by Adams, Max;
I came to Newcastle’s Quayside along the miles-long, smooth river promenade from where great battleships were once launched but where industry has been emasculated by the success of efficient foreign competitors. Across those muddy waters, Dunston’s wooden coal staith—a rollercoaster with a fatal terminal drop—now lifeless apart from nesting gulls, is a monument to a lost race of subterranean delvers. It is flanked by desirable luxury properties for the north-east’s aspirant office workers and a new generation of entrepreneurs. Car showrooms, swanky-looking hotels and science parks line the roads entering the city from the west. Soaring bridges carry road and railway a hundred feet above the Tyne while the incoming brown salty tide meets the fresh waters of the Pennines in a struggle as old as the hills. In the vacuum left by industry and mining, the powerhouse of the north-east attempts to reinvent itself as a shiny urban paradigm, and as a tourist destination.
NEWCASTLE
I climbed away from the river along Forth Bank, the site of the world’s first railway factory where George and Robert Stephenson’s Rocket was built and whence the Stockton–Darlington and Liverpool–Manchester railways were plotted. A few hundred yards closer to the city centre, between the nineteenthcentury railway station, which stands on top of Roman Newcastle’s civilian settlement, and the massive Norman stone keep which sits above the fort, a fragment of the Wall line can still be seen poking through the pavement outside the city’s Literary and Philosophical Society. The Lit & Phil, as it has been known since its founding in the Age of Enlightenment, houses one of the great libraries of Britain. The permanence of the Romans’ civilising presence in Britain is recorded in a landscape of stone monuments—walls, roads, forts, inscriptions and early churches. It is also recorded in the institution which above all mapped the great Mediterranean project: the town. If the physical form of most of our towns now owes little to their Roman forbears, then at least their role as central places, where literate, thoughtful people might gather to debate the nature of the world, survives and thrives.
§ CHAPTER EIGHT
Speed : Meigle to Canterbury
Picts and symbols—Roman roads—Inchtuthil fort—Gask Ridge—Stirling Castle—Antonine Wall—Dere Street—Escomb church—Catraeth and Gododdin—Aldborough Roman town—Goodmanham—the Conversion—Humber bridge—Barton-on-Humber—Stow—the kingdom of Lindsey—Lincoln and Paulinus—Ermine Street and Icknield Way—St Albans—Stone chapel—Reculver—Isle of Thanet—warriors and popes—Canterbury—Roman churches
DERE STREET
THE VILLAGE of Meigle straddles the A94 on the south side of Strathmore in the old Scottish county of Perthshire. Immediately to the north-west the Braes of Angus mark the Highland line, the edge of the Grampian mountains. Meigle seems once to have been the site of a Pictish monastery and royal estate; the small museum, housing more than thirty carved stones in a former Victorian school house, punches well above its weight. Some of the greatest indigenous art of the ancient British reposes here, where the Dark Ages are not merely illuminated but animated: dauntless warriors ride prancing horses into battle with hounds baying at their feet, bulls lower their horns and face off against one another; strange winged beasts process across friezes. A hybrid repertoire of Christian iconography—crosses, crucifixions and defeated serpents—is decorated, intertwined and psychologically melded with Z-rods,79 mirrors, crescents and creatures of fabulous imagination, the encrypted semiotics of a proud and exuberant warrior culture. The Picts may be enigmatic, their language obscure and their symbols as yet defiant of the code-breakers’ arts, but there is no denying their love of self-celebration, their pluralist relish in embracing the iconographies of Christianity and their animist prehistoric past.
The stone called Meigle 1, the earliest of the collection and belonging probably to the eighth century, was recycled from a prehistoric standing stone that bears traces of Bronze Age cup-and-ring marks. Its ‘front’ bears an elaborately interwoven, ornate cross of hybrid Irish form, a stylised wheel-head pierced by four circles, not a square inch left without interlace or knot work. The corners are filled with what look like wild boar and deer, and creatures of the imagination that seem impossible to describe. On the reverse is an apparent jumble of pictorial thoughts: a fish, a mirror and comb, warriors on horseback, a snake and Z-rod; an angel with spreading wings. Perhaps set up, or reused, as a gravestone to a great warrior—the explicitly Pictish symbols are believed to represent rank, status, maybe names and probably clan affiliation—and possibly later ‘converted’ to overtly Christian commemoration, these stones tease us with the promise of insight into the rich emotional and imaginative Early Medieval mind: it is a mind both grisly and glorious, fantastical and pragmatic, inhabiting parallel worlds of subsistence and warfare in a mindscape of magic and wonder, the dreamtime of the ancestors.
