The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  Of all the places where Caesar is said to have spent the night, Parc Samara has one of the strongest claims. The oppidum of four hundred hectares on the Gaulish meridian would have been one of the largest Celtic sites in Gaul – a worthy setting for the council of the tribes and of Caesar’s headquarters. A day’s sail downriver was the port of Leuconaus (Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme). A road to the north led to the lands of the Morini and the shortest crossing of the Oceanus Britannicus. The Roman fort was implanted in a corner of the settlement like the fort at the oppidum of Hod Hill in Dorset. It was there, in the tribal capital of the Ambiani, that Caesar recovered from his invasion of Britain and waited to hear that his legions had reached their winter quarters.

  A fortnight passed before he received news of a tribal uprising in the east – time enough to make preliminary notes for his history of the Gallic War and his account of Celtic customs and religion. ‘They worship above all the god Mercury’ (to a Roman eye, Mercury was the closest match for Lugh): ‘They consider him the inventor of all the arts and the guide of their paths and journeys.’ Caesar would not have known that the place in which he spent that long winter was bisected by one of the pathways of the god. Intelligence gathering was hampered by a conspiracy of silence – it had taken the best part of a year to discover the most convenient crossing of the Channel – and in any case, the information would have been of purely ethnological interest. For Caesar, the gods belonged in a separate chapter. He had seen pictures and carvings of Lugh all over Gaul (‘huius sunt plurima simulacra’), but they mattered little more to him than the face of a farmer or an innkeeper glimpsed from a carriage window. By then (54 BC), a new, secular age had dawned, and military strategy was proving more effective than divinatory wisdom. As the freezing fog rose from the Samara, he settled in to his temporary home and planned his savage response to the uprising, perhaps on the very spot where a fire still burns in a Gaulish house.

  After an informative hour with a young archaeologist from Amiens disguised as a Neolithic farmer, the expedition returned to its bicycles, dislodged a cat that had curled up to sleep under the chain-rings, and left the lost city of Samarobriva with the sun standing high in the south. For the next week, the shining road and the light in the sky would be constant reminders that this was, despite appearances, a rational and time-honoured direction of travel. The shadows of rider and wheels raced over the stubble of the wheat fields, first to the west, then to the east; on either side of midday, they contracted into the form of a goblin that ran alongside the bicycle before eventually emaciating itself in the attempt to reach the horizon before sunset. As the days passed, our slightly crooked journey along a straight path seemed increasingly unlike a research trip and more like an unconscious form of pilgrimage.

  One hour south of Samarobriva, the meridian bisects the village of Nampty. Nampty was once a ‘nemeton’. Its small white chapel is still a shrine and a place of pilgrimage. When the local monastery closed in 1206, a miracle-working statue of the Virgin was left behind and remained active at least until the First World War, when she persuaded the German army to take a different route to Amiens. Now, the floor of her temple is strewn with petals, and the wooden door, as legend states, is always miraculously open. (The nave itself is barricaded by an unmiraculous iron grille.)

  Thousands of people still walk out from Amiens every year to give thanks to Our Lady of the Virtues. Sometimes, pilgrims bound for one of the great shrines of Christendom – Santiago de Compostela – pass through Nampty on their way to Beauvais Cathedral and the Midi. They follow the same guiding light as migrating animals and sun-seeking tourists. Far to the south, beyond the Pyrenees, where one of the Compostela routes crosses the lands that were ravaged by Hannibal, the pilgrims turn west towards the setting sun. Many of them pursue their journey beyond the shrine of St James to the edge of the Continent where a Celtic ‘ara solis’ (a sun-altar) stood at Fisterra or Finisterre. The Romans knew the place as Promontorium Celticum. On the site of the ara solis at this End of the Earth, modern pilgrims burn the clothes and shoes in which they made the journey, but this is not considered orthodox or even Christian: the Catholic Church warns pilgrims that if they continue to Fisterra, they must do so only as tourists, to bathe in the ocean or to admire the long sunsets over the Atlantic.

