In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  This revelation got me thinking, in conversation with James McKenzie, about Dark Age navigation. We agreed that smaller vessels must have hopped along the coasts of the Irish Sea and Scottish archipelago in series of day-sails. I speculated that pilot knowledge must have been critical to a safe passage, and James showed me his pilotage notes for these waters, where the inexperienced or unwary sailor is as like as not going to come a cropper. We looked out the charts for our passage from Falmouth and pointed at likely places where boats negotiating these waters from Francia or the Mediterranean might land and pick up pilots to take them onward. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, it came to us that the Scillies were a key setting-off point—a cluster of safe anchorages and trading settlements where information and expertise might be sought in exchange for small, interesting or high-value goods. Many of the other places where such voyages might call were those that were, historically, the sites of early churches and monasteries, royal palaces or places where markets took place regularly or intermittently over the centuries of the Early Medieval period: Tintagel, Whithorn, Meols, Caldey Island, Peel and so on. In some cases these were neutral locations; in others, royal prerogative ruled and, given the large amount of human traffic evidenced by the travels of the early saints, no doubt the churches fostered their own nautical expertise. From the sixty or so accounts of sea journeys recorded in the life of St Colmcille, it’s clear that the monks of Iona were their own pilots; might they have offered their services to traders and to ecclesiastical travellers like Arculf?

  Adomnán called the Corryvreckan Charybdis Brecani, referring to the whirlpool which forms in the Strait of Messina between Sicily and Calabria. In a small tale of prophecy, he tells how Colmcille had a vision of a monk, Colmán mac Beogni who, on his way to Iona from Rathlin, was in danger of being sunk by the whirlpool and who raised his hands in prayer to quell the terrible and turbulent seas. In an animist world, albeit a Christianised one, the forces of nature loomed large in the physical and spiritual lives of generations of intrepid travellers. The most adventurous of them all, St Brendan, sailed far beyond landmark and pilotage to explore even more exotic worlds and wonders in his search for the ultimate in peregrinatio—the journey abroad for Christ.

  If the Western seaways of the Dark Ages were busy with boats, traders, raiders and travellers, the effects of their networking on economy, religion and culture went beyond a coastal periphery. In Ireland goods were carried deep inland along the lines of major river systems; where kings’ influence spread, so did their lines of patronage and the gifts and perquisites with which they maintained their networks of kin affiliations. But it is difficult to directly comprehend the effects of this traffic, even in the artefactual record. The missionary wanderings of early monks are often described with approbation; even so, the missions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the fanaticism of our own times are a warning of the social and cultural devastation that zeal carries in its baggage. It seems to me that the explosion of monastic enthusiasm, particularly in the Ireland of the sixth and seventh centuries, cemented existing tribal structures rather than overthrew them; that it gave new opportunities and impetus for elites to explore and exploit cultural niches as an alternative to economically and socially unproductive warfare. Pre-Christian belief in a suite of gods and mediating ancestors was probably not replaced by a solid, universal belief in a single, all-powerful God; rather, I think, a new version of animism was socially negotiated. The church understood that integrating existing sentiments with its tidings of Good News (the Gospels) worked. The message of simplicity, generosity and asceticism might even have benefited a population of rural poor (although I am sceptical). But there is little doubting the intellectual revolution which took place in ideas of kingship and statehood during the sixth and seventh centuries. It fostered a rational, self-aware theory of a state that might survive the death of the person of the king; a sustainable and hugely influential model.

  INVERIE

  A more inadvertent effect of international seafaring and commerce, repeated with equally regrettable consequences by the mercantile empires of the great European states from about 1600 onwards, was the introduction of diseases to societies with no immunity. There is a broad consensus that the end of the trade in goods from the East Mediterranean, which can be dated to the middle of the sixth century, resulted from the arrival of a great plague, mentioned in contemporary sources and originating in the port cities of Constantinople and the Levant in the reign of the Emperor Justinian. That plague had devastating effects on Atlantic Britain too: among its suspected casualties was Maelgwyn of Gwynedd, the greatest of the five tyrants of Gildas’s ‘complaint’ epistle. When trade resumed towards the end of that century, its horizons were more limited: Western Gaul became the principal Atlantic source of trade in ideas and objects.