I am struck, though, by the contrast with those crosses and memorials with which we had spent time in Moville. There, sculpture lives on in its landscape; in a museum, divorced from horizon, setting, sunrise and sunset or archaeological context, these beautiful works of a lost race are diminished: shop-window mannequins, not people.
I had hoped to walk among the Picts; but I had another story to tell that began at Meigle and ended 705 miles away on the coast of Kent. Meigle marks the very end, so far as we can tell, of the Roman road system in the British Isles that began with the armies of Claudius crossing the Channel in AD 43. The legions built outpost forts north and east of here along the coast of Angus and Aberdeenshire, as far up as the Moray Firth: the furthest reach of a grand experiment to tame and enrol the British peoples into the Imperial project. But no metalled road has been proven beyond Perth and none can realistically be projected further than the line of the A94. What better place to begin a mad dash along the highways of the Empire?
Dark Age landscapes are best seen at walking pace when land and sea, river and sky behave as they did for our cultural ancestors. To understand them more minutely one must dwell for a while, steep oneself in a locality with a bounded horizon. But there was another dimension to the Early Medieval world. Stepping across the threshold of native settlement and trail, farm, field and woodland, onto the stone highways of the lost race of giants, was to experience the world at warp speed. If the Roman legions were like land-grabbing tanks, then the roads its armies laid were their tracks: an unstoppable grid of militarised policing that subdued by shock and awe. The speed at which cross-country travel became possible during the Roman centuries distorted and distended the map of Britain to a degree that is difficult to appreciate since the revival of road building in the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century the electric telegraph had the same effect, joining Europe, America and the Indian sub-continent in an information web that shrunk communication from weeks to minutes. The internet video call has been a natural successor, but is merely incremental. The railways are the inheritors of the Roman idea of a Europe united by the speed at which horses and armoured troops might move. Our contemporary equivalent of that travel revolution on the human, physical scale has been the linking of Britain and Europe by an undersea railway, an idea that seemed fantastic to earlier generations but which is a logical successor to Watling Street and the Fosse Way.
What impact did that streamlining of landscape, the removal of the land’s natural drag-effect, have on the Early Medieval world? How much of the Roman road network survived the fall of Empire? How many of those supposedly straight roads existed before Roman armies turned them into superhighways of suppression, co-option and commerce? In travelling from one end of the conveyor belt to the other, at speed, I hoped to experience something of that distortion of space and time; and to answer a few of my own questions along the way.
I travelled up from County Durham on the motorbike and spent a night in Perthshire with old friends, Malcolm and Fiona Lind. Malcolm was a fellow student in archaeology in the 1980s; both are teachers in schools around the town of Blairgowrie; both are gifted photographers. They look at the world fro
m the edge of the Highlands, through a distinctly Northern lens. I was arriving in early autumn when the soft fruit harvest had been gathered and lorries full of tatties trundled along roads from farm to factory. It was a fortnight after the ‘No’ vote in the Scottish independence referendum and I found my friends in despondent mood: this is nationalist territory. We talked of democracy and of Scotland’s cultural renaissance; of an idea of a North whose border lies somewhat south of Berwick, and of a long-nourished sense of estrangement from the centres of power, a conversation that might not, perhaps, have been unfamiliar to the clan chiefs of the second century; or the eighteenth. Plus ça change. We consoled ourselves with camera talk, with whisky, craic and music.
