by Adams, Max;
Our peculiar means of getting at this enigmatic landscape is to walk up and down in narrow, marked rows carrying a device which measures the magnetic response of the soil beneath our feet. Where soil has been disturbed by digging, by construction or by fire, its magnetic response varies, subtly.51 For every twenty-metre square that we walk with our gradiometer, its data-logger records 3200 points, which we plot in the form of a map of grey scales—a ghostly, grainy but telling sub-surface landscape, a human and natural palimpsest—doing so without disturbing the archaeology. For the surveyor, with two assistants moving guide ropes between fixed points, every grid square is a walk of eight hundred metres. Walking on the spot can be tiring.
During the last months of 2014, as the days were becoming uncomfortably cold and short, hardier members of the Bernician Studies Group52 convened in the fields between the Roman Wall and St Oswald’s church. Jack Pennie was our principal geophysicist: a retired Royal Engineer and bus driver, he has mastered the technicalities and logistics of the machine with admirable persistence—it is not very user-friendly kit. The other members of the team were Geoff Taylor, a retired solicitor, Ray Shepherd, a former engineer, John McNulty, a GP, and Deb Haycock, property manager and sailor—an interesting and rewarding group of fellow Dark Age enthusiasts. The prize for this unglamorous, chilly and repetitive work was the chance to see if Oswald’s brief bivouac here left any archaeological trace that we could detect.
The Ordnance Survey map still records Heavenfield as the site of the battle in which Oswald slew his British rival Cadwallon; but since the nineteenth century it has been known that the battle took place elsewhere. Bede tells us that Cadwallon was destroyed at a place called Denisesburn. A medieval document uncovered by Canon William Greenwell, an indefatigable if sometimes unsubtle Victorian antiquarian, identified it as the Rowley Burn. That stream flows into the Devil’s Water (that Divelis /Dhubglas name again) near Whitley Chapel, three miles or so south of the River Tyne. If the denouement of the battle was a rout that ended in this hilly, remote part of Hexhamshire, the main battle is likely to have taken place at or near Corbridge, where I believe Cadwallon based his army. In the surprise of a dawn attack his forces fled, fatally, south across the bridge and into the high country with no hope of escape.
There is also a curious tale told by Bede which suggests that Oswald’s cross may not have been the only mark left here before the construction of the church. Bede admits in his otherwise smoothly persuasive account of Oswald’s triumphant return to Bernicia and the founding of Lindisfarne by Bishop Aidan a year later, that in the intervening months an Ionan priest ‘of harsher disposition’ tried to preach to the Anglians of these parts. ‘Seeing that the people were unwilling to listen to him, he returned to his own land.’53 Aidan, it seems, was his more wisely chosen successor. If Bede’s tale is true, it begs the question where the first priest set up his church. Intriguingly, when Heavenfield is viewed from the air, a suspiciously shaped enclosure can be discerned: it has the size and shape broadly similar to the monastic enclosures at Iona and Lindisfarne, even if its walls appear to be no earlier than the eighteenth century.
Over a half dozen days we plodded up and down, then huddled around the computer screen beneath the shelter of an immense, ancient and venerable oak tree to see the results appear, pixel by pixel, grid by grid. The Wall appeared as a ghostly, thin, dead straight line thirty yards or so north of, and parallel to General Wade’s Military Road. The faint outline of the Roman turret 25b could be seen. Excavated in the 1950s, it yielded no significant artefacts, but a hole dug into its centre in antiquity offered the tantalising possibility that this was where Oswald raised his cross. In a corner of the field in which the Wall lies submerged, a pronounced, straight-edged black strip, which looked like some enormous military ditch, had us going for a while until, one evening, we traced it on a geological map—and found it to be nothing more or less than an outcrop of the Great Whin Sill: extremely magnetic but entirely natural. This intrusive dyke proved to be a small nightmare: like the glare of a floodlight, its presence masked everything else near by. Even so, some careful filtering of the data and a switch to a less sensitive setting on the machine for another pass showed that there is indeed some archaeology here, across the Roman ditch beyond the Wall. We saw what looked like parts of circular ditches—buildings perhaps; but maybe just agricultural disturbance; that pesky Whin Sill hides all in its glare. It’s hard to say exactly what these features are and the only way to positively identify their nature and origins would be to excavate. Nevertheless, they were enough to have us applying to renew our detection licence; and so we would be back again in the New Year. We had not given up on Heavenfield. The jury is out on the idea of some sort of early Irish establishment here; but there is a large subterranean landscape for us to explore and map; all it takes is a little walking on the spot.
