Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  I think of Richard Jefferies’ novel of 1885, After London, which imagines a future Britain after some nameless disaster has depleted its population. London is contaminated and uninhabitable. Scrub and forest have greedily devoured the once cultivated countryside, so that it is a land of frightening, impenetrable forests. What remains of civilisation has lapsed into feudalism. Jefferies’ hero, Felix, ventures forth to a ‘dreadful place, of which he had heard many a tradition’: the ‘deserted and utterly extinct city of London’.

  Jefferies writes: ‘For this marvellous city, of which such legends are related, was after all only of brick, and when the ivy grew over and shrubs sprang up, and, lastly, the waters underneath burst in, this huge metropolis was soon overthrown.’

  In around AD 450, half a century after the end of Londinium, someone had reason to walk over what is now Lower Thames Street, picking a path through the treacherous, collapsing old buildings and the undergrowth – an adventurer, like Jefferies’ Felix, in a lost city. Who was it? I want it to be a woman. So let it be a woman; a woman from over the German sea. Who knows what brought her here. Whatever she sought, she also lost something: a Saxon brooch was dropped here, among the fallen roof tiles, among the shards of other lives.

  4

  Silchester

  Heu Veii veteres! et vos tum regna fuistis,

  et vestro posita est aurea sella foro:

  nunc intra muros pastoris bucina lenti

  cantat, et in vestris ossibus arva metunt.

  (Alas, ancient Veii! You too were a kingdom once, and a golden throne was placed in your forum: now within your walls sounds the horn of an unhurried shepherd, and over your bones they gather the harvest.)

  Propertius, c. 14 BC

  Like the medieval city of Dunwich, which the North Sea claimed from the Suffolk coast and whose ghostly submerged church bells are still said to ring, Roman Silchester is a lost town, buried not by the grey eastern waves but by soil and an ocean of tall grass, through which the wind sings and sighs. Near Reading and Basingstoke, and a few miles from Aldermaston and the forbidding triple-fenced enclosures of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, Silchester hardly promises beauty or isolation by way of its setting. Yet it is tucked away at the heart of a deep labyrinth of narrow, high-hedged lanes that seem to stretch away to infinity when you are caught in their pleasant windings. To be here in midsummer is to witness the absolute triumph of nature over street and stone. The air is sickly-sharp with the scent of elderflower. Goldfinches stream brightly between hedgerows; swallows foregather on a wire; and high above, higher and higher, the singing specks in the sky are larks.

  Merely finding Roman Silchester feels like unlocking a charm. Roger Wilson’s Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain grumbles that it is ill-signposted – which it is, and as the camper van nosed its trundling way through the lanes, my head was buried in the map. We asked directions from the man who had come to empty the bins in the little public car park; he appeared to gesture all around. This seemed to be the typical experience of entering Silchester. When one Norris Brewer wrote up his trip here for the Monthly Magazine in 1810, he recalled: ‘I trod, with increasing ardor, and believed the object of our expedition yet distant, when my companion suddenly arrested my progress, by exclaiming: “We are there!”’ And when John Plummer and George Nelson visited in 1879, compiling a pamphlet optimistically entitled Silchester: the Pompeii of Hampshire, the same happened to them. ‘We wind our way through a succession of those lovely lanes which are so peculiarly the charm of our English land … and we wonder where the famous “city” which we have come so far to see, is to be found. We hail a country lad, who is engaged in agricultural pursuits, upon the other side of a hedge, and who, in answer to our question, “When shall we get to the ‘city’”, replies briefly, but very much to the purpose, “You be there now.”’

  If Silchester is now an invisible city, as Calleva Atrebatum it was once one of the most important towns in Britain. Roads sprung off it: from here you were connected directly to London, Chichester, Winchester, Bath, Cirencester, Dorchester. Before the Romans, it was the tribal capital of the Atrebates; traces of its Iron Age defensive ditches can still be seen if you peer through the undergrowth in the right places. The earliest coins found here are marked to ‘Eppillus rex’, king, with the mark CALLE or CALLEV. He is described as the son of Commius, known in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries as a Gaulish leader who left his native territories for Britain in the 50s BC, after rebelling against Caesar. The current archaeology takes Calleva’s origins back only to the 20s BC – but it is speculated that Commius may have been the original founder of the town, some thirty years earlier.

