by Adams, Max;
Wroxeter survived Rome; the Cornovii survived Rome, too, to become the Early Medieval people known as the Wreocansaetan, more or less retaining the name by which Ptolemy knew their capital. Some time during the period of its post-Roman existence, perhaps around 500, Wroxeter became the burial place for a native man called Cunorix, son of the son of Coline (an Irish name)—his memorial inscription was recovered from the ruins in 1967. Cunorix means something like hound-king, which reminds one of Gildas’s excoriating complaint against five contemporary tyrants. Cunorix may have been the successor potentate of the Cornovii or Wreocansaetan. The ninth-century compiler known as Nennius recorded Wroxeter by its contemporary British name, Caer Guricon, in his list of the twenty-eight ‘cities’ of Britain.16
Wroxeter lies halfway between the Wrekin and the county town of Shrewsbury; it also lies halfway between the Iron Age and the Medieval period, for Shrewsbury was its replacement. Deliberately founded, like Wroxeter, as a defended town, and situated in a strategically handy bend in the River Severn, medieval Shrewsbury was the eventual product of a system of defence envisioned by King Alfred of Wessex, expanded by his son Edward the Elder and daughter Æthelflaed, the so-called Lady of the Mercians. But if, as we believe, Shrewsbury was founded in the early part of the tenth century, there is a break in the trail that leads here. Between Roman city and medieval burgh there is a gap.
At Atcham, more or less halfway between Wroxeter and Shrewsbury at a point where an important bridge still spans the river, is a church whose origins lie during the century in which Wroxeter was finally abandoned. Oddly, it is dedicated to St Eata (hence the name of the village, whose name means ‘homestead of Eata’s people’). Quite why he was commemorated here is a mystery, for he was an abbot of the Anglo-British monastery at Melrose in the Anglo-Scottish border after the year 651; and not just any abbot: he was the mentor of St Cuthbert and one of the first generation of Lindisfarne-trained monks who came to preach the Irish form of Christianity to the Northern English. He died as Bishop of Hexham.
To add intrigue to this mystery, aerial photographs of a crop-mark site two miles due north of here, at Attingham Park, show that a substantial, perhaps palatial township site existed in these parts in the seventh century; it bears a striking resemblance to the Anglo-British complex at Yeavering in north Northumberland (another brilliant excavation, this time by pioneering archaeologist Brian Hope-Taylor in the late 1950s and early 1960s). Early Medieval texts relating to the Welsh kingdom of Powys (much larger than the modern county: the name seems to come from Latin paganses—country folk), which some historians suggest was the successor kingdom to the Cornovii, cite the existence of a palace called Pengwern, the site of which has never been located. Does Pengwern lie here?
From Atcham I followed the meander of the river (a kingfisher flashed by in a wink of lapis-lazuli blue; a drowned stoat lay across my path; there was flood damage along the banks where flotsam still lay piled against hedges, trees and fences: I sensed a washed-out, tired landscape desperate for spring) and entered Shrewsbury from the east. The local college had just disgorged its chattering pupils and a whole crowd of us crossed the deep, wind-ruffled waters of the river at the appropriately named English bridge. After a twenty-mile hike I felt road-rusty and weather-beaten, stopping at the first homely-looking café I could find for a cuppa and a large slice of chocolate cake. My prospective night’s pitch lay on the other side of town, but when I got there it had been washed out—I should have guessed. I slunk back into town as darkness fell and took a room above a pub. No guilt: the shower was marvellous, I ate a steak pie and chips downed with a Guinness and luxuriated in a double bed.