Some weeks later, in February 2015, we gave a presentation on the results to the rest of the group. We also invited members of the local history society at Acomb, and with them Nick Hodgson, a Roman specialist who has been helping them to trace the line of the Stanegate. He drew our attention to a LiDAR survey of Warden Hill and to the curious spread of Roman coins at Great Whittington which Brian Roberts interpreted as a sort of caravanserai. Hogdson and his colleagues have, it seems, nailed one part of the Stanegate question by identifying two construction camps close to the confluence of Tyne and North Tyne, which strongly suggests that the Stanegate crossed at this point. So now we know two ends of the section of the road west of Corbridge. Geophysics will, soon perhaps, complete the line.
Hodgson was particularly interested in our geological anomaly, the intrusive dyke, because he believes that the Devil’s Causeway, which runs from Dere Street about a mile north of the Wall, to Berwick and the Northumbrian coast, might once have extended to join the Wall line further to the south-west. If one projects its line (he showed us a convincing slide), it would come out at Heavenfield; and it would come out in pretty much the same place and on the same angle as our geological fault. Ray Shepherd soon spotted the significance: if Oswald, travelling east from the Solway Firth, hoped to rendezvous with sympathetic forces from his heartlands around Bamburgh, the junction of Wall and Devil’s Causeway would be a perfect location, and invisible from Cadwallon’s forces at Corbridge. If nothing else, it would be well worth our while to see if the gradiometer can confirm, or otherwise, that extension.
Mulling on these matters in a later meeting, we began to see that a rectangle formed by the Tyne and its northern branch, the Wall and Dere Street (about twelve square miles) was a landscape of considerable dynamic importance to the Romans and those who came after. Domination of that rectangle held the strategic key to the middle Tyne valley; to the crossing of the river at Corbridge; to military penetration north, north-west, west and south. Bede’s suggestion that a small church and the remnants of Oswald’s cross drew Christians here in the seventh century may be an understatement. Just across the river the great abbey of Hexham, founded by Wilfrid in about 674 to exploit his significant landholdings here and to tap into the powerful cult of Oswald’s relics, shows the continuing value of the militarised Wall zone. This may appear, at first sight, to be a border, a frontier, but, on closer inspection, it looks very like a core of Bernician territory.
My time with the Wall was up; on my way to Jarrow I had to cross the river and visit Hexham Abbey with its famous crypt, then follow the wild River Tyne until it is tamed, somewhere between here and Newcastle.
§ CHAPTER SIX
Time among the Britons : Anglesey to Bardsey Island
Tacitus and Agricola—Din Lligwy—ancestors—Llan names—Penmon Priory—uninvited travellers—Menai and Telford—Snowdon—Dinas Emrys—pain and rain—creepy farm—Llangybi church—Llanaelhaern—saints and patrons—Home of the Giants—meaning of Gwynedd—Garn Boduan—Llangian—Latin, priests and wandering saints—Meli medici fili martini—Aberdaron—Colin Evans—Island of Currents—Kin
g of Bardsey
CWM LLAN
ASIDE FROM the fact that my great-grandfather Alf Richmond died in a boating accident off Cemaes Bay in 1895, my knowledge of Anglesey’s history is limited to a line in Bede, a couple of entries in the Annales Cambriae and a vague idea that the Romans believed it to be an Island of Druids. It inhabits an exotic corner of the imagination, fortified by the Menai Strait and cut off from the rest of the world, as Sicily is from Italy or as Britain is from Europe. Its reputation as a bastion of Welsh identity gives one, perhaps, the sense that Anglo-Saxons are not welcome; that this ancient and magical land of mists and wizards, defended by fierce tidal races, wishes to keep itself to itself.
