draft of white smoke that billowed silently down- stream. Time seemed to stand still or rather I felt timeless.

We left the beach after a long while, walking up the flight of slime-green- stone and metal-gridded steps, over the flood-defence wall and back into the Sunday city. I left the empty Fire-Pot on the Walbrook beach to be claimed by the fast incoming Thames tide; the Walbrook had reached home and we went to the pub to celebrate with strong spirit.



'The Fire-Pot' on Walbrook Beach


'Essentially, all form is a pattern or network of energy, including that of our natural world and human body….I have called the landscapes that manifest these archetypal patterns ‘landscape temples’. They are all sacred, as indeed is the whole world….. Pilgrimage is one way in which these relationships can be enhanced and the network of energy kept healthy and alive.’

Peter Dawkins

'Dark Earth' in archaeology is a layer often as much as 2 – 3 ft thick which covers Roman remains, notably in London and in Roman ruins in the rest of England, particularly urban ones. The stratum underlying the dark earth is often of a date varying from the 2nd to the 5th Century AD, and the stratum overlying is often, in the City of London, 9th century.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_earth

  Once, a twenty foot wide gravel-bottomed stream, it is now an underground seepage trickling 20-30 feet underground amongst the 'dark-earth' depths of historic London. Tunnelling subversively under the foundations of the Roman Wall, modern offices and the Bank of England, to discharge into the Thames amongst the rusting refuse-barge hulks at Walbrook Wharf.