  On the evening of the day in which we sailed out of Crinan, we ghosted into Tobermory Bay, all brightly coloured houses, crowded jetties (we had to appropriate, with all due permissions, the lifeboat mooring) and drunks—it being the weekend of the Mull Music Festival. Bemused, we strolled along the promenade and front street and up steep, narrow lanes for a view back down onto the harbour, picking our way past clumps of revellers spilling into the road. The creamy light of evening, the reds, blues and yellows of the buildings with a backdrop of dark grey cloud, was an acrylic palette to set against the green waters of the Sound of Mull. No wonder artists and photographers flock to this place. We managed to get a shower despite the competition, sank pints of beer from plastic glasses sitting on the pavement outside a pub (there was no room inside) and tried a dram of whisky from the Tobermory Distillery stall on the front. Then, like outback recluses, we retreated to the safety and cosy fug of Eda’s saloon for a relaxing evening; and for the first time, I remember, we felt the painful contemplation of journey’s end: goodbyes and partings.

  Our last full day’s sailing, in pearlescent sunshine and light breezes, took us past Ardnamurchan Point and the seductive island jewels of Rhum, Eigg and Muck, drawing us on towards the Cuillin ridge on Skye—awesome and compelling, a noble scar and haunt of legendary heroes. Our final anchorage was Inverie where we landed from the dinghy, after a farewell supper, for a beer in the Old Forge, mainland Britain’s remotest pub (it is not connected by road: drinkers must walk or sail and earn their dram the hard way). A long, long sunset on deck, bathing in golds and greens among the glistening tumble-burn mountains of Knoydart. We cruised into the port of Mallaig the next morning: Mallaig, where Britain’s railway system runs out.

  Unable, really, to articulate our feelings, those of us who were leaving, abandoning Eda to her summer sailing, watched silently as the Highlands passed us by on either side, the rush of the swift-falling glens silent beyond the clatter of the train and our own internal peregrinations.

  Interlude A Corbridge circular

  Corstopitum—Dere Street and Devil’s Causeway—Stanegate—royal estates—end of Roman Britain—General Wade’s road—Heavenfield—finding a farmer—caravanserai

  MY COLLEAGUE Colm O’Brien and I needed to track down a farmer whose land we wanted to survey; on an overcast and muggy Thursday early in summer we decided to make a day of it. We set off from Corbridge on the north bank of the River Tyne to walk to Heavenfield, which lies on the Wall some few miles to the north. Heavenfield, where Oswald Iding, fresh from a youthful exile in the kingdom of Dál Riata, returned with a small army in the year 633 or 634 to fight for the Northumbrian kingdom; where he raised a cross the night before battle and had a vision of Colmcille; the place where the northern English Christian state was born.

  A Roman town (Corstopitum, or more locally just Coria) constructed in the middle of the second century on the site of earlier forts, Corbridge is a key strategic location in the Roman and Early Medieval landscape. At least three battles have been fought close by. Its bridge has always been one of the most important crossings of this sometimes untameable river. The siting of a garrison on the north, offensive s
ide of a river is absolutely typical of unapologetic, proactive Roman military thinking. The same applies at York, at London and elsewhere. But Corbridge has been bothering us.

