In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  South of the Gask Ridge the Roman road passes, more or less untraceable, beneath modern routes and towns, past Stirling—Bede’s Urbs Iudeu, where Ecgfrith’s father, King Oswiu, was besieged by Penda in the early 650s. Here an ancient crossing at the head of the navigable River Forth underlines the strategic im pact of Stirling’s imposing natural citadel, as perfect a Dark Age fortress site as can be imagined. I caught up with the ancient road again before a slow cruise through the streets of Falkirk, where road meets Wall. In this case, it was the turf and clay dyke constructed during the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–161), Hadrian’s overambitious successor, and abandoned within a generation. Bede, misreading his sources, attributed it to the later emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211), although he got its geography right: cutting directly across the Forth–Clyde isthmus from sea to sea. Not much of the rampart remains, but I parked up next to the best-preserved section at Watling Lodge. Sure, it’s impressive, like a tidal wave poised to crash onto the shores of some unknown country, seemingly toying with the antique beech trees which ride its crest and whose comparatively short lives of a hundred and fifty years are no more than flotsam on history’s grand swell. With such models to work from it is easy to see how Dark Age potentates like Offa might decide to build one for himself. If holy men wished their achievements to be fossilised in the construction of stone churches, memorials and crosses, why would their temporal lords, addicted to all things glorious, impressive and big, not wish for such a monument to their earth-bound power. And these monuments, like the roads built by the Romans, still stand fifteen hundred years later; they were permanent.

  From Edinburgh (Din Eidyn: the seat of the Gododdin of poetic legend), I was able to follow a familiar road home: the modern A68—Dere Street, which leads north from York in Deira (hence the name), defying topography and superficial logic. The modern motorist, driving at speeds somewhat in excess of the legionary standard of thirteen miles a day, is warned to beware of sharp bends and sudden crests. Any number of road accidents litter this route every year. The unwary motorcyclist is vulnerable to the sin of hubris; and in winter weather the upland sections are quickly made impassable by snow. It is a rollercoaster ride across Lammermuir and Cheviot, through Lauderdale and the border town of Jedburgh, skirting the immense Kielder forest and endless miles of bare sheep-dotted brae. Dere Street allowed Roman armies before, during and after the building of the Wall to penetrate deep into the territories of satellite tribes, the Votadini and Selgovae, whose relationship with the Empire was an ambivalent mix of envy and antipathy. Forts at Trimontium, in the Eildon Hills, where the road crosses the Tweed near Melrose, at Bremenium (High Rochester) and Habitancum (West Woodburn), each one securing a section of the route and monitoring its wild hinterland, passed me by in a blur. I have ridden this road many times; now I was looking at it through different eyes as I tried to take in both the scale of the ambition in attempting to tame these Debatable Lands, and its ultimate folly. No king’s writ ran in these borderlands until there was a single monarch of both England and Scotland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. James VI of Scotland renamed them the Middle Shires, which shows, if nothing else, that he had a well-developed sense of humour.

  Sometimes the modern road departs from its Roman predecessor, taking a more adaptive, empirical route across country, fording river and skirting steep slope. I have traced some of the abandoned route on walks through the Borders, where more human imperatives and practicalities allow the traveller on foot or horseback to respond to local realities. But in its essentials the Roman road survives; and that can only be because it has been in more or less continual use for nearly two millennia. Given the chance, nature eats roads for breakfast. Weeds appear within a year of traffic’s cease; trees follow; landslide, flood and frost wreak havoc. We do not suppose that major repairs were carried out to roads in the Early Medieval period (bridges, perhaps, excepted); routes were maintained by traffic.