Beginning, the next morning, at Meigle, I followed the A94 back along the south side of the River Isla with autumnal orange and deep coniferous green Highland foothills of the Forest of Alyth away to my right. To the south the Sidlaw Hills separate fertile Strathmore from Dundee and the swift estuary of the silvery Tay. At Coupar, Angus I switched to General Wade’s Military Road in my search for the most northerly of the great fortresses of the Empire. The general understood Roman roads and their military potential better than anyone—he knew that flat, all-weather hard-metalled surfaces gave him moral and tactical advantages over the enemies of the state. One road built in the right place supported by strategic forts allowed deep and lasting penetration of untamed landscapes. Commerce followed; and as the pragmatic British mercantile state of the eighteenth century knew very well, the best way to keep a subdued nation down was to trade with it, after which economics conducted their own diplomacy. Revolutions usually start with an unbridgeable gap between rich and poor.
Inchtuthil (Pinnata castra—the ‘fort on the wing’), when I found it overlooking a broad meander of the Tay, looked like a gigantic abandoned football pitch whose touchlines were beyond vision: more than fifty acres in extent, with the odd inconvenient beech tree sticking up from a post-Roman burial mound along the touchlines slightly marring the appearance of rigid, squarebashing military order. It is a huge legionary fortress, ostensibly a memorial to the ultimately unfulfilled ambitions of Tacitus’s father-in-law Agricola in the early 80s and the only legionary fortress anywhere in the Empire to survive completely intact, the site undeveloped by later entrepreneurs aside from a small native fort that lies just beyond its south-west corner. These were, Tacitus says, the headquarters of Agricola’s XXth Legion during a triumphant three-year campaign to subdue the Caledonians; but it was a short existence: the legion withdrew, dismantled the fort, slighted the ditches and left behind nothing but a hoard of three-quarters of a million iron nails. Camp Bastion, a British airbase in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, lasted twice as long. Tacitus’s account of the XXth Legion’s Caledonian campaign is a celebration of martial spirit, of the patriotic obligation to overwhelm a barbarian enemy. His stridently propagandist and triumphalist tone would have found favour with Joseph Goebbels. Archaeologists are much more sceptical now that they have excavated some of the sites associated with the Roman advance into Caledonia and found, to no one’s surprise, evidence of a much more nuanced tale of success and failure, doubt, adaptation and response. Agricola has been demoted a few ranks from all-conquering hero to mixed-record C-in-C, Cal. Ops. The story of the Roman campaigns in Scotland appears to have been more complex, and to have lasted rather longer, than Tacitus wished his domestic audience to think.
Inchtuthil was full of melancholy; autumn seemed the perfect time to visit, with golden leaves falling in lazy arcs from trees, the skies leaden and portentous and my breath misty on the cooling air. There could, in a sense, be no more perfect memorial to the Giants than this unsullied, tangible imprint of their far-distant emperor and living god, re-absorbed by the earth like Fall’s harvest.
Passing signs for Scone, where medieval kings of Scotland were inaugurated at the Hill of Belief—a probable prehistoric burial mound—I picked up the first clear traces of the Roman road network west of Perth along the line of the Gask Ridge above Strathearn. The road’s straightness, its evenness, breadth and flanking drainage ditches were unmistakeable marks of legionary engineering. Constructed perhaps over a period of decades straddling the first and second centuries, it linked a series of intervisible signal stations and seems to have been intended not, perhaps, as a frontier like the Stanegate, but as a series of nodes from which basic military intelligence of native movements was gathered and transmitted up the chain of command: it is an early-warning system joined by a road that allowed the rapid movement of horses and infantry. On the bike, unless I stopped for a pee, to take a picture or refuel and consult the map, the dead-straight road was a worm hole, the landscape of forest and glen a blur, each crossroads passing too quickly to note the directions and distances of the places named on its finger posts. It was a sublime journey south, one of total concentration on the road and with no mental room for ambulatory musings on the Early Medieval landscape. Those were the indulgences of the walker. I was now travelling in the guise of a courier, not a moment to be lost, carrying news to distant parts in the hope that I might outpace their consequences.