  Excavations at Silchester are now reaching deeper and deeper into the pre-conquest town: in the summer of 2011, an olive stone was found in these Iron Age layers, suggesting that its inhabitants had Mediterranean tastes well before Claudius came to Britain with his elephants. (A weakness for effete foreign snacks is perhaps not quite what we might expect from the Iron Age Britons – but then, if we think of them as sturdy, hardy and simple in their tastes, the Romans are at least partly responsible for that. Cassius Dio, in the speech he has Boudica give to her troops, contrasts the sophisticated gastronomy of the Romans with the frugal food of the Britons: ‘They need bread and wine and oil, and if any of these things fails them, they die. For us, on the other hand, any grass or root serves as bread, the juice of any plant as oil, any water as wine.’)

  After the invading general Aulus Plautius took the south-east, the future emperor Vespasian probably forged west this way, presumably with naval vessels shadowing his progress along the south coast, for he is said by Tacitus to have taken the Isle of Wight, as well as twenty hill forts. The Roman town eventually built here to replace its Iron Age predecessor had fine walls, a primly angular gridded street plan, a forum with a stone basilica twenty metres tall, baths, inns, temples: the whole busy thrum of Roman town life. In the Agricola, Tacitus wrote in his typically barbed way of the policy of transforming Britons into good Romans. ‘Agricola gave private encouragement and public help to the building of temples, forums and houses, praising the energetic, and criticising the idle. And so compulsion was replaced by an honourable rivalry. He also provided an education in the liberal arts for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the talents of the Britons over the hard work of the Gauls that those who had recently sneered at Latin now desired its eloquence. So, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the toga became fashionable. Little by little they were led to things which encourage vice: porticoes, baths, elegant supper-parties. All this in their ignorance they called civilisation, when it was only a part of their slavery.’

  All of this – porticoes, temples, forum, baths – now lies under pasture except for the city walls, which still stand high and proud. The only buildings within them are an old farmhouse and a medieval church. The site was never much built over: not, it is thought, because of some powerful genius loci that bred suspicion against the old Roman town, but rather because the ground, bearing hundreds of years’ worth of rubbish and waste, was known as fertile farmland, better for crops than the surrounding fields. The emptiness, though, does not quite explain the curious atmosphere of this place, the uncanny, held-in-check silence of it. I thought of Robert Browning’s poem ‘Love Among the Ruins’, in which the narrator contemplates a ‘plenty and perfection’ of grass that ‘o’erspreads/ And embeds/ Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,/ Stock or stone.’ A friend had once said to me of Silchester: ‘It’s pure Puck of Pook’s Hill.’ He was right.

  The wind-smoothed, cattle-grazed grass is bisected by a drover’s path, which cuts over the town at a blindly non-Roman angle. Stare at the pasture long enough, though, and pale stripes in the green become visible – then disappear as you change the angle of view. This is the ancient street plan, revealed like subaqueous hints of a wreck seen from the surface of the sea. The land was cultivated when Camden came here, but he encountered a si
milar effect: ‘Although the ground bee fertile and fruitfull inough, yet in certaine places crossing one another, the corne doth not thrive so well, but commeth up much thinner than else where, by which they suppose the streets of the citie went in old time.’ He also wrote of the country people’s stories about the place. The ‘great store of Romane coine’ dug up here, he said, was known locally as ‘Onions pennies. For they dreame that this Onion was a Giant and dwelt in this citie. There are digged up also many times inscriptions, of which the unskilfull rurall people envie us the having.’ The antiquarian Thomas Hearne described a visit to Silchester in a diary entry for 22 May 1714. He thought that ‘Onion’ was a misreading of ‘Constantine’, which the local people might have seen inscribed on coins. Onion was also supposed, wrote Hearne, to have thrown a rock called the ‘Imp Stone’ to Silchester Common. The word ‘Imp’ might have derived from the common contraction of ‘imperator’, emperor, seen on numerous Roman inscriptions.

