The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  Traced on the map of Middle Earth, Boudica’s ‘rampage’ is a perfectly coordinated dance of destruction. The solstice line from Wardy Hill runs as straight as a brown hare to Erbury (or Clare) Camp, which was one of the largest fortresses of the Iceni’s allies, the Trinovantes. It then arrives at the ceremonial centre of Camulodunum. This was the capital of the Roman province and the first town to be destroyed by Boudica’s army. The Romano-Celtic temple is thought to have pre-Roman origins. This now seems all the more likely since the temple is aligned on the British solstice angles: one axis coincides with the solstice line from Wardy Hill; the other points directly at the next place on Boudica’s itinerary: Londinium.

  A layer of burnt debris from the time of Boudica’s revolt has been found at several sites in London. It extends south of the Thames to Southwark, where Boudica is assumed to have crossed the river. At this point, when this book was in rehearsal, the map of Middle Earth appeared to be in error: if Boudica followed the solstice line southwest from Camulodunum, she would in fact have crossed the Thames several kilometres downstream, at a site of no apparent interest, where the Woolwich Power Station once stood. Then a bulletin arrived from the archaeological front line. Because of ‘the constant threat from treasure-hunters’, the discovery had been kept secret since 1986. Now, in 2010, with the completion of the Waterfront Leisure Centre car park, the Kent Archaeological Rescue Unit could reveal that ‘a major fortified Iron Age settlement’ had been discovered on the Woolwich Power Station site:

  70. Camulodunum

  The religious centre of Camulodunum, near Gosbeck’s Farm, Colchester. (After Dunnett and Reece.) The alignments are accurate to within less than one degree.

  Constructed about 250 BC, centuries before the foundation of the City of Londinium by the Romans, this major site on the south bank of the River Thames controlled the river for over 200 years. [Its inhabitants] lived surrounded by massive earth ramparts and deep defensive ditches. . . . The complete defensive circuit would have enclosed an area of at least 15–17 acres. . . . This major riverside fort . . . also dominated a wide area and was effectively the capital of the London Basin for part of the Iron Age.

  71. The pattern of Boudica’s revolt

  The solstice line from Camulodunum exactly bisects this ‘capital of the London Basin’. Passing to the south of Greenwich Park, the line continues to a solar intersection and a Roman road junction at the foot of Blythe Hill Fields in Lewisham. From the top of the hill, the scouts of Boudica’s army would have looked down towards the merchant ships and barges, and the new Roman houses on the north bank of the Thames. They now turned to follow the trajectory of one of the Four Royal Roads of Britain – the road later known as Watling Street.

  Along that ancient path protected by the gods, they slaughtered their way into Londinium, perhaps re-crossing the Thames at Southwark – or, if they followed the solstice line exactly, between Blackfriars Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, where a rare Celtic parade helmet with two bronze horns was dredged from the river in 1868. Their route would have taken them by Russell Square and Euston Station (not the neighbouring King’s Cross, where a local legend places the grave of Boudica), then over Hampstead Heath and along the Great North Way to the next Roman town to be destroyed – the former capital of the Catuvellauni, Verulamium (St Albans).

  72. Watling Street

  The presumed survey line and actual route of Watling Street. The course of the road through London is unknown. Beyond London, this line would have reached the south coast near Hastings. It matches the survey zone of the eighteenth-century London-to-Hastings road via Lewisham, Bromley, Farnborough, Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Lamberhurst and Robertsbridge. This road is not currently identified as Roman.

  With the smoking ruins of three centres of Roman power behind her, Boudica may have been intending to complete the pattern of destruction by returning to Icenian territory along the solstice line from Oxford (fig. 71). Meanwhile, after abandoning Londinium to its fate, the troops of Suetonius Paulinus had regrouped somewhere to the north of Verulamium. The camp prefect having failed to arrive from Isca Dumnoniorum with the Second Augustan Legion, the Romans were outnumbered, but a battle had become inevitable. They faced the Britons from a narrow pass with woodland in the rear and a plain in front. (These are the only topographical details given by Tacitus.) The soldiers who had recently been scared witless by the Druids of Mona had to be encouraged by Suetonius to ignore the appalling din of war-trumpets and ‘empty threats’ (Druids’ curses). ‘You see before you more women than warriors,’ he told them in an ill-advised attempt to steady their nerves.

  Since Watling Street was the main artery between Wales and London, the battle is plausibly referred to as the battle of Watling Street. The exact site is unknown. The archaeologist who excavated the settlement of Tripontium on Watling Street near Rugby suggested in 1997 that the battle took place on the nearby Dunsmore Plain. This happens to be one of the battlefields recently identified by ‘terrain analysis techniques’, and the even more recent Druidic analysis agrees.

