By the time the dig was due to start, Mortimer was busy in London, so it was Tessa who excavated the amphitheatre at Caerleon, shuttling back and forth between the site and London, helped by her young friend and admirer, Nowell Myres. There is a to-do list in Verney Wheeler’s firm, competent hand from that excavation, in which she notes the day’s tasks – everything from archaeological matters on which to consult her husband, to ‘draft an appeal’, ‘consider post-cards’ and ‘write to Archbishop’. It was in excavating Caerleon’s amphitheatre that Verney Wheeler came of age as an archaeologist and scholar in her own right. On this project she published solo for the first time, and afterwards was elected one of the first female fellows of the Society of Antiquaries.
Two years later, in the summer of 1928, the Wheelers came west again to dig, at Lydney Park in the Forest of Dean – a tract of land in that stretch of Gloucestershire on the west side of the Severn estuary that seems to belong properly to Wales. The late-nineteenth-century house of the Bathurst family, the viscounts Bledisloe, is tucked into a little fold of its own deer park; and each spring its gardens are opened to the public to show off its exotic plantings of azaleas and magnolias – and its exquisite Roman-temple ruins. On the day I visited, a motley gang of us, children outnumbering grown-ups, drifted round the glades and avenues. The grass was carpeted with the downcast heads of early English bluebells; ferns unwound their new leaves. Through the grass nodded the slim, erect stalks of pink candelabra primulas, which grow wild in the Himalayas. My nieces and their friends lay in the thick grass on the banks of a pool to study the tadpoles squirming in the water. It was an unseasonably hot April day. Opposite the shrubbery of candy-coloured rhododendrons, the ground rose sharply.
I left the others eating cake on the lawn and climbed up the rise – Dwarf’s Hill, as it was once known. Here, between the canopies of beeches, one with palest green leaves, the other a fiery copper, I came upon the remains of a late-Roman temple, dedicated to an otherwise unknown god called Nodens. Nearby were the fragments of a little bathhouse, and further along the hilltop, deep square holes in the turf: Roman mineshafts where men had dug for iron ore. Perhaps in some distant imagination the dwarves of the hill had toiled in these mines. When the Wheelers excavated the site in 1928, Mortimer was excited to see the marks of ancient picks on the stone walls of these shafts. From the low mossy stonework of the temple remains, the view opened out, down to the Severn. The excavation report – authored jointly by the Wheelers – called it ‘a vista of luxuriant forest and spacious estuary which can scarcely be matched for beauty even in a county of pleasant park-lands’.
Back down the hill, in the old-fashioned little museum attached to the house, a room of which is devoted to shells and ethnographic objects collected by the Bathursts in New Zealand in the 1930s, I studied the finds from the temple. So many little canine statues have been found here that it is thought Nodens was particularly associated with dogs. The god remains something of a mystery: it was a young Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon called J. R. R. Tolkien who was commissioned to speculate on the origins of the name for the Wheelers’ report. He thought it might have parallels to words meaning ‘catcher’ or ‘snarer’ in ancient Germanic languages. My eye was drawn by an imperfect, slightly damaged figurine in milky-ambery alabaster: a hunting dog, elegant and leggy. It was lying down, its front forelegs folded underneath it, and I felt I could sense that utter gentleness and looseness that a large dog’s paw has in repose. But its head was high and alert, its ears pricked and eager, its nose practically quivering, as if it had just been roused to wakefulness.
In another room of the museum was an album of photographs taken during the 1928 excavation, its pages much worn by use. I paused at a page showing two pictures of a young woman standing next to a range-rod, the striped pole used to show scale in archaeological photographs. In the first photograph she was in profile, eyes down; the picture’s angle emphasised the lines of her neat bob. In the second, she was looking up into the eyes of the photographer. Her expression was striking, and hard to read: wary? pensive? resentful? As I looked at the pictures, the museum attendant said, ‘Sir Mortimer Wheeler was of course notorious for bringing his girlfriends on digs.’ I felt a sudden rush of illogical defensiveness towards her: this was no girlfriend, but his wife. One anecdote, told by Wheeler in his autobiography, seemed particularly telling of the way they worked together. Sitting eating lunch one summer’s day on a wall of the Lydney ruins, he had contemplated a piece of fourth-century ‘inferior cement’ that had apparently been laid to mend a broken mosaic. ‘Beside it lay a pick, and the conjunction of idleness and opportunity was too much for me. I drove the point of the pick into the cement patch.’ The soil beneath the cement was ‘freckled with minute green specks’. The specks turned out to be 1,646 tiny late-antique coins, probably dating from the mid fourth century. For Wheeler, these minimi were a ‘veritable symbol of the Dark Ages’. A newspaper article romantically called them ‘King Arthur’s small change’. It was a find that would ‘alone have justified our two seasons’ work on that lovely spot’, remembered Wheeler. It seems somehow entirely typical that while Mortimer had casually made the spectacular discovery, it was Tessa who followed patiently in his wake, cleaning and studying and classifying the tiny scraps of bronze.