The gossipy Roman historian Tacitus, whose father-in-law Agricola commanded a campaign of conquest in Britain during the late first century, records that when confronted with the Menai Strait and with no fleet at hand, the general hand-picked troops trained in specialist assault and had them swim across to the island of Môn.54 The enemy, he says, were so awestruck by the sight of swarms of amphibious semi-clad soldiers that they lost their heads and surrendered their island fortress without resistance.
We had seen the lights of Holyhead, one night, from the helm of Eda Frandsen, the Dublin ferries coming and going ahead of us in a blaze of lights. Now, in the second half of August 2014, Sarah and I crossed Thomas Telford’s stupendous Menai Bridge on a small local bus—the twin arches that pierce the bridge’s superstructure so narrow that there was barely more than a couple of inches’ clearance on either side—and found ourselves deposited at a crossroads near the village of Moelfre on the island’s north-east coast. I wanted to start my journey among the Britons at a suitably evocative spot: the ruins of a stone-built native village called Din Lligwy. In August the back lanes of Anglesey’s rolling hills are choked with holiday traffic: refugees from the bustle of Manchester and Liverpool who succeed annually in bringing city-centre traffic chaos with them. The campsites are more like car and caravan rallies, with armies of marshals, electronic gates and myriad notices forbidding this and that. We poor pilgrims on foot were as invisible as sewer rats.
We found Din Lligwy hidden in a copse of trees, like some sacred grove, on a small limestone rise not far from the site of a medieval chapel now inhabited only by cows and crows. Din Lligwy must have been the settlement of an elite family: the massive neatness of the stone foundations which survive tell of wealth and architectural pretension; the trapezoidal curtain wall, of privacy; the setting, of a deep sense of belonging in the landscape. The site, covering perhaps an acre internally, may have been inhabited since the Iron Age: two houses are perfectly circular in the pure native tradition of the British West, but the long rectangular buildings which nestle against the inside walls are of a strikingly different tradition: more like miniature Roman granaries than anything you would find in a mainland British village. One wonders if the inhabitants had heard of, or seen, a Roman provincial villa and remodelled their farmstead on a suitably grandiose scale. The early twentieth-century excavators recovered pottery of the third and fourth centuries; and in the building close to the entrance they found evidence of ironworking. Curiously, and sufficient to get the Early Medieval archaeologist’s nose twitching, many of the pottery sherds showed signs of having been repaired with iron wire. Those who could afford Roman kitchen pots and tableware could generally afford to replace them with new; either this rich family had fallen on hard times in the fourth century or the settlement survived beyond the end of the Empire, when the pottery industries of Roman Britain collapsed and even the wealthy were forced to make do and mend; shades of wartime Britain in the Blitz.
Strolling among the ruins of this lost race, I was struck forcibly by the sight of the door pillars flanking the entrances to the houses. If I had seen them standing alone in a field I would have had no hesitation in identifying them as memorials to the prehistoric dead or remnants of stone circles: here was the familiar asymmetrical, broken-shouldered, figurative form that captures the spirit of the ancestor, turned to stone like some troll at sunrise. Wooden round houses may have boasted carved icons or totems on either side of the porch to protect those inside, to make the broken circle whole and venerate family ancestors, but we never find them because they would long since have rotted. Did these people, perhaps in response to changing times, reinforce their ties to the old native religion, of shaman and ancestral patron, by creating a living monument in stone, the material of permanence and memory? It is a process, identified across the Early Medieval world and described by the archaeologist Sophie Hueglin as ‘petrification’, the physical expression of a profound need and desire for solidity, certainty, intransience in a transient world. Materially this is reflected in the transition from wood to stone in memorial and elite buildings; it is paralleled by developments in recording time, history and identity from oral to written forms. At Ironbridge a similar transition, from wood and stone to iron, is equally evocative.
DIN LLIGWY
Close to Din Lligwy lies a Neolithic chambered tomb whose importance to earlier settlers might still have resonated with these Romanised Britons. Another thought occurred: was this seeming hybrid of native and Roman architecture a sign, frozen in time, of the tensions between indigenous and Roman cultures being played out, consciously or subconsciously, in the geography and space of a wealthy farmstead—profoundly sensible to its past but with an eye on modern trends?