  It is hard to say exactly when one age of humanity ends and another begins, when Nampty became a shrine instead of a nemeton, or when Lugh and other gods replaced the prehistoric deities, and when those gods in turn were supplanted by saints. In the twenty-first century, the Church has no doubt that the incineration of road-soiled garments at Fisterra and the YouTubed commemoration of the offering constitute a form of pagan ‘sun-worship’. The same war on paganism was being waged at the end of the Roman empire, when the Church rewrote the histories of Celtic shrines. Along with thousands of other holy sites, Nampty was said to have been a wilderness where outlaws butchered innocent travellers. Like broken pots thrown onto a midden, the old beliefs were relegated to the fields beyond the sacred enclosure. Now, they survive only as names on the meridian nearby: ‘le Grez-Qui-Tourne’ (‘the Turning Stone’), ‘Fosse aux Bardes’ (‘Bards’ Grave’), ‘le Bosquet du Diable’ (‘the Devil’s Wood’).

  At Loon, the Iron Age had seemed entirely absent, but after three days of following the meridian, the present was wearing thin and the past becoming ever more populous. South of Nampty, a ‘Chaussée Brunehaut’ (a medieval name applied to Roman or prehistoric roads) runs along the meridian for four kilometres. Near the village of Cormeilles, the hilltop chapel of St Martin overlooks the stony track. The wooden doors were locked. Kneeling down, I peered through the keyhole and saw, above the altar, what appeared to be the Celtic horse goddess Epona. Magnified on the camera screen, this proved to be a painted image of St Martin, the Roman cavalry officer who met Jesus at the gates of Amiens in AD 334 and devoted the rest of his life to smashing pagan temples and bringing Christianity to Gaul. Many of St Martin’s shrines stand by the side of roads on which the new religion arrived. When the Church decreed a more conciliatory approach to pagans, refurbishing temples instead of demolishing them and turning blood sacrifices into Christian feasts, images of Epona were converted into icons of St Martin on his horse.

  The goddess and the saint are often almost indistinguishable. Sometimes, all that separates Celtic from Christian religion is a change of clothes and gender. The Three Mother Goddesses of the Celts appear as the three Marys or as Jesus flanked by two angels. In their hasty disguises, the Celtic gods are everywhere. Near the end of the same section of Chaussée Brunehaut, after Cormeilles, where another Christianized Epona stands in a niche, there was a familiar, smiling creature with a large club and a broken nose above the west door of the church at Hardivillers. He looked like a retired peasant on a visit to the farm he had known many years before. It was Ogmios, the Gaulish Hercules, only half-transmuted into his Christian avatar, St Christopher.

  Just as Caesar recognized the Roman pantheon in the deities of the Celts, a reincarnated Druid entering certain chapels on the meridian would find himself among familiar figures. He would see a human heart dripping blood and a partially eviscerated man nailed to planks of wood. In the lonely chapel of Condé, he would see cringing sinners impaled by a skeleton and a figure in painted plaster (St Denis) offering its bloodless head to the visitor like a gruesome Sunday roast. In the late Roman empire, when Druids were still guarding some remote rural temples, certain shrines were renamed after saints who were supposed to have wandered all over Gaul, carrying their own severed heads. The original Celtic temples had contained stone pillars carved with niches from which human heads stared out. Sacrificial victims had been hung on the walls so that birds of prey could take their rotting flesh to heaven; others had been left to ferment in ‘hollow altars’.

  Celtic historians refer to these bloody practices as ‘the Cult of the Severed Head’. At Ribemont in Picardy, in the early third century BC, Celtic tribes from the east won a great
battle against tribes from the west. After the battle, according to their custom, they raised a gigantic panoply of headless human corpses, exposing victors and vanquished to the elements and the birds of prey. As one observer points out, those gory shrines must have had ‘a rather peculiar aesthetic effect’. On the section of the meridian that crosses the swampy forests of the Sologne, the observation was confirmed. At the side of the narrow road, someone had erected a tall wooden structure resembling the front of an open barn or a lychgate at the entrance to a churchyard. Almost every inch of its wooden beams was covered with the nailed skulls of slaughtered animals. To one side, a long wall had been painstakingly adorned with hundreds of leg-bones, exactly reminiscent of the panoply at Ribemont. A hunter who spends whole days in the silence of the forest tracking wild boar and deer had accidentally recreated a Gaulish shrine, as though the old gods had secretly commissioned a new private sanctuary of their own.