  The Pendinas / Aberystwyth line of latitude bisects Watling Street at Tripontium and the meeting point of three counties, just to the east of the Oxford meridian (figs. 71 and 72). Until 2007, the site was occupied by the giant masts of radio transmitters, which made excavation impossible. A vast housing estate is about to bury whatever evidence remains. Perhaps, one day, a Celtic sword or a Roman lance will be forked out of a garden in Boudica Avenue or Suetonius Close. Any human remains may well be female. The Roman soldiers surged out of the pass in a wedge formation. Hampered by their wagons and baggage, the Britons were unable to retreat, and ‘our soldiers’, says Tacitus, ‘did not refrain from slaying even the women’.

  According to Tacitus, who liked to present his pampered Roman readers with the spectacle of barbarian stoicism, Boudica committed suicide by taking poison. In the mopping-up operation, the Romans ‘laid waste to’ the lands of ‘tribes that were hostile or unreliable’.55 In Cassius Dio’s less heroic account, Boudica survived the battle but fell ill and died. Her soldiers had been ready to fight on, but the death of their queen struck them as the final defeat. They gave her ‘a costly burial’, and then ‘scattered to their homes’.

  No mention of this is made in the historical accounts, but a painstaking excavation has shown that at about that time the great ceremonial enclosure of the Iceni at Thetford in Norfolk disappeared. It lay on the same line of latitude as Pendinas, Tripontium and Wardy Hill. The entire complex – its grand circular buildings and nine concentric palisades – was systematically dismantled by Roman soldiers. The oaks were extracted from their postholes by digging or by pushing and pulling. The Thetford complex was neither a military nor a residential site, but the Romans had learned to fear the Druids and their oaks, and it was safer to remove them altogether than to consign the sacred place to flames from which the trees might rise again.

  Ten years after the death of Boudica, most of what is now England was under Roman domination. Wales hung on to its independence until the mid-70s, and, despite the earlier massacre of Druids, the island of Mona held out even longer. In AD 78, a new governor, Gnaeus Julius Agricola, finally completed the cleansing operation from which Suetonius had been recalled by Boudica’s revolt. The Britons ‘sued for peace and surrendered the island’. With the Druids’ threat annihilated, Agricola was free to move north, to encounter ‘new peoples’, and to ‘lay waste to their lands as far as the Tay’. By AD 83, only the tribes of northern Caledonia were unsubdued.

  One night, somewhere beyond the Firth of Forth, while the soldiers of the Ninth Legion slept in their camp, the sentries were butchered by ‘Caledonian natives’ and the camp was overrun. Agricola arrived during the night with the cavalry. By dawn, the Britons were fleeing through ‘the marshes and the woods’. Nothing further is reported until the following summer, when Agricola learned of the death of his baby son in Rome, and decided to seek ‘a remedy for his grief in war’. He sent the fleet a
head with orders ‘to plunder several places and to spread terror and uncertainty’.

  ‘Still buoyant despite their earlier defeat’, the Caledonian tribes demonstrated the characteristic Celtic ability to swarm like honey bees when the hive is attacked: ‘By embassies and treaties, they called forth the whole strength of all their states.’ More than thirty thousand warriors began to mass at a place whose name, in its Latin form, was Mons Graupius.

  This is the first occasion on which a proto-Scottish nation appears in history. Unfortunately, the first named event in the annals of Scotland has been condemned to wander homelessly about the map: the location of ‘Mons Graupius’ is a mystery. There are currently about thirty contenders, but since the human geography of Iron Age Scotland is largely conjectural, and since most ancient battles leave few physical traces, no single place has emerged as the favourite.56

  The name ‘Graupius’ is always said to be obscure, despite the fact that the Celtic word ‘graua’ is found in dozens of place names. It meant ‘gravel’, and the second part of the name is probably its frequent companion: ‘hill’ or ‘summit’, from the Celtic ‘penno’, the Latin forms of which are ‘pennius’ or ‘pen(n)is’. Gravelly hills are not exactly rare, but with Tacitus’s description of the battle site, a map of contemporary Roman forts, and, crucially, the Druidic map of Britain, the last stand of the British Celts can at last find a home and perhaps a monument more fitting than the planned seventeen wind turbines on the nearby Nathro Hill.

