In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  The contour-hugging lane became a path which brought us, via a small stream where there was once a mill, into the pretty stone-built village of Acomb (a ‘valley of oak trees’), one of Tynedale’s most desirable residential addresses. From here the path reverted to a road and rose steadily for a mile, still heading north, with majestic, open views towards Warden Hill and beyond. It topped out at something like six hundred and fifty feet above sea level. Below and before us the line of General Wade’s road and the vallum underscored the hills beyond, the Wall itself having been scavenged here to send the general’s own Clear Message to the local Jacobites. From here, road and vallum, heading west, descend into the North Tyne valley and to the site of a Roman bridge which carried the Wall across, just as it had near Birdoswald. We came out onto the Military Road at Heavenfield, the site of Oswald’s famous vision of Colmcille and his last camp before doing battle with Cadwallon.

  There is a wooden cross (less than a hundred years old) at the roadside and a path leads across pasture to the small church of St Oswald in Lee which is supposed to lie on the site of a much earlier building, erected, according to Bede, in ‘recent times’—that is, in the late seventh or early eighth century. If the current church is modest, plain and uninspiring, its setting is not, for it looks north onto a vast sweep of open Northumbrian countryside towards the Cheviot Hills and the border. What made Oswald choose this precise spot for his pre-battle camp is not absolutely clear. One of the objects of our prospective geophysical survey was to get some idea of what happened here both before and after his army’s overnight stay in 633 or 634. Oswald had been exiled in his thirteenth year on the death of his father, King Æthelfrith, in battle against his (Oswald’s) Uncle Edwin. He cannot have recognised the geography; one must suppose that he had both native guides to assist him and older companions, survivors of his father’s warband, to advise. But Heavenfield has advantages: it cannot be seen from the south or east, where the enemy may have lain at Corbridge.

  A mile to the east along the line of the Wall, Colm and I took afternoon refreshment at St Oswald’s Farm café. We were looking for the farmer in whose fields the church sits. We were in luck. John Reay was not there, but we met his mother, were able to explain to her what we were about (we did not disturb the rhythm of her knitting, I am glad to say) and to get his phone number.

  Mission accomplished, we followed the Wall path eastwards towards its junction with Dere Street. The Wall is invisible here, not because it was removed by the thrifty general to build his road (now the B6318), but because Wade had his redcoats build the road directly on top of it: nothing like a firm foundation.

  Before the Wall’s and road’s junction with Dere Street we struck out across country, with half a mind to reconstruct Oswald’s putative dawn march to Corbridge on the morning after his vision. There is no obvious path; more likely they rode direct, avoiding routes where scouts might have been waiting and watching (the Wall; Dere Street; Warden Hill, perhaps). The surprise was complete, Oswald’s rout of Cadwallon’s British army astonishing and epoch-changing. The green lane we took was wide enough to have been an old droveway, leading to the site of one of the great cattle fairs. Stagshaw Bank, a flattish expanse looking steeply down onto Corbridge from the angle formed by Wall and Dere Street, would see a hundred thousand cattle pass through during these summer months. They came from all over the borders and beyond, on their way to London’s Smithfield or other southern markets. Here they were shod for the hard roads ahead (eight shoes per cow: imagine the sheer weight of iron being forged, shaped and fitted). The droving industry died almost overnight with the arrival of the railways; but how far back this particular gathering might be projected is a moot point. Portgate, where Dere Street pierced the Wall on its northern track, is such an obviously key point in the ancient landscape that it is easy to imagine a very old tradition of gateway communities. There is an unexplained fort-like earthwork here, just on the edge of the road. The distinguished geographer Brian Roberts, noting the presence of large numbers of Roman coins recovered from Great Whittington, just to the north-east of Portgate, suggested to us in a brilliant insight that this may have been a place where merchants and traders from all points north were required to halt before entering the Empire, like caravanserai bivouacs outside the desert towns of North Africa. Here their bona fides were checked; dues were paid; deals and bargains made or broken; selected persons were given privileged access; the riff-raff—slaves, drovers, chancers—were kept out. Think Casablanca; think the Scillies, Peel or Crinan. Think Aldgate and Whitechapel. Was the fair at Stagshaw the successor to such a caravanserai?