  At Old Melrose a loop in the Tweed makes an almost enclosed peninsula where a famous abbey stood in Bede’s day: here the youthful Cuthbert was trained by Eata (the abbot and later bishop so improbably commemorated in the church at Atcham on the banks of the River Severn (see page 71). The monastery was supposedly a foundation of Aidan, the first abbot of Lindisfarne; but there has always been a suspicion among scholars that it had earlier been a British foundation; Bede knew it by its Brythonic name, Mailros. There are sufficient signs of Romano-British Christianity in the Borders—Latin memorial stones, aligned cemeteries and ‘Eccles’ place names—to suggest that a Roman episcopal church maintained itself here long enough to be absorbed into Oswald’s Irish mission. That a native foundation like Mailros should survive close to Iron Age and Roman forts and a military road on a key crossing of the Tweed makes one appreciate the essential continuity of landscape foci. Roman roads and their crossings were centripetal. The three hills of Eildon in whose shadow Melrose lies dominate the horizon for many miles in all directions. They can be seen from the Border crossing at Carter Bar; from Cheviot and from the Lammermuirs. The logic of travelling through these magnificently open lands is ancient and compelling.

  The village of Ebchester, which marks a crossing of the Derwent Valley and the boundary between Northumberland and County Durham, is the site of a former Roman fort, Vindomora. The modern place name suggests that it was appropriated by King Oswald’s sister Æbbe (pronounced Abba, as in the pop group) to found a monastery. Its parish church, which sits within the outline of the old fort, was originally constructed using Roman masonry and is still dedicated to the saintly Iding princess. She also founded a house in less hospitable surroundings at St Abb’s Head north of Berwick, on a rocky clifftop high above the sea. Appropriately, considering the martial history of her family, the church at Ebchester was later the burial place of celebrated sword-makers from the nearby village of Shotley Bridge. Joseph Oley, supposedly the last of a line of German craftsmen to settle in these parts with their armourers’ skills, was laid to rest here in the nineteenth century. Shotley Bridge is my home too: a resting place before the onward journey south.

  In many parts of County Durham the line of the old road must be reconstructed by joining the dots, one fort or town to another. At Lanchester (Longovicium) on the River Browney not even a footpath survives. In odd stretches it coincides with a lane or B-road. The geography east of the Pennines is one of steep-sided wooded denes;81 the grain of the land is unclear, like the confused swells of the sea after a storm. The Roman road tends to survive on higher, flatter sections useful as drove roads. Close to Bishop Auckland the Roman fort of Binchester (Vinovia), situated in a loop of the River Wear, appears unconnected to the road system. On the opposite, southern bank of the river I stopped, one morning some time after my Scottish ride,82 at Escomb, where England’s most complete early church survives somewhat against the odds. It is an austere, very northern sort of building: tall and narrow, its exterior walls smutty from the smoke of coal fires. The key hangs by the front door at one of the cluster of modern houses that rings the venerable church—there is no pretension here. The churchyard is circular, a clue, perhaps, to Irish or British influence. The precise date of its construction is unknown, although it must belong to the late seventh or eighth century; some say Wilfrid had it built, but it seemed to me to lack his grandiose orthodox stamp. It is simple in its magnificence: constructed in stone quarried from Binchester fort (a legionary inscription has been built into one internal wall; the chancel arch has been lifted wholesale from a military site). From the outside it looks more like a Borderer’s defensible bastle house83 than a church. The original entrance was a low door in the north wall. There is no tower, but a simple nave and smaller chancel or sanctuary with small windows high up: one’s eyes are constantly drawn to the heavens. An incised cross, thick with layers of whitewash, survives in the wall behind the lectern; a larger cross, carved in relief and perhaps depicting a preaching high cross, now stands against the east wall behind the altar.r />
  South of Bishop Auckland I picked up Dere Street again: unmistakably arrow-straight for several miles as far as Piercebridge, where a Roman bridge across the Tees, its ruined footings stranded in a field by the meanderings of the river, forced a small diversion through the village and over a modern crossing. A few miles further south, at Scotch Corner, Dere Street is joined by both the trans-Pennine A66 (Roman-built, too) and its big brother, the A1; the Pennines of Swaledale closed in to the west; the Vale of York opened out to the east with the North York Moors distant and grey-hazy beyond. The dual carriageway takes a wide, sweeping arc around Catterick, site of a racecourse and Roman fort (Cataractonum) and, probably, of a legendary Dark Age battle. The town’s prehistoric forebear may have lain upriver at Richmond, beneath the medieval castle below whose ramparts the Swale tumbles into a splendid cataract well worth the Latin name. Cataractonum survived into the fifth century and beyond. Inside the jaws of Swaledale a series of apparently defensive dykes is thought to belong to a period when Dere Street was a frontier between Deira and the British kingdom of Rheged, whose warrior lord, the fabled Urien, fought the kings of Northumbria as far north as Holy Island.

