Under Another Sky

by Charlotte Higgins

  Another tablet is on the subject of the theft of a cloak: ‘To Minerva the goddess Sulis I have given the thief who has stolen my hooded cloak, whether slave or free, whether man or woman. He is not to buy back this gift unless with his own blood.’ Sometimes the curses were brutal: the theft of one unknown object caused the petitioner to demand that the perpetrator, and his family, be prevented from eating, drinking, defecating or urinating. There is one tablet that is thought to have been written in British Celtic – using the Latin alphabet – which makes it unique, but untranslatable, without some kind of Rosetta Stone to unlock this usually unwritten language. Sometimes the curses were written right to left, as if to increase the magic, or the secrecy. There are a number of ‘illiterate’ tablets, random scratches on the lead, that those hurling them into the seething spring might have thought contained the enchanted power of writing. Dr Roger Tomlin, the scholar who has undertaken the delicate task of transcribing and interpreting the spidery, slippery handwriting of the tablets, thinks the curses may be the dark obverse of the goddess’s power. If she can heal, then she can also debilitate; if she can help, she can also hurt, wielding that black strength from deep beneath the earth. He also thinks the curses worked: that is, sufficiently well for people to continue flinging them into the springs for two centuries.

  Some of the curse tablets had turned up before Cunliffe’s excavations. In 1904, Edward Williams Byron Nicholson, Bodley’s librarian at the University of Oxford, settled on a very particular vacation project. He took with him on a Scottish holiday photographs of a tiny lead tablet, incised on both sides with what had hitherto been regarded as indecipherable letters. Roger Tomlin has written vividly of Nicholson: he was known to his deputy at the library as ‘diabolus bibliothecae’, the devil of the library; to others he was simply ‘Old Nick’. Two of his board of curators, according to Tomlin, committed suicide under the strain of working with him. The sleeves of his voluminous gown used to dash the papers off desks as he swept like a tornado through the reading rooms. Among his many and varied interests, he attended spiritualist meetings, wrote on animal rights and was an antivivisectionist. He campaigned against plans to use the beautiful Jacobean entrance hall of the Bodleian Library as a bike shed. One of his many money-making schemes was an idea for selling biscuits imprinted with images of British beauty spots.

  Nicholson’s Scottish holiday was not idly spent. On his return, he published a pamphlet with a translation of the tablet’s text:

  Vinisius to Nigra: (? The grace) of the Lord Jesus Christ to thine also. (Thy) husband’s faults Vinisia has related to Vilius’s Similis. (? Do thou be strong in Jesus and) with all thy strength (? in thee go counter). Unless in just conflicts (lit. arenas) (? avoid jealousies more abundantly). Christ’s enemy has sent Biliconus from Viriconium that ye may take (him) in the sheepfold, although a dog of Arius. Do thou pray Christ for light. A(p)ulicus carries these sheets.’

  This was sensational stuff. One of the great teases of Romano-British history was then, and continues to be, precisely how widespread Christianity was under Roman rule before Britain was subsumed by the pagan Saxons. (Augustine’s mission in 597 is the conventional date for Christianity’s official introduction to Britain, though in its original Roman form it survived in the west and Ireland, whence it was later reintroduced to Iona and then Lindisfarne and the north-east of England.) As Nicholson put it in his pamphlet: ‘Everybody … is aware how very little we know of the history of Christianity in Britain during the Roman occupation, and how scanty are its literary relics. There are the texts of some writings of Pelagius in the early fifth century, a blundered copy of the signatures of five British ecclesiastics at the Council of Arles in 314, a few stones, rings, &c., with a Christian monogram or motto – but that, I think, is the entire literary legacy known to have been left by the British Christianity of that period: there is not even a Christian inscription on a British tombstone which can safely be ascribed to the first four centuries. Consequently more than ordinary interest attaches to the fact that there exists in the Pump Room at Bath a complete fourth-century Latin letter written by a Christian man in Britain to a Christian woman in Britain.’