There is evidence that Early Medieval couriers and their warrior lords relied heavily on the Roman road system. A remarkable story told by Bede, in his Life of St Cuthbert, relates how the holy man prophesied the destruction of the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith (r. 671–85). Succeeding his father, Oswiu, after a long and successful reign, Ecgfrith does not seem to have inherited the luck of the Idings. He married twice, but neither queen gave him a child. The first, Æthelthryth, retired to found Ely Cathedral, leaving her dower lands at Hexham to Wilfrid. The second, Iurminburh, who seems to have been a Frankish princess, but who took against Wilfrid, survived her husband, also took monastic vows and died childless. Such was the dynastic risk posed by a king without sons that Ecgfrith’s sister, Ælfflaed, consulted her holy man Cuthbert, then Bishop of Lindisfarne and in his last years, about potential successors. Ecgfrith had unwisely invoked Cuthbert’s anger, and that of Iona, by fighting a war in Ireland and taking Christian prisoners. In 685, the year in which he dedicated a church at Jarrow, the king alienated his bishop further when he took his armies on campaign in the land of the Christian Picts. Cuthbert saw that the moment of greatest danger was at hand.
He set off therefore to Carlisle, to speak with the Queen, who had arranged to stay there in a convent to await the outcome of the war. The day after his arrival the citizens conducted him round the city walls to see a remarkable Roman fountain that was built into them. He was suddenly disturbed in spirit. He leaned heavily on his staff, turned his face dolefully to the wall, then straightening himself and looking up to the sky he sighed deeply and said almost in a whisper, ‘Perhaps at this moment the battle is being decided.’80
Cuthbert immediately went to Queen Iurminburh and warned her to return to ‘the royal city’ (Bamburgh, probably; but perhaps York) in her chariot as soon as possible. Of many intriguing features in the story (not least of which are the survival of a Roman public fountain in seventh-century Carlisle and the queen’s mode of transport), the most telling is the arrival, three days later, of a refugee from the battle bearing ill tidings. At a place called Nechtansmere the king had met his end at the hands of Bruide mac Beli’s Pictish armies; his bodyguards slaughtered, his army routed. Never again would Northumbria so dominate the whole island of Britain. Even allowing for the narrator’s exaggeration, it is nevertheless striking that a courier was able to reach the queen within three days of the battle (one can see how the story was retrospectively put together by marvelling companions of the far-seeing saint). There has been much speculation about the site of this battle. Traditionally it was associated with Dunnichen, close to Forfar in Angus, a day’s march east of Meigle. It has often been suggested that a great Pictish stone at Aberlemno, which seems to depict a battle, commemorated the defeat of the Northumbrian armies. Alex Woolf, a pre-eminent Early Medieval scholar, has suggested another possible site:
Dunachton in the Highlands, south-west of Aviemore. If one is to believe Bede’s very precise account of the timing, a location close to the end of the Roman road system is, perhaps, more plausible, although the jury is still out. One hundred and eighty-odd road miles in three days, if true, represents a system of Bernician royal couriers every bit as competent as that of the Imperial legions: impressive; but not miraculous.
That Dark Age armies used the existing Roman road system is clear from the number of significant battles which took place on, or very close to, Roman roads, especially where they crossed significant rivers. Many of the monasteries donated by kings to their special holy men were sited in or near Roman forts at key points on the road network. In the late seventh and early eighth centuries, King Ine of Wessex retained a company of Welsh riders, apparently as couriers. The constructions of the Giants were real and were used as assets by Early Medieval kings, shrinking space and time and giving them significant advantages in controlling access to land and territory. Military campaigns often took place over long distances: Welsh kings in Northumbria; Mercians in Scotland and Essex; Northumbrians in Wessex, the Welsh Marches and East Anglia. Nor should we underestimate the Anglo-Saxons’ awareness of what they had inherited. Bede knew that Roman engineers were responsible for roads, forts, walls and fountains, civic and military infrastructure. Inquisitive kings would have known from the learned men of the seventh century that the words of these ancients had also been preserved; that academic knowledge did not prevent them from constructing a mythological past in which Germanic and Roman dynastic progenitors conferred magical powers and inalienable rights on their line. Nor did deep-held pagan tribal traditions of ancestorworship and the king-as-god prevent them from signing up to the new deal offered by an entrepreneurial, savvy and opportunistic church: that in return for land, a rational idea of kingship and a Christian state, kings should hold their office by divine right.