  Colm and I shadowed Dere Street back to Corbridge, these days a bustling and very attractive village, still trading on its ancient crossing of the river. Corbridge continuing to bother us, we wondered if our modern remote-sensing equipment would soon cast a faint light on a dimly seen past.

  § CHAPTER FIVE

  Heroes : Wareham to Yatton

  Alfredan burghs—St Martin’s—T. E. Lawrence—Britons and Anglo-​Saxons—Thomas Hardy—Tolpuddle martyrs—Divelis and Dubglas—Cerne Abbas giant—hidden Dorset—childhood heroes—St Juthware—Sherborne—Cadbury/Camelot and Arthur—lightning—Street—Glastonbury—Philip Rahtz—Moon mirrors and ley lines—lake village—England’s lost footpaths—Cheddar and Mendips hills—Congresbury—Dark Age hampers

  ST MARTIN’S

  I WALKED OUT, one midsummer’s morning, from a farm campsite at the head of Poole harbour in Dorset, to walk across the Wessex peninsula. My fellow campers formed ranks of white, shiny miniature mobile houses, either motorised or towed behind glistening polished cars. This is the sort of conspicuous, portable wealth whose equivalent, in the ancient lands of Britain, was cattle. There is an essentially petit-bourgeois competitiveness to these vehicles that one catches fragments of evidence for in half-heard conversations between temporary neighbours. Desocialised by the self-imposed isolation constructed from garden fences, block-paved driveways, security lights, CCTV and paranoiac television, they don’t leap out of their doors to make conversation with their new neighbours, or passing pilgrims; net curtains twitch in a cultural semaphore that might have been inherited, distantly, from nesting birds spotting raptors overhead.

  Land-bound again, I was nevertheless accompanied by the sounds of clanking halyards, squeaking fenders and the rustle of a half-hearted breeze through willow and reed bed. A mile inland from where the River Frome empties into the harbour, boats sat easy at their moorings on the ebbing tide and the day’s heat began to infuse the earth. The riverside path into Wareham was dusty; the forecast promised thirty degrees. July’s brilliant light seemed to energise the air into a new level of clarity: saw-edged sedge leaves sharply pencil-drawn against china-blue sky; dark green hedges chiselling lines between oat-yellow fields fat with grain and ripe for harvest. To the south the protective line of the Purbeck hills, the ramparts of Wessex, crisply profiled the horizon. Ahead, and across the river, above tall waving banks of reeds, the square crenellated tower of Lady St Mary church marked the south-east corner of Wareham town. Following the lazy meander of the river, I came to the modern bridge that carries the road from Corfe Castle into the town centre along a route more than a thousand years old.

  I went to Wessex to walk with the heroes of the Dark Ages: not to praise them, but to understand how a mythic past has infiltrated the fabric of the landscape. My route took me from the fortified town of King Alfred, via the martyrs of Tolpuddle and the virile chalk giant at Cerne Abbas, to the hilltop Camelot of Arthur, then to his supposed resting place at Glastonbury where Joseph of Arimathea planted his thorny staff. It took me to a site associated with the legendary St Congar and through the landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s tragic heroine Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It also drew me back to associations of more obscure heroes from my own past. Along the way the idea of the hero morphed into something complex and ironic, while the apparently homely, very English counties of Dorset and Somerset took on,
in my traveller’s mind, a secretive and ambivalent cloak of obscurity.

