The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  This is what the treasure chest contains: the mathematical formula of the British Druidic system, and a map of the Poetic Isles before the Roman conquest. The temptation (not to be resisted) is to go rushing about the map of Celtic Britain like a historian with a day pass on a time machine. But first – to save time on the road – the theory and the formula.

  The meeting in mid-Channel of the two royal brothers, Lludd and Llevelys, may be the remnant of a legend which recounted the translation of the Druidic system from Gaul to Britannia. Lludd of Britain is the elder brother. He inherits his father’s kingdom, the homeland of Druidism. But his younger brother, Llevelys of Gaul, is ‘a wise man and a good counsellor’. It is Llevelys, avatar of Lugh and ruler of a land in which Pythagorean science is taught to the young, who provides the necessary data, and the means of converting the Mediterranean solar network into a British equivalent. Having discovered by precise measurement the omphalos of his kingdom, and having calculated the trajectory of the sun dragons, Lludd will be able to bring the protection and prestige of the sun god to Britannia.

  The formula supplied by the wise Llevelys is as secretly simple as a Celtic design. To return for a moment to an earlier part of this book, the exact points at which the solstice sun rises and sets were practically impossible to determine. The sun’s light is refracted by the atmosphere, and a terrestrial horizon is never completely flat. In Gaul, therefore, a standard solstice angle had been chosen. It matched the trajectory of the Via Heraklea and the convenient ratio, 11:7, which contains the formula for producing a circle (here).

  This Mediterranean standard was perfectly usable even in northern Gaul, but by the time the solar paths reached British climes, the angle would have been visibly out of kilter with the locally observed solstice. The sun would no longer appear to rise and set in ‘the right place’. A new, British standard had to be devised.

  This was perhaps the first time in history that Britain deliberately distinguished itself from a Continental system. In modern terms, the solstice angle chosen as the British standard was 53.13° east of north, while the Gaulish angle was 57.53°. (Remarkably, the difference between these two standard angles – 4.4° – is almost exactly the actual difference between strictly calculated solstice angles at the latitudes of Châteaumeillant and Oxford – 4.63°.) The cross-Channel adjustment produced a trajectory which matched what the inhabitants of Britain saw when they observed the rising and setting of the solstice sun, but, like the Gaulish angle, the British angle had to be brought in line with a mathematically convenient and Druidically significant ratio. Suddenly, that vat of mead in which Lludd traps the dragons at the centre of his kingdom looks very familiar . . .

  In the Aeduan capital of Bibracte in Gaul, a pink-granite basin was filled with a liquid that served a ritual purpose (here). The basin was astronomically aligned, reflecting the upper world both visually and mathematically, while its elliptical concavity suggested a birth passage and a connection with the lower world. Mead is a product of both worlds: it comes from the bees of the air and the wheat that taps the nutrients of the earth. Cauldrons and tankards filled with mead were buried with tribal chiefs in some of the German oppida. Perhaps, then, this was the sacred beverage that filled the basin at Bibracte. In the absence of the tell-tale waxy deposits it is impossible to be sure, but it is quite certain that the Bibracte basin shared something real and magical with the vat of mead at the Oxford omphalos. The geometrical formula for the basin’s ellipse was 4:3. This is the elementary ratio that produces a perfect Pythagorean triangle, and – as Llevelys would have known when he handed the formula to his brother – this is also the ratio of the solstice line that connects the Oxford omphalos to the fort of Dinas Emrys.49

  Here, locked in legend for two thousand years, is the formula – 4:3 – that would be used by British Druids to pattern a land mass one-third the size of Gaul. It was concise enough to be written on a tiny piece of parchment, and it contains so much information that it pushes the date at which the recorded history of Britain can be said to begin back before the Romans. Interpreted Druidically, those Celtic legends are the dream of a lost volume of the encyclopedia devoted to a forgotten letter of the alphabet. In the waking world, it sits there on the shelf, waiting to be read.

  Before the expedition can set off with a Druidic GPS calibrated on the British ratio of four and three, one question remains to be answered. When Lludd had the length and breadth of his kingdom measured, why did his surveyors find the centre to be in Oxford? Iron Age and even Roman Oxford was such a peripheral place that its appearance in the tale seems to be one of those stray, eccentric details that litter the Celtic legends.