  The relocation of tribal capitals by the Roman conquerors has an unfortunate consequence for visitors to the Iron Age, who often find themselves forsaking the glories of a Roman and medieval city for a deserted heap of rubble somewhere beyond the suburbs. The expedition crossed the busy roads that converge on Caesaromagus (Beauvais), leaving its Gothic cathedral six kilometres to the west, and arrived instead at the hill called Mont César near Bailleul-sur-Thérain.

  ‘Mount Caesar’ was a major oppidum of the Bellovaci tribe and almost certainly the tribal capital: its geographical relationship to the nearby Roman capital of Beauvais is typical of a post-conquest tribal resettlement. The meridian passes through the hamlet of Hez on the hill facing the oppidum and within a stone’s throw of a prehistoric dolmen called ‘la Pierre des Fées’ (‘the Fairies’ Stone’), the likely site of a Celtic necropolis. The two plateaux on either side of the river Thérain were joined by a paved ‘Chaussée Brunehaut’. They probably belonged to the same settlement, which may be the place mentioned by Caesar: ‘The Bellovaci conveyed themselves and all their possessions into the oppidum called Bratuspantium.’

  It was evidently a cosmopolitan town: hundreds of Celtic coins have been found at Mont César. They came from all over northern Gaul and even Britain, and far more would have been found if the ravages of time had not been accelerated by motocross bikes, metal-detectorists and waste-disposal engineers. The Roman conquest plunged the oppidum into insignificance and Mont César was abandoned – except, perhaps, by some of the reclusive pagans referred to in early ecclesiastical documents as Druids – until twelve Christian monks built a hermitage there in 1134. Two years later, they moved into a new building at the foot of the oppidum and founded one of the earliest Cistercian abbeys in France. The hermitage became a farm called ‘la Vieille Abbaye’. The final degradation of the Bellovacian capital occurred a few years ago, when the Old Abbey was engulfed by the Mont César Sanitary Landfill.

  From Mont César, it was a day’s ride to what can now be identified as the predecessor of Paris, the capital of the Bellovaci’s neighbours, the Parisii. To the west of Paris, beyond the Bois de Boulogne, stood the vast river port of Nemetoduron. The town was divided into residential, industrial and religious quarters. Channels dug through its narrow streets of wattle-and-daub houses brought the rainwater down from Mont Valérien, where a fortress still stands – the nineteenth-century Fort du Mont Valérien. From the summit, one hundred and thirty metres above the Seine, Paris is a distant patch of grey, a vision of its own protohistoric past: there are no signs of Celtic life in the capital of France before the Romans, and archaeologists now believe that the ‘island in the river Sequana’ where Caesar held an assembly of the Gaulish tribes in 53 BC was not the Île de la Cité. The cathedral of Notre-Dame is part of a comparatively recent development. Its flat little island would have been an odd choice of capital in any case, dominated by surrounding hills and without even a spit of land to connect it to the rest of the world.

  Mont Valérien is now considered to be one of the three or four likeliest locations of the Parisii’s capital. At that time, the Seine formed a tighter curve and may have given the Romans the impression that the town was on an ‘insula’ rather than a peninsula; or perhaps Caesar used the word loosely to refer to the kind of promontory fort or éperon barre that was favoured by the Celts – a piece of high ground with natural defences on three sides and an artificial barrier on the fourth. On Mont Valérien, above the boundless sea of urban infrastructure, the sky unfurls itself for the first time since the plains of Picardy, and the solar meridian, which bisects the necropolis under the streets of Nanterre, seemed plausible once again. Until this point in the journey, I had resisted the temptation to use the meridian as an infallible detector of ancient sites, but now its predictive potential was undeniable. Other north–south lines drawn experimentally along randomly chosen degrees of longitude passed through notably fewer places of Celtic significance. At Nemetoduron, above the distant and future city of Paris, the divine pattern seemed as clear as the white clouds sailing for the coast and all the other long-distance arcs and tangents of motorway lighting, power lines and vapour trails.