It was on quite a different kind of day – when the wind was blowing strong, and rain threatened from a glowering January sky – that I went to Maiden Castle, in Dorset, one of Britain’s most impressive Iron Age hill forts, which bears down from gloomy heights upon Dorchester and its satellite, Poundbury. I climbed up its high sides, which were twined round, at the summit, with a cat’s cradle of sheer-sided ditches and earth ramparts. This may have been one of Suetonius’s ‘20 hillforts’ that the future emperor Vespasian took, when he fought his way west in the AD 40s after the defeat of Camulodunum. At the top, the gale blew so strong that you could lean right back into it and feel it cradling your body; but it scoured the skin on my face and wrenched my words away. In a corner of the plateau there were, like an afterthought, the foundations of a late Roman temple, dwarfed by the great scale of the older fortifications. It is not the only Dorset Iron Age hill fort to have been thus adopted: at nearby Hod Hill, a Claudian-era fort was improvised out of a corner of British earth ramparts, so that two sides of it are regimented and Roman, straight lines marching over the hilltop, and two are formed by the great snaking curve of the Iron Age defences.
Thomas Hardy’s short story, ‘A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork’, describes the approach to Maiden Castle: ‘The profile of the whole stupendous ruin, as seen at a distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay. It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips. It may indeed be likened to an enormous many-limbed organism of an antediluvian time – partaking of the cephalopod in shape – lying lifeless …’ The story, told in the first person, describes an ascent to Maiden Castle by night, as a storm rages. The narrator is to meet there an antiquary, whom he finds wielding a spade – against the law. ‘I inquire why, as a professed and well-known antiquary with capital letters at the tail of his name, he did not obtain the necessary authority, considering the stringent penalties for this sort of thing; and he chuckles fiercely again with suppressed delight, and says, “Because they wouldn’t have given it!”’ The antiquary begins to dig, and at length discovers ‘a pavement of minute tesserae of many colours’. He goes on with his spade, and draws from the earth ‘a semi-transparent bottle of iridescent beauty, the sight of which draws groans of luxurious sensibility’. Then comes a skeleton; and then a bronze figurine of Mercury. The storm renews itself, more vigorous than before. At the end of the night, the antiquary reburies each of his treasures, though ‘each deposition seems to cost him a twinge; and at one moment I fancied I saw him slip his hand into his coat pocket’. Against the backdrop of the lashing storm, and the unspeakably ancient sleeping beast that is Maiden Castle, t
he antiquary’s desecration seems both arrogant, and deeply irrelevant.
It was here that the Wheelers undertook a major excavation that began in the summer of 1934. By this time, they had also worked together on Verulamium, the Roman predecessor of St Albans. (Here the Daily Mail had taken an interest in ‘Girl Excavators’, describing Tessa, in a piece of 9 August 1930, as a ‘woman with dark wavy hair and smiling brown eyes, dressed in a business-like brown jumper and skirt, brown stockings, and Wellington boots’, who is ‘directing the important work of excavating the site of the Roman city of Verulam’.) But after St Albans, Wheeler had professed himself suffering from ‘a satiety of Roman things’. Iron Age Maiden Castle was to make a change – though, of course, studying the remains of the Roman temple was part of the job. It was the largest dig the Wheelers had masterminded, with Mortimer as general, and Tessa the ever-efficient aide-de-camp, supervising the many students who came to dig, some of whom would go on to great archaeological careers. William Wedlake, who worked initially as the dig’s foreman, recalled: ‘I well remember Dr Wheeler’s arrival at the site. My first impression was of his long striding legs with equally long arms … I soon noticed that Mrs Wheeler and the staff which he had brought with him from London were trained almost like commandos to carry out the Keeper’s instructions.’ Not for nothing Wheeler’s war career. The digging was hard work, but there was also something of a holiday atmosphere. Tourists came and bought souvenirs: objects of the minor archaeological type, pieces of tile and slingshots. For the student excavators, there were amateur dramatics (including a pageant enacting the site’s archaeological layers, with a pantomime mammoth), and, no doubt, affairs.