  Dere Street, the ancient road from York to Edinburgh and the Antonine Wall, crosses the river here and a lateral branch, known as the Devil’s Causeway, links it with the mouth of the Tweed and the harbour at Berwick. The Stanegate runs west from here to the Solway Firth; to the east, twenty-five miles downriver, is the mouth of the Tyne. A major Roman supply fort, Arbeia, stood on the south side of the Tyne near its mouth; another (Segedunum) on the north bank, coincided with the end of the Wall, five miles inland. Corbridge was effectively the garrison supply town for the eastern half of the Wall and all forts to the north; its counterpart, at the other end of the Stanegate, Carlisle (Luguvalium; Brythonic Caer Luel) may already have been a thriving settlement before the Romans came, perhaps the civitas capital of the Carvetii. But, since there is no known Roman road linking Corbridge with its supply forts on the east coast, the question arises whether, in the Roman period and after, the river was navigable this far up. There is much debate. For that matter, the line of the Stanegate, and the point where it must have crossed the North Tyne, have not been satisfactorily traced—yet. And we would like to know for how long the Roman bridge—a mile upstream from the present construction—continued in use after the end of the Empire. These questions are important not just for understanding the geography of the Roman north, but for reconstructing the circumstances in which Oswald’s small army, having perhaps sailed down the west coast to Carlisle and then marched along the old road from Carlisle, was able to surprise and defeat the most formidable force of the day: the battle-hardened veterans of King Cadwallon of Gwynedd.

  Several scholars have floated the idea that Corbridge lay at the core of a royal estate in the sixth century, that it formed the heartland of the original kingdom of Bernicia as the principal administrative and strategic centre for the Tyne corridor and its fertile soils. The name Coria probably means something like a tribal assembly or hosting place. Cadwallon of Gwynedd may have chosen the old town as his winter quarters before his fateful encounter with Oswald. So why, in later centuries, did it lose out to Hexham, just across the river, as the principal town in the valley? By the third quarter of the seventh century a major church had been established on a promontory at Hexham, a little upstream on the opposite, south bank. It became one of England’s earliest bishoprics while Corbridge, despite its location, has never been much more than a large village since the end of the Roman period. History will give up no more clues to its Dark Age: only archaeology, and the landscape, can shed light.

  From the bridge, the seventeenth-century survivor of a great flood in 1771 which destroyed every other bridge on the river, Colm and I took the riverside path west, below the flood-proof terrace on which the Roman settlement stood. Much of the town was excavated early in the twentieth century under a regime, typical of the period, when archaeologists removed any overburden to get down to Roman strata and in the process destroyed what evidence might have existed for Cadwallon’s presence or the existence of a Dark Age royal township. It is, to say the least, a pity.

  Colm and I were deep in conversation when we found ourselves crossing the Cor burn, turning north past a magnificent mill house and emerging from the path onto Corchester lane. We doubled back along the lane to the entrance of the Roman town and paid our dues to English Heritage for a look at the ruins. They are impressive, more civic than military: the granaries still have their floors; the drains look as if they might still be in good working order; there is a forum and all the urban trappings of civilisation in Britain’s most northerly Roman town. Its location has obvious benefits: it looks down on the broad, fast-flowing river and the site of the ancient bridge, across to the moors above Hexham with their valuable lead deposits; and both ways up and down the valley. Most striking is the metalled road on which we walked to view the ruins: the beginning of the Stanegate before it heads westwards through the North Pennine pass near Gilsland. Apart from its obvious functions in terms of shifting troops and goods at speed through a potentially hostile, then pacified land, it makes one hell of a statement of intent—more so even than the Wall, which it pre-dates. It sent out what modern governments like to call ‘a clear message’. It said, ‘We are here to stay, we know what we’re doing, we’ve subdued every barbarian kingdom on the Continent and this is how we do it. We show you what Rome is like and then you become part of us. Everybody got that?’

  Everybody, almost everybody, did get it; they bought into it with enthusiasm, especially the native elite who subsequently became the magistrates and civil servants, burgesses and masters of Roman Britain, doing rather well, thank you, under the overlordship of distant masters. The more or less permanent garrisoning of the frontier zone by troops ensured a lively economy (probably the odd riot and local scandal too). But Corbridge must have found itself on the front line when the Wall was overrun by revolting Northern Britons in the later fourth century, and those with material wealth were tempted to bury it in a safe place. We find those hoards from time to time and it goes almost without saying that their owners never came back for them. How long it took for the native warrior elite to become effete toga-wearers petty-politicking in the town’s forum is hard to say. Human communities are nothing if not adaptable.

