EPILOGUE

Our day was at an end, and quite an adventure it had been. We had been well aware beforehand that we may not find anything recognisable, in which case the whole thing would have been merely a nice walk in some woods. Instead we found just about everything we wanted to in the way of locations and camera angles which we could match up to those from the film.

Did we find any arrowheads, spears, old discarded Roman shields or helmets? Sadly, no. The cleanup team which presumably followed the end of filming must have been extremely thorough.

We did make one or two tantalising discoveries though. In a corner of the battlefield is a strange little hillock; nearby, on the sand, half-sunk, many pieces of wood lie - six-foot posts, some longer, some shorter. Most of them were sharpened at both ends, which seems significant - after all, a fence post only needs to be sharp at the end which goes into the ground. If the other end is sharp too, that suggests... defences? One of these staves came home with us as a souvenir. We noticed later that a pile of these is visible in the film.

Also lying carelessly on the battlefield was a piece of rusty ironwork which could easily have been a part of one of the Roman war engines built for the film! This theory rapidly faded shortly afterwards when a whole heap of similar metal was discovered, along with some corrugated plastic. Unfortunately what had seemed exciting on its own suddenly appeared very mundane in the plural.

Genuine pieces of film history or just farm refuse?

It would have been all too easy to spend the entire visit preoccupied with matching trees and lining up camera angles. Happily though we managed to spend an equal amount of time just standing, looking, contemplating. In these surroundings of eerie beauty it did not take much to conjure in our minds the warring armies, the flying arrows, the blood and the steel. I for one almost fancied I could feel the ghosts of the past all around us - whether long past or recent past, it didn't seem to matter.

Yet the findings of the day were not entirely in our imaginations. It was while scouting the area of the execution that we happened across what was perhaps the most tangible proof that a film company had been here at all. For upon that densely-wooded plateau, where Maximus had been taken to die on a freezing, misty morning, one of us kicked an old aerosol can out of the ground. The label on the can? 'Smoke Canister... Effects Associates Ltd... Pinewood Studios'.

"Strength and honour."