  In the 1720s, another pioneering visitor came to inspect the remains of Silchester. This was William Stukeley, an intriguing character in the history of antiquarianism, who has left us voluminous writings both published and unpublished, as well as a prolific correspondence in a nicely rounded copperplate hand. Born in Holbeach in Lincolnshire in 1687, he was a polymathic man of his age, studying classics, theology and science at Cambridge – where he set up a room for experiments and ‘sometimes surprizd the whole College with a sudden explosion’. In 1720, he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, and during the course of his long and fruitful life his interests ranged across geology, astronomy and the history of religion, as well as antiquarianism. He was Newton’s first biographer – and though his manuscript remained unpublished for 200 years, his was the first telling of the famous apple-and-gravity story. He startled his friends by taking holy orders and in 1730 becoming the vicar of Stamford, in his native Lincolnshire, despite some intriguingly heterodox religious views. Though many of his ideas can now appear rather fanciful (and did so even during his lifetime, especially his enthusiasm for Druidism), he was a crucial figure in the history of antiquarianism, pioneering the accurate measuring and recording of ancient monuments. When he came to Silchester in the 1720s, he was working on his Itinerarium Curiosum, published in 1724 and again, in a new edition, in 1776. The book was a programme for a kind of anti-Grand Tour, in which the glories of the Continent (which he never visited) were eschewed in favour of a series of journeys around Britain. In the preface, he argued that the conventional Grand Tour had ‘led infinite numbers of its admirers through the labours and dangers of strange countries, through oceans, immoderate heats and colds, over rugged mountains, barren sands and deserts, savage inhabitants, and a million perils; and the world is filled with accounts of them … while our own country lies like a neglected province. Like untoward children, we look with contempt upon our own mother.’

  Silchester, he wrote in the Itinerarium, ‘is a place that a lover of antiquity will visit with great delight’. He noted that the ‘walls of this city are standing, more or less perfect, quite round’ – adding, with customary (and misplaced) national pride, that they were ‘perhaps the most intire of any in the Roman empire’. Matthew and I followed Stukeley’s lead, and walked around them. Ash trees, their thick trunks grey and wrinkled and their branches bearing bunches of fresh green keys, pulled their way out of the flint. Camden had been impressed by the trees: not ashes, but oaks, that seemed ‘bredde with the verie stones, with such huge boughes all about, that it would make the beholders to wonder thereat’. Stukeley too described the walls as ‘quite round crowned with oaks’. Michael Fulford, professor of archaeology at the University of Reading, who has dug at Silchester for more than thirty summers, remembers the oaks here in the 1970s: many of them died, he said, in the drought summer of 1976. Perhaps the ashes will soon be gone, too.

  A little to the north-east of the town walls was, Stukeley wrote, ‘another great curiosity, which the people think was a castle: I presently discerned it to be an amphitheatre … The whole area or arena within is now covered with water, but they say it is not much above three foot deep … it is a most noble and beautiful concave, but intirely over-grown with thorn-bushes, briars, holly, broom, furze, oak and ash-trees, &c, and has from times immemorial been a yard for cattle, and a watering-pond.’ He provided an illustration: a pool fringed around with trees, two gentlemen fishing at the water’s edge. It is telling of Stukeley’s mixed reputation, as well as the sometimes brutal intellectual atmosphere of the time, that Hearne wrote, in a diary entry of 10 September 1724, that Stukeley was ‘a mighty conceited man’ who ‘addicts himself to fancy altogether … He pretended to have discovered a Roman Amphitheatre at Silchester, a draught of the walls thereof he shewed me. This is again fancy. I have been at Silchester, there is nothing like it.’

  But Stukeley was right. Today the amphitheatre is no longer a ‘watering-pond’ but an elliptical gravel-floored space with earth banks rising around it, and Roman walls marking the edge of the central arena. Into them are set niches, which may have been for images of Nemesis and Fortuna, one pulling the combatant towards reckoning and death, the other to luck and life. Several thousand people might have sat here watching. The anonymous author of a short work called The History and Antiquities of Silchester in Hampshire, published in 1821, imagined it to have been the stage for ‘disgusting sights and barbarous exhibitions’. ‘The lion’s roar, and the tiger’s howl, have echoed through these woodlands. The shrieks of the torn victims have rent the air while the shouts of the multitude, as cruel as the beasts which afforded them such sanguinary pleasure, were still more awful.’ He (assuming it was a he) went on: ‘How thankful should we be for milder punishments, and more rational pleasures. The Gospel has thus ameliorated our conditions.’ The barbarity of the amphitheatre has long been regarded as the epitome of Roman brutality (all the more so because of lurid tales of Christians flung to lions). In fact, current evidence suggests that the Silchester amphitheatre lay empty for long periods of its history; and it is unlikely that anyone took the trouble to bring lions and tigers to Hampshire.