  At the fifth-century end of the imperial project, we would very much like to know if, when and how those town-dwellers cast off their togas, picked up their ancestral swords, took to the hills and became warlords once more in the face of civil strife, invasion and piracy. An obvious answer is that they did not, having forgotten over the previous three centuries how to fight. They might, then, have either devolved responsibility for security onto the existing commanders along the Wall, as at Birdoswald, or hired mercenaries. Either way, the best fighters were those from Saxony and Jutland, the tribes beyond the Rhine frontier that had never been tamed; everyone knew that. But in the west and south-west of Britain, and north of the Wall—so-called Outer Brigantia—those native tribes still handy with spear and shield might well have taken matters into their own hands. As late as the early seventh century, the British of Gwynedd could realistically hope to wrest this region from its Germanic kings.

  We popped into the town’s well-furnished museum to say hello to Frances McIntosh, its curator, and assistant curator Graeme Stobbs, a veteran excavator of the Tyne’s archaeology; we were treated to tea and biscuits and a question. They took us back into the museum and showed us a sculpture—a gravestone, perhaps, or an altar, not much more than a foot high. The relief carving depicted a (now headless) woman stirring something in a barrel. What did we make of it? Roundels had been carved either side of where her face had been before being chiselled away. To the right was a repeated motif of what looked like eagles—it was hard to tell in the low light. The roundels, we speculated, might have been flabella, like the decorative cross on the slab at Ellary—and, therefore, possibly Christian. Who was this woman? A native or Roman God, otherwise unknown? Or the depiction of a real woman, erected by loved ones? What was in the pot? The closest parallels depict the goddess of medicine, Meditrina, surrounded by barrels of potions. We know that in the long history of the Wall and in Roman towns across the Empire, native and Roman deities often became associated with each other by virtue of their common attributes. That Corbridge had a shrine to a medical deity, or a sign outside a pharmacy, would not surprise. By the time those with medicinal skills resurfaced in the literature of the Dark Ages, they had either become something more arcane, even sinister, or they were being called hermits and saints.

  CORBRIDGE

  After this tantalising glimpse afforded by archaeology of the Roman town and its road, there is no sign of the ancient highway for a few miles. But it’s always worth having a good nose around on foot, to get the lie of the land and look for subtle clues that might be preserved in the line of a hedge or wall, a low ridge through a meadow, a curious
hump in a field. The Stanegate must have crossed the North Tyne somewhere between its confluence with the main river at Warden, just below the hill fort, and the nearest Wall fort at Chesters, nearly three miles to the north. So we followed the small road that keeps to the base of the valley side before climbing the hill up to the hamlet of Anick, peering over hedges and musing on those ancient routes through the land that might survive as footpaths, droveways and twisting deep-sunk lanes. We were detained for a minute by the curious sight of a flock of unmoving crows in a field. As we looked closely at them to confirm that in fact they were models—quite good models, convincingly disposed—a man with a shotgun wearing camouflage emerged from the hedge behind us, amused that his decoys had fooled us as he hoped they would fool other crows; it was slightly unnerving.

  A tiny, straight lane led out of Anick, heading due west, along the line of the three-hundred-foot contour; with its commanding views of river and approaches, it seemed to us that this would make a very good line for the Stanegate. After a mile, where the lane swung north aping the line of the North Tyne beyond, we stopped at St John Lee, a little parish church perched on the hillside without a community, apart from a small cluster of farmhouses. It may be the site of a very ancient foundation, mentioned by Bede as a retreat used by John of Beverley, a Bishop of Hexham, and originally dedicated to the Archangel Michael. Michael was a frequent and popular dedicatee for early churches, especially those founded on high ground.44 Our convenient road may be the ancient route to this church and yet have nothing to do with the line of the Stanegate; or, we might speculate that the church was sited on the old Roman road deliberately. A Roman altar was found near by and sits in a corner of the church. If nothing else, St John Lee boasts a very decent stained-glass window depicting St Oswald raising his cross at Heavenfield, along with images of Edwin and Oswald’s brother Oswiu.