  ESCOMB

  An epic battle lament that survives in much-evolved form as Y Gododdin (from the ancient British tribal name Votadini) seems to commemorate a siege here in the last decades of the sixth century, a tragic, failed pre-emptive attempt by a British confederacy of the Men of the Old North—the Gwŷr y Gogledd—to turn back Northumbrian territorial ambitions. Bede, and the Gododdin poet, called it Catraeth and in siting a mass-baptism by Bishop Paulinus in the River Swale here in about 627, Bede implies that it was a royal estate under King Edwin. My memories of excavating at Catterick are three unpleasant months confined within the stinky stalls of a cow barn on a farm whose foundations lay deep in the Roman and Dark Age past. Construction of new slurry pit offered the chance for Catterick expert Pete Wilson and his team to get a sniff, so to speak, of the town’s end. We peered through the keyhole, drew narrow conclusions and moved on. The nearby British infantry garrison is a reminder that useful places stay useful.

  Now, thankfully, I passed Catterick at speed and rode on to the civitas capital of the Brigantes, the confederation of northern British tribes, at Aldborough. Isurium Brigantium was shut—English Heritage hibernates until April Fools’ Day. The fifteenth-largest town in Roman Britain, nestling in a bend of the River Ure close to Boroughbridge and just above its confluence with the Swale, intrigues me because of its location. Like Wroxeter, it was intended to provide a less threatening replacement for the tribal headquarters, or oppidum, in this case at nearby Stanwick. It is the closest Roman presence to Wilfrid’s seventh-century foundation at Ripon and the only substantial civilian settlement on the road between York and Corbridge. There are thoughts in the academic community that perhaps Catraeth succeeded to its tribal functions and status, lying at the core of a Dark Age kingdom of the Tees Valley. Bede may be referring to Aldborough, or to Catterick, when he describes a siege at an oppidum between a Deiran pretender, Osric, and King Cadwallon of Gwynedd during the campaign that led to Oswald’s great victory at Heavenfield in 634. Aldborough is now just a pretty village off the main drag, deserted by legions, river and main road alike. But I stopped for a while anyway, peering over the fence to see what I could of its grassy-banked ramparts before taking a small, dead-straight road south-east towards York.

  Eburacum, the greatest Roman fortress town of the North with its own colonia 84 and special place in imperial history, is worth its own journey. For now, I was able to spend a comfortable and cheery evening in the company of old friends, Bob Sydes and Sarah Austin. I first met Bob when I worked for him twenty-five years ago at an extraordinary lowland ‘hill-fort’ excavation in South Yorkshire called Sutton Common. It’s the only site where I have had the privilege of excavating ramparts with their wooden palisade still intact and with the axe marks of the woodsmen who cut the stakes still perfectly visible. Their extraordinary preservation was caused by the anaerobic conditions that prevail in wetlands, now sadly drained by agriculture. Bob and I chewed over old times and current archaeo-gossip; Sarah and I over a fascinating exploration of visualising complex archaeological data that she has in mind for a doctoral thesis. Bob had just been to a conference in Derry, so we compared notes on Ireland, on that interesting city and on politics.

  From York, Roman roads run south-west to Tadcaster (Roman Calcaria) to rejoin the Great North Road, and east towards the chalk Wolds of the East Riding and the River Humber. My first appointment was with Bede’s most famous set-piece drama: the conversion of King Edwin. At Market Weighton, at the foot of the Wolds, I turned off the main road and wove my way through the back lanes of the town, up the gentle scarp behind it and into the village of Goodmanham. Here, Bede says, Edwin’s chief priest Coifi, having been persuaded by the Deiran elite to renounce his paganism, rode out on a stallion wielding a spear, and cast it into the precincts of a temple that stood here. For Bede, drawing on oral traditions inherited from Edwin’s descendants and preserved by his cult at Whitby Abbey, this was a decisive victory for Roman orthodoxy. Walking around the outside of the parish church (all locked up and no key to be had), perched on a raised rectangular graveyard in the centre of the village, perhaps on the exact spot of the earlier idolatrous temple, I contemplated what paganism and Christianity meant to the Northumbrians of the seventh century. So much of what we know about the church derives from medieval and later historical perspectives that it’s hard to say. Bede’s account is so coloured by both his distaste for paganism and his detestation of British schismatic practices that it’s easy to be seduced into thinking that the conversion was intellectually and spiritually decisive, at least at the level of aristocratic elites if not among the populace.

