I trained as a stonemason in Gaul (France), but came to Britannia (Britain) when I realised that there was lots of work for me here.

Nobody in Britain knew how to carve stone, and many new buildings needed skilled workers like me to finish them. In Rome and Gaul, people learn to read and write in the Latin language, and so stonemasons often carve writing as well as patterns and pictures on stone.

Stone is very heavy so I have my own cart and mule to collect stone from the quarries where it is dug up. If I need a lot of stone, I hire a riverboat to take the stone as near to the building where I am working as possible. The new roads make travelling much easier, but there are still a lot of rough tracks.

Some of my work is for tombstones. Sometimes there is a picture of the person who has died, with their name and age. I also carve milestones for the new roads which the army has started building. There is a milestone placed every mile along the road, with the distance to Noviomagus (Chichester) in miles written on it, as well as the year in which the milestone was set up.

My most recent job was to help carve a large stone for a temple to Neptune and Minerva in Noviomagus.

The king, Togidubnus, needed many stonemasons to work on his new palace about a mile away from the city. Beautiful stone from Gaul and far away places like Turkey and Italy has been brought to the palace, for us to carve into pillars and other parts of the building.

I write records of all my work, and the money paid to me, on thin sheets of wood, which I can tie together. I make my own ink out of soot, gum and water. Although my records will probably not last a long time, I hope that my stone carving will last for thousands of years.