Shrewsbury is unlikely to have enjoyed its later status as a great border town during the Early Medieval period. It was not made the centre of a diocese in the eighth century when Mercia was the rising power of central England and ancient tribal regions were busy acquiring bishops. Cathedrals at Worcester and Lichfield and royal centres at Repton and Tamworth suggest its marginality—or perhaps the instability of a marcher region in which British and Anglian dominance swayed back and forth too readily. Shropshire is named from Shrewsbury; but Shrewsbury is not named either from the former capital or the original tribe. Its Early English name is the rather unpromising Scrobbesburh, a shrubby or scrubby fort—a name that brings to mind the coconut whiff of yellow gorse or perhaps a phase of neglect. Its Welsh name sounds better: Amwythig, meaning simply ‘fortified place’. By the early tenth century the town mattered sufficiently to have a charter drawn up, in which it was called a civitas in imperial style. Its emergence as a central, fortified place owes more, perhaps, to external threat than to antecedent history: during the Viking Wars between 865 and 927 Mercia and its ultimately more successful rival Wessex were under periodic but sustained attack from an army of enterprising, battle-hardened and well-led Scandinavians. The fortification of the Marcher towns was not an immediate response to this danger, but hard evidence of a strategic fight-back against the expansion of the Danelaw at the very beginning of the tenth century under the children of Alfred. Shrewsbury’s key position on the river and east of the mountains made it worth fighting for, right up to the Wars of the Roses in the fifteenth century. Watling Street and the wool trade ensured its commercial success, reflected in the large number of grand medieval buildings which confer on the town its architectural virtues.
Leaving Shrewsbury the following morning, briefly following the old A5, Watling Street, and having passed a milepost promising Holyhead in only another one hundred and five miles, I wondered when I would start to see Welsh names popping up on signposts as I tracked west. I followed the river for a while, but this early in the year its bleached banks, meadows and trees, still in a forlorn state of winter undress, began to depress the imagination. At Montford Bridge I crossed the river again and took a small back road westwards. Here the plain of the Severn has a striking settlement pattern. Villages are very small, often little more than hamlets or clusters of half a dozen houses, and they are widely dispersed. This has perhaps to do with impermanence; it may also have to do with a large number of small settlements feeding a few larger central places—if so, is this a remnant of the burghal system which provided a central point of defence and trade within a day’s march of every settlement in its hinterland? Sometimes I saw no more than a dozen or a score of houses spread over half a mile, and after the last house I would find I had left the ‘village’. Once I paused in front of a simple, unaffected red-brick Primitive Methodist chapel with an inscription above the door, which provided me with some sort of an answer—one that could only, perhaps, have been inspired by a border region.
ERECTED A.D. 1865
THE LORD LOVETH THE GATES OF ZION MORE
THAN ALL THE DWELLINGS OF JACOB
The Primitive Methodist movement, born in Staffordshire in the early 1800s, was partly inspired by the American frontier pioneers’ camp communions—open-air gatherings for prayer and communal meals in places where there was no church or priest—and a conscious revival of ideas about early Christian assembly. Here, where the secular geographical landscape has so often been disputed and where settlement is so dispersed, it seems quite natural to celebrate a mythical otherworldly place of permanence and security.
I sensed the swell of hills to the west; and although behind me the Wrekin still lurked like a slow-moving tanker against the horizon, the hill fortress of Breidden was now my compass mark, a few miles upstream. A closer look at the map showed something else: a large number of early names reflecting something of the landscape history of the region. There were Charltons (the houses of ceorls, or free farmers); Walcotts, hamlets of Britons17 (presumably in an English area); and a Sascott—a Saes, or English, hamlet in a British/Welsh area. Then a first, truly authentic Welsh place name: Pentre (meaning little more than just ‘place’ or ‘settlement’). If the river has often been a border over the millennia, it has been a very porous one: English and Welsh have always mixed here, and continue
to do so. This is a patchwork land. That night, settling down to a pub dinner, having pitched my coffin-like trekking tent on a welcoming grassy sward on the north bank of the river, I got chatting to an Anglo-Welsh couple. She worked with horses; he was a gamekeeper. The thought of them choosing between nationalities was facile: their identity was defined by their lives and families and their landscape: a cultural and physical chequerboard. Welsh or English, they were Marcher folk; and I have heard much the same thing in the Anglo-Scottish borders and in the border counties of Ireland. Maybe we should get over the idea of nation, reserving it for the rugby pitch.
A third full day on the trail saw the back of the Severn. My destination that evening was Oswestry where I had an engagement at the town’s annual Litfest. That meant a change of clothes, which I had been obliged to carry with me; but also a comfortable room at the Sebastian Hotel courtesy of the organisers. Oswestry was also a place of personal pilgrimage: I had never before been to the site of King Oswald’s martyrdom—rather shameful to admit, having written a book about him. But before Oswestry came other pleasures and challenges. This part of Shropshire, it must be said, suffers from some poorly signed paths and a few that have been disestablished by farmers. Between Melverley Green and Argoed I became hopelessly disoriented in a metaphysical maze of existing, former and purely mythical paths. A field full of rather frisky-looking steers forced a diversion across a small ditch whose apparently firm banks dissolved into red clay as I landed on the other side. Knee-deep in filth was not the way I had intended to make my entrance in Oswestry.