I experienced a powerful sense of this same cultural tension when I once stayed for a couple of days in Window Rock, the tribal capital of the Navajo nation high up on the Mogollon plateau of north-eastern Arizona. The beautiful and impressive Nation Council building is circular, echoing the form of the native hogan55 but on a massive scale, built with giant pine beams radiating from the roof peak and semi-dressed stone walls whose plastered interior is painted with a cyclical mural history of its people. The space is both sacred and secular. The architecture carries echoes of a lost race, the Anasazi, who built marvellous drystone-walled towns with exquisite precision and delicacy among the mesas and canyons of that high country during Europe’s Middle Ages. My hosts, Skip and Elaine Baker—oddly enough neither of them was Navajo; they were respectively Crow and Blackfoot—lived in a very ordinary house; their kids watched Sesame Street and attended grade school; they ate burgers and drank Coors Lite when they could smuggle it onto the reservation, and drove a pickup. Their census names were English (they had other, native names not to be shared) and when I spoke with them about their identity they reacted as if the convenient paraphernalia of modern capitalist America might easily be cast off like snakeskin: ‘when you Anglos go away we won’t miss you’. I remember Skip grinning when he said that. Out there they call it the Apache smile.
They may be deluding themselves. It’s hard to shake off an empire when it builds you nice roads and delivers water and beer on tap. The difference, I suspect, is that when the Romans conquered a people and gave them citizenship of their empire, they meant it: a barbarian might become emperor. Roman Britain was not a reservation. I cannot imagine a Navajo sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office of the White House. If it ever happened, one suspects the presidential face would be wearing an Apache smile.
If Din Lligwy is now deserted and long abandoned, Moelfre was in party mode when we strolled down to the village for an evening meal. They had just commissioned a new lifeboat which sat out in the bay, bright orange and blue, riding complacently at anchor on a light swell; ashore the beer flowed, music blared out and, in the warm evening light, locals and visitors spilled onto road, beach and quayside in a cheery assembly of colour and laughter with RNLI ensigns and bunting adorning the seafront houses. It might have been Cornwall; or Bute, except that here the native language is spoken universally. Blackberries ripening in the hedges, and a blanket of low cloud carried in on a sea breeze, were signals of autumn’s approach; but it was still warm. We retired to our tent surrounded by the invisible inhabitants of motorhome and caravan, all busy watching tele
vision in case they missed anything.
Our first full day’s walking followed the coastal path towards the south-east corner of Anglesey. At one point, we made our way inland along generously hedged winding lanes in the vain hope of finding a Dark Age settlement at Pant y Saer—consumed by rabid thorny undergrowth and completely invisible—which is supposed to be another enclosed settlement like Din Lligwy but with the additional Dark Age wow factor of a sixth-century penannular brooch retrieved during excavations. The diversion was not entirely pointless, for at one point we encountered a young red squirrel on the road, as curious as he was scared. Past the village of Benllech, we stopped for refreshment at a pub on the edge of Red Wharf Bay, a great sandy inlet facing the distant Cumbrian mountains. The tide was so far out that a thin line of white surf made our horizon. Despite the temptation to cut a mile or so off the day’s journey, we decided to skirt the bay rather than risk impassable mud or uncrossable channels. Besides, it was a fine afternoon. South of the bay we climbed a steep wooded slope and found ourselves in the middle of a disorienting plantation whose rides and trails did not seem to match the map. I wanted to look at a patch of relict fields whose shape from the air suggested they were ancient; but we couldn’t find them and had to take our chances at several forks in the timber road. Not for the first time I mused on the navigator’s reliance on an open landscape. Still, we came out more or less where we wanted, on the moors above the village of Llandonna at about 550 feet, so that we got a lovely view back across the bay: orange sand against green sea and blue sky, a Mark Rothko abstract, a landscape without apparent narrative, only form, colour and texture. The open moors were rocky, not much good for grazing anything except sheep and the odd shabby-looking pony fenced in by thin, woolly strands of wire.