  Nicholson’s lead tablet referred not only to Christianity, but even to the question of the Arian heresy, a non-Trinitarian position that contended that God’s divinity was stronger than that of Jesus, which was debated at the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325. The same controversy was mentioned in one of the very few near-contemporary literary sources on the end of Roman rule in Britain, a polemical text by the sixth-century cleric Gildas. In his On the Destruction of Britain, he called the Arian heresy ‘fatal as a serpent and vomiting its poison from beyond the sea’.

  Amid this paucity of evidence, Nicholson’s reading threatened to revolutionise knowledge of Christianity in Roman Britain. His translation was widely, and mostly warmly, covered in the newspapers. The Scotsman was one of the few publications to express scepticism. ‘In deciphering such ancient writings there is not a little danger of error,’ wrote the paper’s correspondent. ‘Possibly the next interpreter may tell us that Vinisius and Vinisia, Nigra and her husband, Biliconus and Similis and Vilius, and Apulicus, the unfortunate postman who carried letters of lead from Viriconium to Aquae Sulis, are but shadows in the imagination of Bodley’s Librarian. In the meantime we may accept his tale.’

  Unfortunately for Nicholson, he had made one crucial error. He had read the tablet upside down. Tomlin turned the photographs over (the original sheet of lead is lost) and started again drawing his own copies of the text. He ended up with the following translation:

  Whether (they be) boy or girl, whether man or woman, forgiveness is not to be given to the person who has stolen this unless […] innocence. Forgiveness is not to be given to him/her, nor shall he/she sleep, except on condition that Euticia (?) sell a bushel of cloud, a bushel of smoke.

  As Tomlin himself has pointed out, the text – while falling into the familiar formulae of the curse tablet – remains rather eccentric, with its bushels of smoke and cloud. You might even ask, why should we let Tomlin’s reading pass without challenge? He himself would be the first to argue that deeply specialised palaeography of this kind is an insecure and provisional business. But what haunts me in this story is that Nicholson did not intend to deceive. He stared into the mirror of that dulled metal, and he conjured up visions, visions that were only reflections of himself. His Roman Britain was the purest, most perfect fantasy.

  7

  Hadrian’s Wall

  My laborious, my romantic, and even my Quixotic undertaking, the double tour of the Wall.

  William Hutton, 1802

  Still I hope that in our anticipated pilgrimage we shall not forsake the Wall a single yard in its course. Let us try to trace it over the whole of its length.

  John Collingwood Bruce, 1885

  A walk expresses space and freedom

  and the knowledge of it can live

  in the imagination of anyone, and that

  is another space too.

  Richard Long, 1980

  From the summit of the wild and remote Sewingshields Crags, east of the Roman fort at Housesteads, you can stand next to Hadrian’s Wall and see it snake away from you in either direction for miles, following a long, sharp ridge. That ridge is part of the Whin Sill, a tide of volcanic rock that forced itself up to the earth’s surface 295 million years ago like (according to an unusually vivid local information board) the jam forcing its way through the bread in a sandwich. The landscape seems to stretch itself out impossibly luxuriously. There are no towns, no villages to be seen, just the occasional lough, hill farm and plantation, and (on this bright, blustery day) the clouds racing their shadows over the calm heights. Here, the wall might have been built on the crest of a wave frozen at the point of breaking.

  It is hard to imagine this knobbly spine of stones as the implacable barrier it once was, a structure two metres thick and five metres tall, manned by infantry, its bulk blo
tting out the views that the steady stream of walkers now comes to admire. It was built in AD 122 by order of the new emperor Hadrian. His policy was to set the empire, perilously overstretched by his predecessor Trajan, within defined, consolidated limits; this barrier would be the spine of its northernmost frontier zone. The wall extends eighty Roman miles (seventy-four of ours) from the Solway Firth in the west to the Tyne in the east, punctually marked by eighty-one milecastles, or fortified gatehouses, allowing (or rather controlling) access to the north or south. Between each milecastle came two turrets; and at times the line of the wall suddenly opens out into a large rectangular enclosure where a fort once stood.