At Woolston, around lunchtime, my travails were rewarded: one of those ‘shall-I-take-the-quickest-path-or-follow-my-nose?’ moments. Behind the last house in the village a narrow path led between hedges, showing hawthorn just coming into leaf, down to a pretty stream; and above the stream an equally lovely, if not enchanted, late medieval half-timbered cottage consisting of a single room, which straddled St Winifred’s well. She is an interesting saint, one of those holy women who, for their faith, got their heads cut off. Her other, more elaborate and more celebrated shrine lies at Holywell in what used to be Flintshire. A broad contemporary of the Northumbrian King Oswald, who also lost his head in these parts, she was a Welsh noblewoman whose vow of chastity and desire to become a nun enraged her lover to the point of homicide. Where her severed head landed, a spring with miraculous healing powers appeared. The hagiography is conventional; but the frequency with which decapitated holy women became associated with local miracles evokes those head cults known to have existed long before Christianity co-opted such wise and virtuous souls.
Peering through the window of the cottage, I was surprised to see a man sitting in an armchair reading a newspaper; and thinking he must be some sort of warden, or even a work of installation-art, I knocked on the door. A dog barked; there was a long pause, movement at the window, a short conversation half-heard. The door opened a fraction to reveal half the face of a timid-looking chap who explained that he and his wife were renting the place from the owners, the Landmark Trust. He did not encourage discussion of the saint, and closed the door. I felt slightly miffed until I realised what an abject sight I must have been: dressed all in black, with a three-day beard, woolly hat and the lower half of my legs a very bright, crusty terracotta. I nevertheless sat on the edge of the pool where Winifred’s holy waters emerged from beneath the cottage, and ate my oatcakes and cheese with as much sangfroid as I could muster. I am glad to say that Winifred’s story turned out well. Her uncle, St Bueno, stuck her head back in its proper place and restored her to life. Turning his attention to the murderous suitor, one Cradoc, he cursed the man, who dropped dead on the spot. Winifred later became a nun and abbess.
Unlike those of island, coast and highland, the landscape of the Marches is not steeped in such tales. Early monuments and sacred places in the lowlands have been overwritten by the pragmatic plough and lore of farming and the claims and testimonies of secular and ecclesiastical estates. Song and legend, myth and folk culture are heard more faintly here, and the historian is not helped by a distressing lack of sources from the Early Medieval kingdom of Mercia. If there were historians in these parts of the stature of Bede, their works have been lost. But the sine wave of road and river, the tell-tale of place name and church, holy well and hilltop rampart are there to be read. And so it was that as the sun’s arc declared its late afternoon passage towards the Welsh hills, I found myself walking, somewhat in a daze by now, along a suspiciously straight lane between Amesbury and the little hamlet of Ball, a few miles south of Oswestry. If I hadn’t had a map I might have taken no notice. But then the road deviated from the straight to circumvent the site of a derelict, beautifully decrepit watermill; I stopped to take pictures and check my map. After this kink, the line of the lane cut back at right angles to cross its former course. A slight bump (only a car driving too quickly would have noticed it) in the tarmac betrayed the true nature of that straight line: Wat’s Dyke, little brother of the grand rampart that bears the name of Mercia’s greatest king, Offa.
Wat’s Dyke rarely forms more than a ditch, sometimes filled with rainwater, accompanied by a modest bank; it was never conceived on remotely the same scale as its twin, four miles to the west. It belongs, archaeologists now think, to a period some little time after Offa but well within the period when Mercia and its neighbouring kingdom Powys competed for control of this frontier zone: that is to say, the eighth century. Its actual practical purpose is quite obscure—it is no Hadrian’s Wall, no great defensive barrier to turn back an army; more an administrative line that says where one man’s writ runs. For now it was sufficient for me to recognise that its line was taken up again by a small path through fields where farmers had, in their opportunistic way, used it as the line for a barbed-wire fence and a drainage ditch. No great monument to the Dark Ages, but it would lead me directly to Oswestry, a shower and my literary engagement.
