In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  These were walkers’ thoughts. An earlier wanderer, an Anglo-Saxon poet, full of melancholy, weary of spirit and looking back on his lonely life, had this to say:

  The ancient works of the giants stood idle,

  Hushed without the hubbub of inhabitants.

  Then he who has brooded over these noble ruins

  And who deeply ponders this dark life,

  Wise in his mind, often remembers

  The many slaughters of the past and speaks these words:

  Where has the horse gone? Where the man? Where the giver of gold?

  Where is the feasting place? And where the pleasures of the hall?37

  Long-distance walking can induce melancholy, for sure; but it is also therapeutic. Rousseau, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Rimbaud, Laurie Lee embarked on journeys of self-discovery: what Nietzsche called outdoor thinking. For pious Dark Age argonauts setting out across the wolf-prowled hills on the long straight road to Rome or dipping their oar into the icy waters of the northern seas, the models for walking heroes were to be found in the New Testament and in the lives of the Desert Fathers. The ideal was peregrinatio: the journey abroad in imitation of the Temptation of Christ in the desert, as a voluntary exile and perpetual stranger in a foreign land. Christ had wandered in the baking wastes of Jordan, starving and alone, for forty days. For some churchmen, those who believed in the communal endeavour of the cenobitic monastery, such wanderings were an indulgence, a distraction tending towards fanaticism. For others, the voyage into the dangerous, uncharted, un-Latinate unknown was a trial of faith beyond the edge of knowledge—and therefore of high virtue. Pilgrims, on the other hand, knew where they were going, even if they had a very imperfect idea of what the journey or the destination—Rome, Jerusalem, Tours—would be like. Some made the journey to Rome more than once: the seventh-century bishop St Wilfrid thrice; Benedict Biscop (founder of the priory of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow) no fewer than five times. Alfred of Wessex was taken to Rome twice as a mere child; many kings made pilgrimage their retirement; there were those who set out and never reached the promised land.

  There were also those who journeyed for more earthbound reasons: to flee persecution or escape justice; to conduct their lord’s business; to visit friends or to carry messages and gifts; to trade and to fight. Pragmatism and superstition governed the time of departure, the route, the method of travel. Bishop Aidan, the first abbot of Lindisfarne from 635 to 651, astonished and offended King Oswine of Deira, his patron, when he gave away to a pauper the king’s gift of a horse. The king understood bishops most easily in the context of a warrior elite, to whose caste they belonged; the horse reflected their dignity, rank, honour. Aidan eschewed these and walked. The journey of Abbot Uttar of Gateshead to retrieve a princess and bride-to-be from Kent was so risky a venture (physically and probably politically) that he sought approbation and blessing from Aidan, and was comforted by the gift of a phial of holy oil which he used to quell a storm in the North Sea. Travellers, especially pagans, had superstitions about crossroads and, in particular, places where three roads met. Auguries and omens were physical manifestations of the pre-Christian imagination; rituals were performed before setting out and after arriving safely. Journeys, by their very nature extraordinary and ambitious enterprises, were attended by miracles and portents. Age was no barrier to travel. The monk Theodore, a native of Tarsus in Asia Minor, was sixty-six when he was chosen by Pope Vitalian to travel to England to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 668. His likely route was overland, via a string of monasteries across northern Italy and Francia. The journey did him no harm: he held the metropolitan see for more than twenty years until his death in 690.

  The most-travelled men and women of the Early Medieval period were kings and queens. Kings must visit their royal estates in turn to receive tribute and be fed; to dispense justice, gifts and land; to consult their wise men. And every year it was their duty to gather a host and go to war against their enemies for glory, treasure and the pride of their folk. After the later seventh century it became fashionable, as an alternative to death in battle, to abdicate and set out for Rome to retire there, as did Cædwalla of Wessex in about 688, his successor, Ine, in 728 and Cyngen of Powys in 855.

  Malcolm and I lunched at the edge of a copse of Scots pines that straddles the Wall south of Greenlee Lough. Malcolm’s Wall walk had been something of a personal struggle: walking alone can take you to places you didn’t know existed or perhaps did not want to visit. In company the trail is all about camaraderie, companionable silence, satisfaction at day’s end; anecdotes. A walk with each different sort of companion is an adventure in adaptability, in shared pace and perspective; two people notice more than one.