  Sometimes the wall rises and falls in graceful increments, working in discreet harmony with the landscape; but at others, particularly just a little further west from here, around the famous spot known as Sycamore Gap, it seems to compete directly with the terrain, making swooping dives and wild climbs, describing curly U’s and precipitous W’s. Sycamore Gap itself is a much-photographed spot: here the wall performs a perfect acrobatic parabola, and at its very bottom grows the lonely tree for which it is named. You can discern the Roman love of regularity and order here: even though the milecastle at Cawfields, for example, is built on a ludicrously steep slope, it still has a northern gate opening out on to thin air at the escarpment’s edge. (The line is drawn at Sewingshields Crags, where no northern gate seemed to be deemed necessary, since it would have opened straight on to a plunging cliff, like a trapdoor.)

  The traditional idea of the wall – that it must have been built purely to keep the aggressive northern peoples out of Roman territory – should be set aside, according to current theories. It is now thought that it was much more porous and provisional than that. The very fact of its thickly spaced exit and entry points suggests plenty of traffic through the checkpoints. Just east of Housesteads, at Knag Burn, an extra gateway with a pair of guard chambers was built into the wall in the fourth century: perhaps this was a convenient point for traders and farmers taking sheep to their seasonal grazing.

  What can have been the effect on the Britons of this astonishing structure? This wall in the wilds of northern Britannia divides nowhere from nowhere. Visually, it makes about as much sense as René Magritte’s open door suspended in a cloudscape. The effect of all this insistence on uniformity and precision despite the terrain must have been impressive, if not cowing; part of its purpose, surely, was to intimidate. It is now thought that its value as a symbol of Roman might was at least as great as any practical, defensive purpose.

  I was walking the wall with my friends Joshua and Damian, as a few days’ respite from work and London. West of Knag Burn, at the visitors’ centre at the delightfully named Once Brewed, we paused to eat a picnic, safely out of the high wind that was buffeting the tops. Nearby was an improvised pavilion supported on fake Roman standards. Under it, a woman deep in a book of sudoku puzzles sat on a folding chair next to a table laden with reproduction swords, strigils (the curved metal instruments Romans used to scrape oil from their limbs in the baths), and some sponges on sticks, the reputed Roman equivalent of lavatory paper. A little apart, as still as a statue as we approached, his red cloak flapping in the breeze and his breastplate glinting, stood a tall, thickset man, his height made more formidable by his crested helmet. Occasionally a family came up, hesitated shyly for a moment before starting to chat, and then a boy would put on a spare helmet and have his photograph taken with this imposing figure.

  He introduced himself as Marcus Aufidius Maximus, of the 6th Legion. He had borrowed the name of a real Roman, who had dedicated altars at Bath. When in civvies he was Steve Richardson, from Newcastle; he was, he said, ‘a full-time Roman centurion’. The souvenir stall was just for the summer; usually, he said, his work was school visits and events at archaeological sites and museums. At primary schools, he and his wife Lesley kitted out the children in uniforms and then ‘I take them out on drills.’ He had the six- to eight-year-olds doing the ‘testudo’, the famous ‘tortoise’ infantry formation in which the soldiers locked their rectangular shields together to form a carapace against arrow showers.

  How did he come to be a Roman centurion? ‘I got fed up with selling kitchens and bathrooms,’ he said. An interest in archaeology led to his getting a job working front-of-house at the Roman fort and museum of Segedunum, in Newcastle. One day a bakery wanted to photograph someone dressed as a Roman soldier for an advert. Richardson volunteered, and on his way back from the shoot to the fort he was, he said, ‘mobbed by excited kids’. The museum management realised it could do something with a Roman soldier, so he started appearing at events at the fort and eventually went freelance as a centurion. After meeting him, I began to spot his good-natured face in all kinds of places: on a poster for a museum in Newcastle; even advertising the ‘Roman Britain’ ice cream produced by Doddington’s, a local dairy. (The flavour is honey, cherry, apple and cinnamon.) ‘I get paid for playing soldiers,’ he said. ‘What more could I want?’