Oswestry (originally Oswald’s Tree)—Croesoswald in Welsh—is the grisly name that commemorates the battle in which King Oswald of Northumbria was defeated, decapitated and dismembered by his foe, Penda of Mercia, in the year 642. The head was placed on a stake as a token of prehistoric, pagan triumph. A year after the battle Oswald’s brother, Oswiu, came with his warrior band to retrieve the head and arms of his brother in an equally pagan gesture of possessive defiance. Unsure which body parts he should claim, the young king was shown a sign, by a ‘great bird of the crow family’, who carried the martyr’s arm to an ash tree (the bird in Reginald of Durham’s tale is surely a raven; the ash tree a symbol of the Norse Yggdrasil or World Tree, from which Odin hanged himself in order to acquire the knowledge of magical runes).18 For Bede, and in the medieval imagination, Oswald was a great English Christian king dying for the cause, his body parts and relics a famous source of miracles; but the manner of his death and retrieval carries the strongest pagan overtones.19
In a small, municipal, grassed and paved enclosure on the outskirts of town I came on St Oswald’s well, traditionally the place where the bird dropped Oswald’s arm and whence a healing spring spontaneously arose. I decided not to refill my water bag there, having a deep respect for the science of bacteriology. Above the well, curiously, is a modern bronze of an eagle grasping an arm complete with gauntlet. I wondered how the raven had become an eagle; does nobody read their Reginald of Durham these days?
I could not leave Oswestry without exploring its hill fort, an immense complex of earthworks just north of the town which I reached in the light of a low, golden sun so that on approach its massive ramparts, surely commissioned by a lost race of giants, seemed to clatter like bursting Atlantic rollers onto the unsuspecting shores of the town. The proximity of battlefield and hill fort has suggested to some historians that Penda, the most potent of Mercian warlords before Offa, had a headquarters here and that Oswald mounted a pre-emptive strike on his enemy’s heartland. A recent archaeological watching brief on works near the entrance yielded a bas-relief
carving of a horse, much damaged—a reminder, perhaps, of the value that Dark Age warlords placed on this potent symbol of speed, power and princely virility.
Oswestry, the birthplace of Wilfred Owen, had a suitably humbling literary feel about it: slightly somnolent, easy-going, welcoming in a sort of stand-offish way. I did my thing (it was not the potent virtue of Oswald who rescued the evening from a projector that would not communicate with a laptop, but a kind member of the audience, who fetched one from home). I slept well, in comfort, and managed to wash some of the trail from my dirty clothes, while outside it poured with rain all night. On the news the story of a missing Malaysian airliner, lost incomprehensibly in the vastness of the southern Indian Ocean, gave me a chilling sense of fragility as I retired.
The next day, the spring equinox, when the sun rises due east and sets due west, I made my acquaintance with Offa’s Dyke, the greatest single engineering achievement of the Early Medieval period. Here, for once, was real walking terrain, room to stretch the legs, enjoy the open sky and feel the undulating conveyor belt of the land beneath my feet. From Oswestry I took lanes and tracks west towards the hills, rising all the time through sheep pasture and conifer plantation, all glistening after the heavy rain, until I came onto a broad ridge which, in Offa’s day, must have given huge vistas of the mountains, valleys and kingdoms of Central Wales. At first I saw only trees; then the path opened out and I found I was walking across what had once been Oswestry racecourse; and for a mile or so after that path and dyke diverged so that I was ready for a trailside snack by the time I came onto the dyke proper at Carreg-y-Big, a hill farm at a crossroads on the height of the ridge. The dyke is a grand design all right: massive ‘look-at-me’ bank along the east side, ‘keep-out’ ditch to the west; but it is the unflagging, uncompromising momentum of the beast that really impresses itself, like a boulder that will not be stopped or a crusade that marches under its own unfathomable dynamic. The dyke and I, we have the same thing in mind today, heading north across the grain of the land whose rivers drain the mountains eastwards towards the headwaters of Severn and Dee, nature’s Anglo-Welsh border.