  Wareham, then, and a beginning rooted in geographical and historical certainty. The town is a neat square, planned, laid out and constructed under the orders of King Alfred of Wessex in the last decade of the ninth century. Wareham was a burgh, a fortified settlement whose purpose was to protect its hinterland against Viking raids, to provide a focus for civic functions and trade and to act as a fixed point in a comprehensive system of military co-ordination and cultural revival. Alfred was taking advantage of a strategic site at the head of Poole harbour and of the near-​confluence of two rivers: the Frome, which marks the town’s southern, unwalled edge, and the Piddle, which flows parallel to and just outside the northern ramparts. Within Wareham’s earthen banks a regular grid of plots was established along north–​south and east–​west axes with a crossroads at the centre. The roads were lined with wooden houses, with craft workshops, with wharves and warehouses by the river; these days the buildings are of brick, but the layout is not much altered. Inhabitants enjoyed rights that went with the responsibility to man its walls. Despite the depredations of time and later military alterations over the centuries, the ramparts survive to a substantial and impressive height. Each side of the enclosure, which contains something like ninety acres, is more than five hundred paces long. As I made my tour of the perimeter, I realised it made a perfect dog-walking circuit. A woman, I guess somewhat past retirement age, passed me in the company of her dog and, noticing that I had my camera poised, stopped for a brief chat about photography, evidently her passion. I am ashamed to say that I was a bit terse, if not exactly impolite, and carried on my way, anxious to complete the circuit.

  Where the northern rampart is pierced deeply by the main road there was once a gate; even now the entrance to the town is imposing, high walls rising sheer on either side of the cutting, and the sense of entering a canyon is enhanced by the tall west wall of the church of St Martin which looms above it. The church door was locked, but a notice promised that a key was available by application to A. F. Joy (outfitters) at 35 North Street. I had not been in a shop like this since the 1970s, supposing that they no longer existed. It smelled of old clothes for slow people. A woman there, looking slightly sceptical at the sight of me, as if my rucksack might be designed for looting precious church relics, took the satisfyingly solid, heavy iron key from the drawer that held gentlemen’s ties, and made me sign for it. I was not, thankfully, required to purchase a tie.

  St Martin’s-on-the-walls was built in about 1030; but its dedication, to the fourth-century St Martin of Tours, may reflect an earlier foundation on the same spot. The interior was all elegant, catholic delicacy, with the splendid tall proportions of a tower-house. The Romanesque chancel arch was more refined than the squat dog-tooth of many Norman churches and pierced on either side by smaller arches which brought more light into the nave and gave it the air of a basilica—the sensibility was distinctly Carolingian. Above the chancel arch, and in the chancel itself, faded paintings almost floated on the lime-plastered walls: a twelfth-century depiction of St Martin on horseback; the lion and unicorn crest of Queen Anne; the Ten Commandments, and an extract from Exodus. It was a beautiful, peaceful place, cool and gracefully welcoming. It would have been a fine thing to have a companion to talk to, for sound diffused through its patient, dust-moted air like the faint echo of its own history.

  In the north aisle I stopped before the creamy-white marble effigy of a great warrior, a flesh-and-blood templar returned to his homeland, honoured by art and family. Recumbent, dressed in the robes of a Bedouin prince, hand on ceremonial dagger at his waist, his feet were crossed, braced against a block of stone carved with a representation of Hittite fighting bulls. The body does not lie here, but in a small cemetery in the village of Moreton, not many miles to the west, wrapped in a union flag. This warrior hero was no medieval crusader but a latter-day adventurer, scholar and champion of Arab rights.

  I spent some time in quiet contemplation of Thomas Edward Lawrence. The face betrays nothing of the emotions, but even in its apparent blank passivity an extraordinary, restless intellect can be read: the marble is cool, much polished from visitors touching it. His friend and sculptor, the war artist Eric Kennington, had intended the effigy for St Paul’s Cathedral; but Lawrence, who died in 1935 on the back lanes of Dorset in a motorcycling accident (the official version),45 was as divisive a figure in death as he had been in life. Like the incorrupt body of St Cuthbert or the relics of King Oswald, his remains were a matter of more than academic interest to contemporaries. Lawrence was too controversial a figure to lie alongside the remains of Nelson, that other troubled secular saint, in St Paul’s. Neither man’s heroism was by any means straightforward. Lawrence’s Arab sympathies and discomfort with British policy in Arabia (the fruits of which are splashed across the newspapers as I write), his self-advertising memoirs, distinctly equivocal attitude towards Hitler’s Germany and his refusal to play the part of gracious (and tight-lipped) English war hero, have corrupted the comforting narrative of perfection that we like our heroes to conform to. Dark Age heroes such as Alfred and Arthur are also less reassuring, less readily graspable than the simple certainties their mythic portrayals would suggest: for the archaeologist or historian, reality is always more complex, always more interesting.