Before the third season of digging, in the spring of 1936, Wheeler set off alone on a trip to Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, in order to acquaint himself with the archaeology of the Levant. He also, reported Hawkes, had personal reasons for taking the trip alone; the presence in Palestine of ‘a remarkable young woman, the then reigning sovereign of his love life’. On his way back, six weeks later, he bought the Times at the Gare du Nord. Flicking through it on the train, a headline caught his eye: ‘TESSA VERNEY WHEELER’. The article was an obituary. She had died three days earlier, at the age of forty-three, from a pulmonary embolism, the aftermath of a botched operation for misdiagnosed appendicitis. Wheeler pressed the bell-button and ordered a double brandy; a ‘kindly numbness’ spread through his mind.
The excavations at Maiden Castle continued that summer, but for student diggers such as Veronica Seton-Williams – an Australian who had been drawn to England to study archaeology with the Wheelers, and who had found in Tessa a beloved mentor – ‘the magic of the great hill had gone’. Tessa’s friends felt that her death had been hastened through neglect and overwork, and pain at Wheeler’s infidelities. There was no pause in his pursuit of pretty girls.
In Still Digging, Wheeler describes his wife’s death out of chronological sequence, placing it next to his account of Passchendaele. The battle, in October 1917, was ‘the nadir of physical misery’, but, he wrote, he felt its ‘mental effect’ only after his wife’s death in 1936. Passchendaele, he wrote, was ‘the definition of hell’. ‘The cataclysmic rains and such shelling as never was before had churned the whole landscape into bottomless mud, honeycombed continuously with ever-renewed shell holes, every shell hole liable to be an actual grave or a pond of slime into which the wounded rolled from time to time and were choked to death.’ As he picked his way across this deathly landscape, late at night, ‘I flashed my torch to circumvent a shell hole; the thin light lit up an arm and half-clenched hand, thrust from the mud as though to clasp my ankle.’
The report on Maiden Castle was written up, at length, and dedicated to the memory of Tessa Verney Wheeler. The great discovery was of a ‘war cemetery’ at the fort’s east gate, in which Wheeler envisaged Britons interred after bloody defeat by the Romans (‘the fury of massacre rather than the tumult of battle’). He believed that the battle had taken place as the Romans marched west under Vespasian, flattening everything in their path. In a vivid passage in the report, he pictured the survivors of the dreadful onslaught creeping forth ‘from their broken stronghold’ as ‘the ashes of their burned huts lay warm and thick upon the ground’ to bury their dead ‘hastily and anxiously and without order’. He wrote: ‘The whole war cemetery as it lay exposed before us was eloquent of mingled piety and distraction, of weariness, of dread, of darkness, but yet not of complete forgetfulness. Surely no poor relic in the soil of Britain was ever more eloquent of high tragedy.’
The graves are not now thought of as a ‘war cemetery’. Later archaeologists have judged the bodies to have been carefully placed, not hurriedly buried in the wake of a massacre. Even though a handful of them bear the marks of a violent death, there is no evidence that the people were killed by a single, cataclysmic war event. And yet Wheeler, soldier and widower, dug into the soil of this Dorset hill and found violence, and untimely death. It was as if the three events – the death of his wife, the ghastly scenes of Passchendaele and the slaughter at Maiden Castle – had folded in on each other. As if the grief and guilt and devastation at Tessa’s death could be exorcised only through his summoning up a vision of the dead of Maiden Castle. As if, too, the British dead themselves had been fashioned into imagined being – ghostly warriors – through a memory of the dread and darkness of his own war.
6
Bath
There’s a lot of fine-boned, blue-eyed English madness in Bath, part of its charm, a population with rather more than a fair share of occultists, neo-Platonists, yogis, theosophists, little old ladies who have spirit conversations with Red Indian squaws, religious maniacs, senile dements, natural lifers, macrobiotics, people who make perfumed candles, kite-flyers, do you believe in fairies?
Angela Carter, 1977
The city of Bath exists because of the hot sulphurous waters that surge from the ground in almost appalling profusion. A quarter of a million litres gushed through the Romans’ sacred spring every day, and fed in turn the medieval King’s Bath that was built above it. If you visit the Roman baths, you can see the ancient overflow pipe, the stone around it stained orange from the metals in the water, still carrying away the spuming, frothing excess to the Avon. This scalding bounty is reckoned to pulse up from three kilometres beneath the Mendips. The very water itself is ancient, even by Roman standards: it fell as rain on the hills 6,000 years ago.