  From the amphitheatre, Matthew and I walked back to Silchester’s walls, and came to the only building, aside from the church, that breaches them: the farmhouse. Despite his horror of gladiatorial combat, the author of The History and Antiquities of Silchester was disapproving about the inhabitants’ lack of antiquarian sensibility: ‘We deeply regret that the occupiers of the farm do not make frequent researches for the numerous curiosities of antiquity which might easily be found, and that when found, we wish they would carefully preserve them. Even now at the door of the farm house, a horseblock is constructed of a portion of the shaft of a Roman column, on the top of which is placed the mutilated fragment of a capital [sic].’ The authors of Silchester: the Pompeii of Hampshire were similarly struck by the sight, in the farmyard, of ‘several massive stones which are apparently portions of a stately column or columns, which were formerly the support and glory of some stately temple’.

  A little digging was done in Silchester in the eighteenth century: unusually, not by a gentleman antiquary, but by a working man – a local cobbler, John Stair of Aldermaston, who measured the basilica and mapped out the basic street plan. In 1817, after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was given the local stately home, Stratfield Saye, by a grateful nation; and in 1828, the parish of Silchester was added to his lands. It was the second duke who was the enthusiast for the remains on his doorstep. Under his auspices, the splendidly named Revd James Joyce undertook the first concerted excavations, in the 1860s. He found many wonderful things, including two mosaics fit to be removed and relaid in the entrance hall of Stratfield Saye, where they are still. He kept careful notebooks of his excavations, with delicate watercolours of his finds, which can be seen at the Reading Museum. More archaeology was undertaken by Edwardian excavators. For many years afterwards, it was supposed that Silchester had offered up all its secret
s.

  That was not, it turned out, quite the case. For Professor Fulford – a merrily round-cheeked figure in his sixties – Silchester has been his scholarly mainstay. ‘I’ve published more on it than everything else put together,’ he told me, as we drank coffee at the Reading Museum. ‘Silchester is a virtually untapped archaeological resource, for the early excavations only got to its upper layers, to the third- and fourth-century town. The Victorians barely touched the tip of it.’ What makes it so rich for Fulford is that it was continuously occupied in both the pre-Roman and Roman eras, and may have continued as a community after the end of Roman rule too. Equally, it wasn’t occupied afterwards: there is no modern town above it to negotiate. In the 1970s and 80s, along with an ever-changing army of volunteers and students, he re-excavated the town defences, the amphitheatre, and the forum basilica. For the past sixteen summers, he has been working on the same large plot, fifty-five metres square. Slowly, painstakingly, he and his team have peeled back successive layers of Calleva’s history: the project is to try to piece together something of the whole history of the town.

  Fulford told me a little about their recent work. Beneath the regular grid of the Roman town – the one that you can see from the grass, with luck and a steady eye – his team found traces of an earlier, Iron Age street plan. The better to explain what he meant, he took my notebook and drew a series of diagrams. First he sketched a neat Roman grid, with a hefty Roman timber building on it – perhaps part of the fort built immediately after the conquest. But he then drew dotted lines running at opposing angles, representing the earlier Iron Age street layout. The Roman building had been ‘plonked down’, he said, on this earlier crossroads, but with a new orientation. He then drew another Roman grid, square and neat, showing the streets as they were in about AD 80–125, and sketched in a series of dwellings that he believes were standing at the same period – a thatched roundhouse, a longhouse with a tiled roof, and a clump of other, smaller buildings. But he planted them at a wonky angle: although they related to each other, they completely ignored the Roman grid. In fact, he told me, they seemed rather to be aligned to the midsummer solstice sunrise, and the midwinter solstice sunset. According to Fulford, the evidence suggests that there were people in Calleva who were persistently ignoring the neat system of Roman roads in favour of an orientation of their own – just as the Roman town had utterly disregarded the old tracks of the earlier Iron Age settlement.