  Pagan and Christian alike revered bodily relics; both found spiritual solace and magic in natural springs and places with special atmospheres. The lives of all Britain’s inhabitants revolved around the cycle of the seasons, the fertility of their crops and families, the celebration of quarterly festivals and the construction of places in which to contemplate, tender offerings and seek intervention from supernatural beings. Both pagan and Christian held deeply to animist sensibilities. It is easy to look at the monotheism of the Christian faith and see in it a rationalising, all-purpose, all-seeing god with the central redeeming figure of Christ unique in theological history. And it is similarly easy to miss the very evident parallels between the charismatic healers of the shamanic or druidic tradition and those of the New Testament. Jesus acts at the centre of a pantheon of disciples, martyrs, apostles and saints every bit as rich as the suite of ancestors and spirits that the Dark Age Germans, British or Irish employed as propitiatory agents. A host of local and celebrity saints fulfilled the same social and cultural functions as—and in some cases may have been identical with—animist deities residing at the bottom of wells, in sacred groves and caves, beneath rocks and still pools. Did not Pope Gregory, after first advising King Æthelberht to destroy pagan idols and their temples, then suggest to Augustine that he allow converts to raise huts of branches around his new churches and celebrate the Christian feast days as they had been accustomed to celebrate their former pagan feasts.85 And do we not retain Œastra, Woden, Tiw, Saturn and the Moon in our calendrical vocabulary?

  No fewer than four springs rise close by All Hallows Church in Goodmanham, each of which might have attracted offerings, seekers of healing powers and the wisdom of obscure oracles, both before and after the conversion. In a world ruled by capricious fates, divination was an arcane skill practised by wise men and women inheriting the gift from their forebears; a chance to turn the odds in one’s favour or invoke sympathetic magic for the birth of a child or a calf, or for a bounteous crop. A similar impulse moves people to light a candle for a loved one or to pick ‘lucky’ numbers for the lottery. The animist spirit runs deep in the human soul. The Christian missionaries, at least the savvy ones, came bearing
the promise of an upgrade, not a revolution.

  In any case, on King Edwin’s death the Northumbrian elite very quickly apostatised; a political vacuum immediately ensued, during which anarchy seems briefly to have reigned (proof, by the rule of exception, that the Dark Ages were generally anything but anarchic). Bede recalled that year (633–4) as one expunged from the annals of history by ‘those who compute the dates of kings’. In the North, Christianity was very quickly revived in Irish form by a king who embodied the potency of royal saint and Christian martyr, tribal totem, virile battle chief and temporal overlord. Oswald’s life and post-mortem career as inspirational relic factory straddles that divide like no other.

  In the compelling throwaway detail of a miracle tale, Bede gives us incidental evidence that the Roman roads in these parts had a recreational as well as military value in the Early Medieval period. As a youth, Abbot Herebald of Tynemouth priory had served under John of Beverley. John, a former Bishop of Hexham, founded a monastery in the principal settlement on the Yorkshire Wolds around the year 700. We are told that one day Herebald, and the other young men travelling in a party with the bishop, came upon a level and dry section of road that seemed to them to be the perfect spot for a horse race. Reluctantly, the bishop allowed the youths to have their fun, but he refused Herebald’s pleas to join them. Herebald eventually gave in to temptation, took his turn galloping up and down the course and was eventually thrown while leaping a great pothole, fracturing his skull on a rock. Needless to say, the powerful prayers and tender care of the bishop restored him to life.