Hello, again, Blogonauts!

(I ask that you allow me to play a little loose with the time-line fiction. Most readers know that I've returned to the US six days ago, on October 4. But for a brief moment, let's pretend that it is last week, and I am just finishing visiting two walled, ancient cities.)

Here's a question: Do good fences make good neighbors?

The Romans may have argued over this Frostian quote. Romans in Britain built mortared battlements because they simply did not trust their neighbors. Walls, watchtowers and wide, watery moats helped to reduce the risk of neighborly invasion and plundering. And they knew whereof they spoke. After all, that described how they came to rule Britannia.

During the roughly 370 years they ran the region, the Romans built two barricaded boroughs, each far from London: Chester and York. And I visited them both.

Chester, in (the original) Cheshire county, sits on the edge of Wales, about 30 miles south of Liverpool. In the Roman era it was known as Deva Victrix. There are remnants of a Roman amphitheater there that would have seated up to 10,000 spectators. The River Dee that wraps around the town was easily navigable all the way to the Irish Sea. Therefore, Chester was an active and vital port city.

But to paraphrase a series of modern day Republicans, silt happens. In the middle ages, the port became so clogged with mud that eventually all the shipping moved north to Liverpool. But Chester remained an important commerce area. Over time, the walls were reinforced and expanded. Today the municipal walls encompass an area about three times the size of the original Roman city.

Chester of the modern era has been a manufacturing center and continues as a market town. The oldest church in the city stands actually stands outside the city walls. It was partially demolished when Henry VIII purged the monasteries.