  There was something almost miraculously coherent about these configurations of Celtic locations, occurring conveniently on the same line of longitude like towns on an American interstate. The meridian was not a literal road that carved its way through every accident of topography, yet it led straight to the tribal capitals of the three most powerful tribes of northern Gaul. And on the printout of what had seemed an abstract imposition on the map of Europe, there were signs of the same deliberate coordination with solar pathways stretching far beyond the lands of the Belgic tribes: the equinoctial line from west to east and the transcontinental Via Heraklea are dotted with tribal capitals, and perhaps there are others that have yet to be rediscovered . . .

  The more coherent the arrangement, the more mysterious it seems. The Via Heraklea dates back to the earliest days of the Celts in Gaul, while the two lines centred on Châteaumeillant belong to the Biturigan hegemony of the fourth or fifth centuries BC. Yet the tribal capitals that occur on these lines did not exist, or were not inhabited, until the late-second century BC. Until then, there was almost nothing north of the Mediterranean that might be called a town. The locations of these capitals had apparently been established independently of population.

  Between Nemetoduron and the Biturigan frontier, the meridian runs through some quiet regions where the archaeological record is almost silent. Châteauneuf-sur-Loire and Mehun-sur-Yèvre (once called Magodunon or ‘fortified market’) have some of the classic features of oppida, but at the time of writing, their Celtic histories are blank. There are other places on the meridian that might once have been nemetons: another early Cistercian abbey (la Cour Dieu), another Gallo-Roman shrine (Pithiviers-le-Vieil), and a ‘Temple’ that was a property of the Knights Templar (the second such site on the meridian). At different points, a roadside cross, a field and a forest track all bear the name ‘Merlin’, which, like the ‘Champ Merlin’ at Châteaumeillant, may be remnants of ‘Mediolanum’ . . . Sooner or later, a traveller on the meridian enters a realm of meditative unease in which either everything or nothing is significant. The sense of being watched by something from the past is heightened by the fact that many of these sites are privately owned and involve a certain amount of tactful trespassing and creeping through undergrowth.

  17. Tribal capitals and the solar network

  Tribal capitals on the meridian, the equinoctial line and the Via Heraklea.

  It was, therefore, with some relief that on the morning of the ninth day after leaving Loon, we crossed the brow of a hill and saw, crouching in the wooded valley of two tiny rivers, the most unlikely oppidum in central France. This, the goal of the expedition, was the hypothetical centre of Gaul, and the only Mediolanum with a visible pre-Roman past.

  Apart from a musty basilica of the eleventh century which lies on one of the Compostela pilgrim routes, the town of Châteaumeillant (population: 2082) has little to attr
act a visitor. The antiquated municipal website, which stubbornly indicates ‘1 visiteur actuellement sur ce site’, situates the town ‘on one of the axes that join Switzerland to the Atlantic Ocean’. This may have been true ten centuries ago, when carts were still trundling along the dilapidated Roman road from Lyon, but now, the only long-distance travellers are foot-weary pilgrims bound for the Pyrenees and Spain. In cycling twenty-six thousand kilometres in France, I had never once happened to pass through Châteaumeillant. My edition of the Guide Michelin ignores it completely. Its only geographical distinction is the fact that it lies ‘at the heart of France’, though, as the website admits, ‘there are already several other “centres of France” in the vicinity’.

  Châteaumeillant once belonged to the medieval province of Berry, which, like the nearby city of Bourges, owes its name to the Bituriges tribe. ‘Bitu-riges’ means ‘Kings of the World’. In that self-effacing landscape of pasture and hedgerows, it seems a wonderfully immodest name, another sign that the Celts of that distant age inhabited a parallel universe whose lost majesty could be conjured up only with the aid of computer-generated images. Châteaumeillant no longer has a château: one was demolished in the early twentieth century; the other is unrecognizable as the new gendarmerie. A stone tower, said to have been built by Julius Caesar, once stood near the dismally hygienic ‘Merlin’s Pond’ campground. It was crowned with a gilded statue of the serpent-tailed fairy Mélusine, who was the medieval descendant of a Celtic goddess. The fairy and her tower vanished long ago, but behind almost every gateway there are piles of ivy-strangled rubble and decaying buildings of vastly different eras. Perched on what looks like an unlevelled spoil heap, the lanes of Châteaumeillant seem to have been ravaged by a war of time-zones in which the 1950s won a narrow victory over the late Middle Ages.