  A lateral-thinking Druid would have known that Oxford was important precisely because it was peripheral. The distribution of coins minted by southern British tribes shows that Oxford stood at the intersection of three major tribal territories: the Catuvellauni of Verlamion (St Albans), the Atrebates of Calleva (Silchester) and the Dobunni of Corinium (Cirencester). Oxford itself may have been a neutral enclave like Alesia, its protected status guaranteed by its strategic importance. The small Mandubii tribe of Alesia is known only from a solitary reference in Caesar’s Gallic War. Perhaps an equally small tribe of Oxubii has disappeared entirely.50

  The exact centre of the Oxford omphalos (deduced from the calculations that follow) was on the site of one of the city’s earliest Christian institutions. Beyond the Westgate and the railway station, a traveller heading for the Cumnor Hills crosses what was once an international frontier, where the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia met, and where the Thames still sometimes rises from its bed of gravel to flood the western approaches to the city. This is one of the busiest and least photogenic crossings of the Thames. As the river reaches Oxford, it suffers from indecision and splits into several streams. Only after Folly Bridge and the University boat houses does it regain its composure and set off purposefully for London.

  Among those dithering, sloppy streams along the Botley Road, there once stood a magnificent abbey. All that remains of the abbey is a small section of rubble wall near Osney cemetery. Before the monks drove out its demons, Osney (‘Osa’s Island’) was probably a pagan site. An archaeologist has suggested that the circle formed by the river channels around the castle and the former abbey marks the outline of a defensive enclosure or oppidum. (The circle is clearly visible on aerial photographs.) It is more than likely that the river crossing was defended: it was a vital link in a wider network. Even today, Oxford is a hub of the road system, and an accident on its ring road can affect traffic throughout a large part of southern England.

  57. The place of Britain in the oikoumene

  58. The dragons’ solstice line

  Oxford (or, as it may once have been called, Mediolanum) was a turntable of the two systems. It was one of the prime coordinates of the new, British system based on the 4:3 ratio, and, like Whitchurch, it was also integrated with the Gaulish system and thus with the Greek oikoumene.

  The line of latitude that runs one hour of daylight to the south of Châteaumeillant passes through Delphi. The line that runs one hour to the north of Châteaumeillant passes through the great hill fort of Pendinas, which looks down on Aberystwyth and Cardigan Bay in mid-Wales. This Welsh line of latitude, which belongs to the ancient mapping of the world, is also an essential part of the British system. At the approximate mid-point of its course, the dragons’ solstice line from Oxford meets the Pendinas line of latitude, forming a Pythagorean triangle. Due north of Pendinas itself lies the hill fort of Dinas Emrys, and so, when the solstice line arrives at Dinas Emrys, it completes another Pythagorean triangle. The two systems – the British and the Continental – are exquisitely consistent. Despite the local adjustment to the British solstice angle, Dinas Emrys and Oxford each lie one quarter of a Greek klima (± 15 seconds) north and south of the Pendinas line.

  The Druids’ genius for marrying mathematics and geography was just as effective in Britain as it had been
in Gaul. In the tale of Lludd and Llevelys, the latitudinal line drawn through Oxford across the breadth of the kingdom helps to determine the geometrical centre, but this was not just an abstract projection: the line also traces a natural route from sea to sea. Though there are no earthworks to show it, the Oxford parallel is a southern equivalent of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall. South of the Humber, this is the narrowest crossing of the island of Britain, from the Severn Estuary to the dunum that is now Maldon on the Blackwater Estuary.