  Each night of our walk, Joshua, Damian and I put up in B&Bs. At Greencarts Farm, through which the wall runs, Sandra Maughan was struggling with her faulty Victorian pipes, fielding complaints, she said, from city folk expecting urban levels of water pressure, though she was not on the mains supply. Framed in her hallway were some humorous verses about the ‘types’ who walk the wall, with their unsuitable footwear, short shorts and dangly earrings. When we came down for our hearty walkers’ breakfast, Maughan – an energetic redhead in late middle age, with a rich north-eastern accent – dropped us a conspiratorial wink as we shot a glance at the other guests, who were discussing Roman military matters with single-minded commitment over bacon and eggs. When the journalist Hunter Davies came here in the 1970s to write his book A Walk on the Wall, the farmers he spoke to didn’t want tourists coming, leaving gates open, damaging fences. ‘The most important thing in this area is farming. The wall comes second. It must never be allowed to take over,’ he quoted one as saying. This now sounds like the dead rhetoric of a bygone age. Hill farms are less and less economically viable. In 2001, the last really serious British outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease started a few miles east of here at Heddon-on-the-Wall, with terrible consequences for the local economy. ‘We were one of the last farms to lose all our animals,’ Maughan told me. ‘Foot and mouth came straight down the wall. Your farm got wiped out.’ A neighbouring farm had one suspect animal – and then that was that. The slaughter began. ‘It was spring; there were little lambs jumping around. And then your whole life was wiped out in two days,’ she said. When the Hadrian’s Wall path opened as an official tourist attraction in 2003, the farms were still in a bad state; the natural thing to do was to branch out into offering accommodation, and there was certainly the demand. Maughan started putting people up in a couple of spare bedrooms; these days, at peak times, she has had as many as 600 staying, what with the campsite and the bunk house. The farm now makes 50 per cent of its income from accommodation. Some of her friends, she said, ‘don’t like people looking in your windows, knocking on your door’. The path has certainly ‘changed life dramatically’. But on the whole, Maughan seemed to have found the experience enriching – a far cry from the lonely farming existence of previous generations. ‘You get English people, foreign people. You get used to different cultures and expectations. You get politicians, actors, famous people stopping. There’s only the odd one you’d like to strangle.’

  I spoke to one of the local MPs, who was trying to find ways to dramatically increase the number of visitors. At the moment, a million a year come to visit museums and sites on the wall; 200,000 walk part of the trail; and around 11,000 walk it end to end. He’d like there to be more than that. ‘We need people to come away from the Lake District and visit here instead,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing here that can make the farmers any money. Except the landscape.’ There was debate, he said, about how to make the wall more attractive, more vivid. He thought that rebuilding a section, so th
at tourists could get a sense of how colossal and imposing it had once been, might help. Linda Tuttiett, who runs the organisation that oversees what is known as ‘the Hadrian’s Wall corridor’, told me that the wall brings in about £880m a year to Cumbria and Northumberland – but she’d like to see that go up by £300m over the next twenty years. She too wanted tourists to the Lake District to come to the wall: ‘We can have two international brands working really hard for Cumbria,’ she told me. ‘Hadrian’s Wall is one of the most iconic World Heritage Sites. The opportunity for it to underpin the economy of the north is vast.’ It is not just a matter of the farming economy. When Hunter Davies stopped at Segedunum fort in Newcastle, he tried to visit Swan Hunter, the shipyard not far from there along the A187 (or Hadrian Road, as it is named locally), but found the workers on strike: ‘The boilermakers were wanting an increase of £4 a week on their average wage of £34,’ he wrote. At the time, the yard was building the Ark Royal. Today Swan Hunter is stilled: the cranes and floating dock have been sold to India. The company still operates, but with a staff of 200, concentrating on engineering and design services.