  We passed through the fort at Housesteads, all neat, square buildings and ordered space; one of the best-preserved forts along the Wall and, like Vindolanda and Birdoswald, the site of a late-fourth-century structure identified from its apsidal ground plan as a church. We crossed the line of the Pennine Way. It occurred to me to wonder how many transhumant paths and droveways must have been severed or diverted, no doubt at the cost of a toll, during the Wall’s construction and lifetime. We cannot know whether, as with today’s motorway projects, accommodation was made for those aboriginal farmers whose traditional lands and routes were cut in half by the onward march of the Wall, or whether the natives had to like it or lump it. No doubt local deals were cut for backhanders; no doubt grudges were borne. Injustice has a long memory.

  At Sewingshields the high line of the crags ends; looking back at the rollercoaster track of Wall and Whin Sill in low, creamy sunlight, it looked to us like some immense humpbacked prehistoric monster, a kelpie, diving and surfacing, broaching the unfathomable waters of the ages. The country east of here is increasingly benign, less confrontational: now Wall, military road and vallum join together in a strip several hundred yards wide, three plough furrows racing eastwards across the Northumbrian uplands. It struck both of us how useful a plume of smoke might have been for earlier travellers: in the stiller air of the Tyne Valley a monstrous exhalation of steam is constantly emitted by a locally notorious chipboard factory; it had been our unspoken marker all day.

  A little after the fort of Broccolita, where the winter-flooded remains of a Mithraic temple looked like nothing so much as a Christian holy well and shrine, we left the Wall and stepped out across country, heading south-east on the ‘Roman’ side. The path became a lane. We passed a very odd little establishment, a Cold Comfort Farm, shabby and slightly sinister with lines of abandoned rusting vehicles, filthy net curtains in the windows hiding goodness knows what domestic history. These are the backwoods, the neglected corners of the landscape that you don’t come across in a car; they are the secret discoveries of the trail, sometimes to be investigated; sometimes to be passed swiftly by.

  BROCCOLITA

  We rounded the fence of a defunct quarry that for centuries chewed at the hill overlooking the village of Fourstones but which now bristles with conifers. We turned east to join a back road that would take us south towards the Tyne Valley and that plume of steam. The weather had been kind to us all day: piercingly cold but bright and more or less dry; now fine snow drifted in veils across the hills and hurried us on. The light was failing and an indistinct twilight gave notice of the day’s end. We crossed, at right angles, the line of the Stanegate, no more than a mile west of the River North Tyne whose dramatic confluence with its parent valley was our destination. On a path running along the lower contours of Warden Hill I left Malcolm with his pack and flask and trotted up to the summit, at something like six hundred feet: Warden Hill, a domed expanse of pasture that gives views right along the Tyne Valley both ways, and which, as its name suggests, guards the confluence of the two rivers, commands the passage of people and animals heading east, west or north. The Iron Age hill fort whose grassy ramparts survive, truncated, for the sheep to graze on, has periodically been investigated by archaeologists. There is evidence that it was occupied during the Roman
period; like the Wrekin, it must have been slighted38 by the legions, a much too dangerous strategic objective to be allowed to function as a tribal headquarters. But I could still see chunks of masonry poking out from sheep scrapes, and the distinct outlines of roundhouses visible even in this failing light. I rather like to think that it was reoccupied after the legions left; and a new airborne laser (known as LiDAR)39 survey shows some tantalising shapes lying just beneath the turf. As the last of the light drained away, I paused in the centre of the hill fort long enough to see lights from the villages and roads of the Tyne Valley pinprick my eyeline, evoking a strong sense of time’s inexorable passage and the unchanging realities of power, chiselled on our land in the straight line and the circle.