When I dunked myself in the open-air rooftop pool at the Thermae, the city’s modern spa, steam rose from the water, and hung in the air like the breath of a giant. It was chill January, and snowflakes declined gracefully from a swollen white sky. Even in the antiseptic environment of the modern, hygienic bathing facility, I caught a hint of grandeur, of mysterious chthonic forces titantically bound beneath the earth. It was easy to see why the Celts’ god Sulis lived here; and why the Romans adopted the cult, merging Sulis with their Minerva, and building, from the late first century ad, the city of Aquae Sulis. For the Romans, all springs were bound to the gods, liminal places where the superficial realm of the everyday and the great dark unknown of the Underworld collided. They were not to be taken lightly.
This was Bath’s first heyday: its Roman period, when the great temple to Sulis-Minerva was built, in the late first century. Its magnificent pediment was carved with the image – held aloft by winged Victories – of a frowning, Gorgonesque deity, his face circled with snaky hair and beard. Beside the temple was the frequently re-elaborated complex of baths, including a rectangular pool that is now open to the sky and fringed around with fake-antique statues, but was once closed in by a barrel-vaulted ceiling. Altars, tombs and inscribed lead tablets hint that Bath was busy with tourists, or pilgrims, and locals with their curious Romano-Celtic names (Uricalus, Cocus, Oconea, Enica, Senicio). Here were hot baths, warm baths, cold baths – visitors still sling coins, without perhaps knowing why, into the elegant circular cold bath, just as the thousands of Romans flu
ng coins into the sacred spring. A haruspex set up an inscribed stone here: Lucius Marcius Memor is the only priest known in Britain who dealt in the arcane Etruscan art of reading the future from the arrangement of the warm, bloody entrails of slaughtered animals.
At some point late in the Roman period, the flooding Avon caused the baths and temple area repeatedly to silt up. And so they were gradually abandoned. There is an Anglo-Saxon poem, from the collection known as the Exeter Book, that has often been regarded as describing the ruins of Bath. The poem is ruined itself, in fragments because the manuscript was badly scarred by fire. It is a lyrical meditation on a once great city, destroyed by wierd, fate, and it ends, or fades into fragments, thus:
There once many a man
mood-glad, gold-bright, of gleams garnished,
flushed with wine-pride, flashing war-gear,
gazed on wrought gemstones, on gold, on silver,
on wealth held and hoarded, on light-filled amber,
on this bright burg of broad dominion.
Stood stone houses; wide streams welled
hot from source, and a wall all caught
in its bright bosom, that the baths were
hot at hall’s hearth; that was fitting …
…
Thence hot streams, loosed, ran over hoar stone
unto the ring-tank …
… It is a kingly thing
… city …
Bath’s second heyday was in the eighteenth century, when the dandy Beau Nash became the unofficial king of a newly glamorous, fashionable watering-hole, which burst through its medieval walls to become, through riotous bouts of speculative building, a great Georgian town, its architecture defined by classical qualities, as if it was reliving its Roman period. This was the era of the cure, of taking the waters – both by bathing in them and by imbibing them. ‘Ariston men hudor’, is the Grecian boast inscribed above the door of the Pump Room: ‘water is best’, the opening words of Pindar’s first Olympian Ode. Thomas Guidott’s A Discourse of Bathe, and the Hot Waters There, first published in the 1670s, noted that the waters were good for the stomach, for they ‘infallibly cleanse this useful Receptacle from any Impurities lodging in the Bottom or Plicatures thereof’. The water increased appetite and made ‘those that drink it receive and enjoy their Food with more Delight and Satisfaction’. It was also ‘of good Use in the Heart-burning, or Cardialgia, occasioned by the Sharpness and Acrimony of a bilious Humour’. Furthermore, ‘It is of singular Use in all Fluxes, whether with Blood, or without; Diarrhea’s, Dysenteries, or bloody Urine.’ Moreover, ‘It is also of incomparable Use in the Diabetes, or pissing Disease.’ For women, the water ‘prepares them for Conception; so that in some kinds of Barrenness, no more effectual Medicine can be used’. A veritable panacea, then, with only one or two caveats: ‘I doubt not also to commend it in the Dropsy, but Care must be taken that it pass well away, otherwise it may prove more prejudicial than advantagious. The like also may be said of the Gout.’ These days, you can buy a little bottle of the stuff for £3.99 a throw in the Roman Baths souvenir shop, or drink a tepid glass (50p) straight from the source in the Pump Room. It is unpleasant enough to make you feel that it is doing you good: William Stukeley, in medical mode, reported that after drinking it, ‘you find yourself brisker immediately’ and that ‘it is of most sovereign virtue to strengthen the bowels, to restore their lost tone through intemperance or inactivity’.
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