  In Gaul, some of the solar paths had been materialized as roads (here). The Oxford line, too, may have existed as a physical artery. A north–south route is thought to have crossed the Thames at Oxford, and a west–east route is just as likely: some of the traffic that crawls along the Botley Road past the remnant of Osney Abbey is bound for the Severn Estuary and Wales. Here, too, legend confirms the calculation. In his Historia Regum Britanniae, Geoffrey of Monmouth describes a route running latitudinally across Britain from sea to sea. After creating the causeway that ran ‘the whole length of the island from the south coast to the north’,

  59. ‘The breadth of the island’

  60. The causeway of Belinus

  The causeway running the breadth of the kingdom, and Geoffrey of Monmouth’s attempted reconstruction (dotted line). Verlamion is St Albans, and Caesaromagus is Chelmsford. Three forts on the line have legendary associations: Allt-Cunedda, named after a King of the Britons; Pen-y-darren Roman fort in Merthyr Tydfil (Tydfil was a daughter of the King of Brycheioniog, an early British kingdom); Cymbeline’s Castle (perhaps echoing a local legend) refers to the tribal leader Cunobelinus (‘hound of Belenos’). Tower Point is at St Brides, named for the Celtic goddess and Christian saint Brigit. Coygan Camp was a prehistoric, Iron Age and Dark Age fort. Othona was a Roman port. Maeldun (a Celtic name) is Maldon in Essex.

  Belinus commanded another causeway to be made over the breadth of the kingdom, which is to say, from the town of Menevia on the Demetian Sea, to Hamo’s Port, running east to west, and leading directly to all the towns that lie between.

  This latitudinal line that was supposed to bisect all the interjacent towns sounds remarkably like one of the Gaulish solstice lines along which major towns or oppida occur. But as Geoffrey of Monmouth puzzled over his ancient source, plotting its mysterious coordinates on a blurry mental map, he made a hopeless muddle of the Celtic geography. Menevia was the Roman name of St Davids in Pembrokeshire; Hamo was a legendary Roman commander who gave his name to Southampton. This was largely guesswork on Geoffrey’s part: his line makes no sense as a latitudinal route. It runs roughly north-west to south-east, not ‘east to west’, it fails to pass through any significant town, and one-third of its course is over water.

  The solution lies in the most obviously Celtic detail that survived from the original legend: the ‘Demetian Sea’, the part of the Irish Sea that washes the Pembrokeshire coast. It owed its name to the Iron Age Demetae tribe of south-west Wales, and it was there, on the Demetian coast, that the line crossing the breadth of the kingdom would have ended. Though no Roman roads have been found running west or east from Oxford, the earlier instructions of Belinus must have been carried out to the letter. The Oxford line of latitude passes through enough important towns, forts and tribal capitals to have satisfied the king’s requirements.

  Lludd must have been delighted with his brother’s advice. Despite its awkward elongations, Britain, like Gaul, appeared to have been divinely arranged, ‘as though in accordance with some calculated plan’ (here). The ancient kingdom was now attached to the Continent and the wider world by the paths of the sun, and yet, with its own prime meridian and its own standard solstice ratio, retained its peculiar independence, which makes Lludd, son of Beli the Great, a very British king.

  14

  The Four Royal Roads

  Between the conquest of Gaul (58–51 BC) and the Claudian invasion of Britain (AD 43), the Druidic system was not just extended across the Channel, it also reached a new level of sophistication. Its evolution in Gaul had been brutally arrested; in Britain, the influx of Druids and stronger trade links with the Continent allowed it to flourish. The Whitchurch meridian, two ten-minute increments west of the Châteaumeillant meridian, was a Continental import. The intermediate line through London – a town that Lludd was said to have rebuilt – may have remained significant as a meridian, but the new, British solstice angle produced new lines of longitude at roughly five-minute intervals: through Pendinas (Aberystwyth), Whitchurch, Oxford, and a fourth line to the east whose importance will shortly become apparent.

  The solstice ratios (11:7 in Gaul, 4:3 in Britain) were equations that could be applied in different circumstances and adapted to political and commercial necessity, but they were also used to fashion lasting features of the inhabited land. The lines that radiated from the Oxford omphalos to Dinas Emrys and other points of the Druidic compass produced a graceful coordination of Iron Age sites. Three or more tribal centres lie on the Oxford parallel, and at least a further five on the Whitchurch meridian. The Pendinas / Aberystwyth parallel, after passing through two county tripoints and the place that became the Roman town of Tripontium near Rugby, reaches its intersection with the easternmost line of longitude at a fortified settlement of the Iceni tribe called Wardy Hill. (See the large map on this page.)