  § CHAPTER FOUR

  Eda Frandsen : Falmouth to Mallaig

  John the Almsgiver—Tin Isles—Falmouth—Eda Frandsen—fellow crew members—Scilly Isles—night sailing—Dark Age argonauts—Isle of Man—heaving-to—pilots and anchorages—Peel and St Patrick’s Isle—navigation—wics—Atlantic lands—Irish Sea and Solway Firth—North Channel—Vikings—a blast—Crinan and Dunadd—Corryvreckan—trade and intellect—Tobermory—Inverie and Old Forge Inn—parting

  EDA FRANDSEN

  THERE IS AN unlikely story, preserved in an Eastern Mediterranean hagiography from the time of King Rædwald, that tells of a sea voyage from those parts to the Atlantic west coast. John the Almsgiver, patriarch of Alexandria, took pity on a sea captain who, through ill luck and the ‘sinful acquisition of money’, had fallen on hard times. John gave him five pounds of gold with which he bought a cargo; but his ship was wrecked off the great lighthouse, Pharos. The captain again applied to the patriarch and, admonishing the man to be more careful with his and God’s money, John gave him ten pounds to purchase another cargo. Again, his ship was wrecked. You would have thought that each man would have learned his lesson; but the patriarch, trusting in God, now gave the captain a swift-sailing vessel belonging to the Holy Church and carrying twenty thousand bushels of corn. After many days’ sailing, during which violent winds beset the ship, the captain lost his way and landed in the ‘Islands’ [sic] of Britain at the edge of the world. Here, it seems, the people were in the grip of a terrible famine. The captain, with enlightened self-interest, took a shipment of tin from them in return for his corn and then, returning to the Mediterranean and stopping off at an African port, found that his cargo now consisted of the finest silver. This tale of the power of the Christian god in protecting his chosen sons from the perils of fate and ensuring that the patriarch’s precious assets and trust had been wisely invested, almost prefigures Calvinism in its depiction of the salvation of the elect.

  Whatever one thinks of such stories its credibility, or at least the non-miraculous part of it, rests on a supposition that the famine-afflicted land must have been the south-west peninsula of West Wealas—Cornwall—which was rich in deposits of tin ore; and that Alexandrians knew of it. Britain and Ireland were famed prehistorically for their deposits of gold, silver, copper and tin, the latter two metals highly valued as the constituents of the alloy bronze. That reputation evidently survived into the Early Medieval period and provided one incentive for entrepreneurial, or lucky, merchants to come to these parts even after the collapse of the Western Empire. Other texts show that the Atlantic lands were also famous for furs and hunting dogs, for salt deposits and for the slaves produced by decades of conflict between warring tribes. Adomnán, Colmcille’s hagiographer, told a story of Gaulish40 sea captains arriving at the caput regionis, probably Dunadd, as if it was the sort of thing that was expected to happen now and then; and Bede recounts the famous arrival on Iona of a bishop, Arculf, who had been to the Holy Land. His Ionan host (no less than Abbot Adomnán himself) wrote an account drawn from his interviews with Arculf, called de locis sanctis—‘On the holy places’. In the 690s he took a copy as a gift to the scholarly King Aldfrith of Northumbria; it was much copied and adapted (by Bede among others) and the work survives in several manuscripts.

  Many an Irish or English monk travelled to and from the Continent in the seventh and eighth centuries when the universal language and culture of the Christian Church fomented an intellectual network across Western Europe in the face of barbarian invasion and economic collapse just as, to the east, Islam was building the first caliphate. In recent decades archaeologists have been busy retrieving the material evidence for these contacts in the ephemera of pottery sherds, metalwork and glass fragments and in the material transmission of ideas—of art and inscription, technology and literature.

  In April 2014, in Falmouth harbour, Sarah and I stepped aboard Eda Frandsen, a fifty-five-foot 1930s Danish gaff cutter, for a voyage across the same waters that Arculf and many other Dark Age argonauts had sailed a millennium and a half ago. Our destination was Mallaig, on the north-west coast of Scotland, where Eda is based for the summer season cruising the Hebrides. Our route lay in the hands of the wind and tides and of skipper James Mackenzie.

