Indiana Jones and the Roman Flower Bed Drainage

The cool thing about being 14 and spending all your days at a horse riding school is that you can try all kinds of vocations there. You can practise being a vet, a teacher, a bar tender, even an archaeologist:

Our horse riding instructor had told us to put some pansies in the flower bed at the entrance of the horse riding school. We were bored because the older girls had their lesson and did not want us to watch, and our instructor gave us lessons for free if we helped in the stable. So we said yes and started digging.

We dug several holes to put the flowers in there. Soon, we started to hit a rock. Let’s dig out that rock, it’s not supposed to be in a flower bed. When the rock hit daylight, we saw that it looked big and ancient.

We had grown up in Aachen, always conscious of the fact that we were walking on Ancient Roman foundations. We had learned in school that the Romans had founded Aquae Grani because of the healthy water and had left their traces all over the place. Just a couple of weeks ago, people had found the residues of a Roman villa when they started building a new shopping centre.

Maybe that rock was Roman, too? The hot sources were only a stone’s throw away from where we were digging. Maybe the horse riding school was built on the ground a Roman villa, or even an arena? We continued digging. And indeed, we found more rocks, same size, same ancient look. They were buried next to each other. 

Were those the top rocks of a Roman wall? We became excited. But, what if the wall continued underneath the barn? Would they have to tear down the barn if the archaeologists dug up the Roman wall? When we asked ourselves that question we were a hundred percent sure that we had found something ancient and that we were doing the right thing in digging it out.

Then, our horse riding instructor came along, seeing 5 teenage girls all dirty with mud and a flower bed that doesn’t look like one anymore. “What’s your business digging up those rocks? You were supposed to simply plant those flowers,” he told us and we explained him our newest excavations. 
“Those rocks are definitely not ancient,” he explained us then, “I buried them myself”
“But why?”
“Because I tried to build a drainage for the flower bed, so that the rain water wouldn’t stay there. So, please put those rocks back where you found them.”