  At first, some of these places seem devoid of significance, but as the older landscape comes into view, they turn out to have been busy and important. The fenland fortress of the Iceni at Wardy Hill lies at a latitude–longitude intersection and on a solstice line from Oxford. In the other direction, the same line appears to go astray: it misses the capital of the Dumnonii (Exeter) by three kilometres. But this is a line that exists in the Iron Age, not in Roman Britain, and so, logically, it ends at the Exeter suburb of Topsham. This former river port, where the river Exe becomes navigable, is now known to have been the original tribal centre.

  The Dumnonian settlement at Topsham was excavated only recently. Many other places on the solstice lines may one day prove to have pre-Roman roots. Some are already seen as probable tribal centres. The Dinas Emrys line continues north-west across the sands of Abermenai Point to the Druid stronghold of Anglesey and Holy Island. It passes through Aberffraw, which became the capital of Gwynedd – one of the Welsh kingdoms that were formed from the old tribal territories after the departure of the Romans. In the other direction, it passes within five hundred metres of a suspected Iron Age settlement near Worcester Cathedral – perhaps the home of an obscure tribe called the Weogora – and, after the tripoint of Kent, Surrey and Sussex, it arrives on the south coast at Fairlight Cove, near the scene of a more recent invasion – Hastings (here).

  The size of the canvas on which the sun-paths sketch a lost landscape is hard to estimate. The towns of the Iceni and the Dumnonii are separated by more than three hundred kilometres. On the Whitchurch meridian, the Durotrigan town of Lindinis (Ilchester) lies almost five hundred kilometres south of the Votadini’s capital at Traprain Law (also known by its older name, Dunpelder). Due west of Traprain Law and the oppidum site of Edinburgh, the Pendinas– Dinas Emrys meridian arrives with the precision of a god-transported dragon at the place on the Antonine Wall called Medionemeton. If the Druid surveyors operated at this level of accuracy, there is no reason why the entire island should not have been charted by Belinus and Lludd.

  At this distance in time, it seems incredible that two partial maps of the British Druidic system should still exist. The first can be seen in the British Library, which happens to stand on the London meridian. The second is embedded in another map which is familiar, in one form or another, to most British schoolchildren because it depicts the Roman road system.

  61. The Four Royal Roads, drawn by Matthew Paris

  Some time between 1217 and 1259, a Benedictine monk called Matthew Paris was working in the scriptorium of the abbey of St Albans. St Albans had once been Verlamion, the capital of the pagan Catuvellauni; the Roma
ns called it Verulamium and turned it into one of the most important towns of southern Britain. The first British Christian martyr had died there. Now, in the thirteenth century, it was a centre of learning, a rival of Oxford, which – though knowledge of the fact had long since been lost – lay on the same Druidic line of latitude.

  The monk drew what appears to be a crude map consisting of a black oval and four red lines. He described it as a ‘schema Britanniae’ – an outline of Britain. Compared to his other, more flowery maps of the British Isles and the Holy Land, Matthew Paris’s Schema Britanniae is a dull, geometrical doodle. This obviously inaccurate document was once considered to be ‘of extremely slight interest to most scholars of this period’.

  The monk had no atlas, no encyclopedia, and no gazetteer other than the old Roman itineraries. He had read Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae: his own copy, containing his marginal notes, has survived. He also knew Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum (‘History of the English’, c. 1129). There were probably other, older manuscripts, brown and blotched with damp, their half-legible words like the whispers of a dying saint. There may even have been a map, copied from an ancient design or a mappa mundi like the one that had been displayed at the school of Autun in Gaul (here). The monastery library of St Albans contained treasures that could be found nowhere else.

  The subject of the drawing was the marvellous pattern of highways known as the Four Royal Roads. These roads were not some fantastic fable: they existed and were still in use. Three of them were Roman, though the legend claimed that they had been built before the Romans; they were called by the names they had acquired in Saxon times: the Fosse Way, Watling Street and Ermine Street. The fourth road, the Icknield Way, was prehistoric. Historians warn that these Four Royal Roads were primarily a rhetorical trope or figure of speech, not to be taken too seriously.