Second day Roman Hiking Weekend

Salvete friends!

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The weather forecasts were good for us on Saturday. The sun was shining and it was around 26 degrees (78,8 Fahrenheit) that day. We all got up early in the morning to prepare our furca’s, a wooden cross used by the Romans as a carrying pole. In the meanwhile Floris and Marc filmed a couple of scenes for the video.

Packing our furca was quite a challenge. Because everyone had to bring his rations, tools such as axes and dolabras (pickaxes), sheepskins and blankets, an extra pair of shoes and tunics and their own cooking utensils with them. All this stuff had to be properly secured on the furca’s because while marching, we could not continuously stop to correct it.

Around 12:00 a.m. we were ready to start. Packed with the furca’s, shield, spear and our roman military uniform, we arrived at an extra weight of around 35 kg of items per person (or 77,16 lbs).

The march started and although we started with great courage, we all noticed that it was going to be a difficult hike. The weight of the furca simply proved too much for many of our brave participants. Even though the furca's were well packed, many things came loose and one furca even broke in half! The footwear we wore was studded with nails; comfortable on unpaved roads, but on hard paved surfaces they start to press more and more into the soles of your feet - quite uncomfortable to say the least.

Our goal was to complete a route of 20km. Unfortunately, we soon discovered our speed was way too slow, and some of us were physically struggling to continue, so it quickly became apparant that we were not going to make it and this dissapointed us. We really wanted to experience what it was like to BE a Roman soldier and not only dress like a Roman soldier. Many of us also had a lot of shoulder pain due to the heavy Furca, which we really need to fix with something like shoulder padding for the next march. What also did not help was the terrain; steep hills that we had to go over again and again. So yeah, we pretty much only dressed like Roman soldiers ...

At the 8.5 km point we decided to stop. This was not our goal and distance we had hoped for, but in the end it was a very special experience and something that has definitely changed our view on a Roman army on the march. In the end we managed to film at least some shots for our documentary about the Roman army on the march as well, so all was not wasted for sure. And we will definitely try it again next year, perhaps with slightly less ambitious goals and a better route.

As a thank you for the attendees, we created a T-shirt in honor for this film weekend that we all received at the end of the tour. But do we have to adjust the km distance hahaha!

Let us know what you think of the T-shirt. Would you be interested in merchandise like this? We're thinking about adding more designs and selling them as t-shirts, hoodies, etc.