  The gaff cutter is one of the most beautiful sailing boats, adapted to the rigours of offshore fishing but sufficiently light-footed for the demands of coastal waters. Eda has a single mast stepped amidships bearing a gaff mainsail: that is, its upper edge is held stiff by a boom, the gaff, which juts out behind the mast at an angle of about forty-five degrees. Forward, she carries jib, foresail and staysail, while the gaff can be extended with its own distinctive triangular topsail. Eda’s gaff was an earthy, deep orangey-brown weather-bleached and patched canvas; the other sails a rich clotted cream. When we boarded her she was in harbour trim, the gaff lashed to the main boom, the other sails in their seagoing bags. The sky was a crisp blue flecked with white cloud, the waters of the harbour ruffled only by a light wind. Eda rocked very easily on her mooring with a seductive creaking of ropes and the even more reassuring sound of a kettle boiling. The welcome provided by the standing crew—James, mate Melissa Williams and cook Chlöe Gillat—was all good cheer, tea and scones with fresh cream and jam. We introduced ourselves to the rest of the crew: Paul Rowan, a local who sails whenever he can (and oddly enough an old shipmate of Tony Wilmott, the excavator of Birdoswald); Georgia Witchell, who skippers her own boat in these parts; Rolf Winzeler, a Swiss border guard and square-rigger enthusiast; Frank Herrity, a retired psychiatric nurse; and Alexandra (Alex) Goodman, another local sailor who runs a small inshore boat.

  We stowed our gear forward in a space on the port side just large enough for two tight bunks and a double locker where the bluff curve of the bows sweeps in from amidships. My space on the top bunk was about the same size as my one-man tent: sufficiently snug that I banged my knees on the deck planks overhead whenever I turned over. It had a small electric light for reading, although I don’t suppose I ever read more than about half a page before falling asleep in the entire nine-day voyage.

  EDA FRANDSEN

  Opposite us to starboard, on the other side of the forward gangway and hatch and the anchor locker set tight in the bows, lay another two bunks. Beneath the gangway and aft of our bunks were the two heads with loos and shower combined so that the effect was something like astronauts must experience on space-station duties. After a day or so I found that, even in a moderate swell, I was able to wedge my head against the ceiling, rotate about a point and shut myself in, conducting the necessaries without crashing against the walls. There was no great privacy about toilet operations: the pump that flushed them into a tank was electric, and noisy; in the middle of the night you won no friends at all.

  Aft of the heads lay the saloon: just large enough for the ten of us to sit lined up five on either side with our backs against padded benches and our knees pressed against the table—all hidden lockers, fridges and fold-out extensions, so that once we were all seated there was no escape, no musical chairs. Everything was varnished wooden perfection. The table was mounted around the mainmast and glass-and-cup holders circumnavigated it in a nautically efficient way—nothing could fall out of its place except
in a really big blow. Plates and cutlery were similarly confined behind bungee cords and retaining battens. At night the saloon was lit by an electric lantern, slung from the ceiling alongside an ocean-going stuffed toy parrot. Forward of the saloon to starboard, the matching space to the heads, was the galley: a small miracle of efficiency—Chlöe’s preserve except during washing-up duties. I have lived in some small spaces, but I couldn’t even stand upright in the galley, let alone turn around. At the rear of the saloon was the foot of the main gangway and hatch; either side and aft of that were more bunks for the guest crew.

  We made a short crossing of the harbour on Saturday evening, anchoring off St Just in Carrick Roads as the sun dipped low and set a little north of west. Falmouth harbour and the Roads are whiskered with green woods below lush pastures—dairy country. But not far away are the remains of the mines that drew merchants here from across Europe when Britain was known as the Tin Islands. We had our safety briefing (don’t fall off the boat or get clouted by the main boom) and James talked us through some of our route options, asking if we had any thoughts on places we would like to see. I had a list: a gazetteer of Dark Age emporia, royal and monastic sites whose archaeology I knew; some of which, like Dunadd, we had recently visited. But I knew, as the realistic pilgrims and merchants of those centuries knew, that such voyages are essentially opportunistic and in experiencing for myself the vagaries, happy chances and capricious fates that rule the lives of voyagers at sea, I surrendered my fortunes to the joint enterprise. I gave the skipper the list anyway.