  Wareham has more secrets, and they subvert its Alfredan narrative. The parish church of Lady St Mary, which overlooks the river crossing and which seems such a fitting building to mark the south-east corner of the town, must in fact pre-date it. A king of Wessex, Brihtric, was buried here in 802, having apparently been poisoned by his wife, a daughter of King Offa of Mercia, long before Alfred left his mark. The Great Heathen Army, or mycel heathen here as they were called by the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers, made their headquarters here in 876 and had to be paid off by the embattled King of Wessex. His biographer, Asser, mentions the existence of a monastery here; and five stone memorials, inscribed with Latin names—the largest collection of such stones in one place in Britain—suggest that as late as the eighth century there was a British Christian community still active in Wareham. That sort of evidence forces a radical rethink of the relations between Briton and Saxon in Wessex, whose conquest by the Germanic Gewisse is supposed (by their later chroniclers, the West Saxons) to have been absolute, and complete long before. Do we suppose a cultural tolerance? A cult ghetto?

  King Ine, an active and enterprising warlord contemporary with this community, made provision in his law code for the wergild or blood-price of his Welsh horsemen, perhaps a cadre of native couriers; and it is clear that in his time, around the end of the seventh century, Britons could own property in the territories of the West Saxons, even if their wergild was less than that of a freeborn Saxon. Lady St Mary Church may have been a minster in the seventh and eighth centuries—sited at the heart of a royal estate to preach to a wide populace—that would explain a king’s burial there. Was it also the court of an ancient community of Latin-speaking British clerics? If so, were they a conservative rump in denial of the new world order—or did they serve an active British community in these parts? There is an unspoken risk, for historians intimately versed in the loaded, anti-British narratives of Bede, of assuming a greater degree of cultural and religious homogeneity in his era than was in fact the case. There is a growing feeling among scholars in this field that Early Medieval England may have been much more a patchwork of identities and affiliations than the monumental record generally suggests, just as the Welsh Marches are. After all, Wessex had some distinctly British-sounding kings in its early centuries—the kingdom’s alleged founder, Cerdic (r. c.519–34) and the later Cædwalla, who waged genocidal warfare on the Isle of Wight in the seventh century, among them.

  Wareham’s museum, sited next to the ancient crossroads at the heart of the town, was due to open at ten. I returned the key to its relieved keeper and walked the two hundred yards south along North Street, wondering why so many c
ars and vans choked the street and thinking idiotically how appropriate gridlock was for a grid-iron town. There had, it seemed, been a serious accident on the A352 which links the major towns of south Dorset: Poole with Dorchester. Everyone was trying to get around the blockage by driving through Wareham. The museum was a ground-floor room in the offices of the town council. At five minutes past ten the metal grill was opened by the woman I had met on the walls: my chance to purge guilt, and we chatted for a while about this and that, cameras, Saxons, Lawrence and motorbikes. Pam Bowyer-Davis is a volunteer curator. She turned out to be a keen student of the town’s past, having at one time run an Anglo-Saxon festival here—but Saxons are not very interesting to people nowadays, she admitted. Her prize exhibit, on loan from Dorchester Museum, was a tenth-century sword, or at least the copper- and silver-plated guard, hilt and pommel and the upper part of the blade, found in the River Frome during the construction of the modern bridge in 1927. Very few such weapons survive: this one is particularly significant because, incised into the antler-bound hand-grip is the first part of a name, Æthel…, meaning ‘noble’, the sword of a great aristocrat or king; one of Alfred’s brothers, perhaps.