  Lines of latitude divided the ancient world into klimata. One line passed through Delphi, another through Châteaumeillant, and another through Pendinas above Aberystwyth. The next line in the sequence, one hour of daylight north of Pendinas, crosses Scotland from Ardnamurchan Point in the west, by Rannoch Moor and the north shore of Loch Tummel, to Montrose Basin in the east.57 The harbour of Montrose lies a day’s sail north of the probable site of the Roman naval headquarters, Horrea Classis (‘granaries of the fleet’) in the Firth of Tay. A few kilometres inland, the great meridian that runs almost the entire length of Britain intersects the Montrose parallel on the river plain below one of the most spectacular and least-known sites of Iron Age Scotland.

  73. Central Caledonia

  Central Caledonia at the time of the battle of Mons Graupius

  The twin hills called White Caterthun and Brown Caterthun were major Iron Age forts. Both were ‘multivallate’ (with several concentric ditches and ramparts). Brown Caterthun is the closer of the two to the meridian and the meeting point of two counties and two parishes. The track to the summit leaves the rich farmland of Strathmore and rises gently through the springy heather, cutting through the mounds that were once the footings of ramparts. The water that gushes from a spring at the top of the hill has carved a thin gulley through the black loam, exposing the sandstone gravel that lies just beneath the surface.

  Even on a hazy day, the luminous logic of the site appears as on a relief model in a museum. In the plain below, two battles were fought in the Middle Ages. In 1130, an invading army of five thousand was defeated by David I of Scotland. In 1452, the rebel Earl of Crawford was defeated by a royalist coalition of clans from the northeast. More than a thousand years before, the intimidating sails of Agricola’s fleet might have been seen on the sparkling horizon. Between Brown Caterthun and the harbour, the buildings of Stracathro Hospital mark the site of the legionary fortress that was once the most northerly permanent outpost of the Roman empire.

  It is easy to see why the Romans felt that they had come to what Tacitus calls the ‘terminus Britanniae’. The line of Roman forts runs diagonally along the Highland Boundary Fault until it reaches Stracathro. Looking north from the summit of Brown Caterthun, when the cloud-battalions part and the sun rushes over the moorland, there is a magnificent panorama of another country. This is where the Highlands and a military commander’s nightmare begin. As Tacitus has the British leader Calgacus say in his pre-battle speech: ‘There are no nations beyond us – nothing but waves and rocks.’

  The Caledonians arranged themselves with their front line on the plain and the other ranks rising up the slope of the hill in tight formation. Eight thousand Roman foot soldiers and three thousand cavalry took up position in front of the camp. ‘The flat country between was filled with the noise of the [British] charioteers racing about.’ Until the very last minute, young men and old warriors had been arriving from regions unknown to the Romans. Since the valley sloping down towards the Firth of Clyde in the west was occupied by Roman forts, the warriors would have reached the battleground by the high roads from the north and by the Cairn O’Mounth pass, which had been a portal to the Highlands since prehistory.

  The battle at the end of Middle Earth was a triumph for the tactical brilliance of Agricola. His grief found a powerful remedy: ten thousand Britons fell; ‘equipment, bodies and mangled limbs bestrewed the bloody earth’. The remaining twenty thousand turned and ran ‘in disarray, without regard for one another, scattering far into the trackless waste’. After the battle, a strange custom of the vanquished was observed: many of the fighters set fire to their homes and slaughtered their own wives and children. That night, beyond the camp where the Romans celebrated the victory and their plunder, the wind brought the sound of men and women wailing ‘as they dragged away the wounded or called to the survivors’. At daybreak, victory showed its true face:

  An enormous silence reigned on every side. The hills were desolate, smoke rose from distant roofs, and the scouts who were sent out in all directions encountered not a soul.

  The survivors had vanished as though the battle were already a legend. Agricola returned to winter quarters and received the report of his naval commanders, who had sailed around the north of Caledonia, thereby contributing valuable information to the Romans’ knowledge of the world. The tribes of remotest Britannia were left in peace to fight among themselves, while, a long way to the south, in their shiny new towns, the Romanized British enjoyed luxuries such as couches and chairs, red Samian ware, colourful rings and trinkets in the fashionable Celtic style, and oil-lamps made in Italy and Gaul.

  The olive oil that was used as lamp fuel was expensive to import, but for the few who could afford it, the oil was worth its weight in gold. That gleaming nectar of the warm Mediterranean made it possible to cheat the sun and to stay up far into the night, drinking wine and telling tales of Caratacus and Boudica, and of the days when the sun god had come to earth and made it safe for mortal beings.

  16

  Return of the Druids

  The twenty thousand who fled from Mons Graupius vanished into a land of which very little is known. A century after Agricola, the Romans had pulled back behind Hadrian’s Wall, and Caledonia was once again a land of myth. In the early third century, Cassius Dio described a hardy race of Caledonians living off roots and bark, and capable of surviving for days on end in swamps with only their heads above water. The only reliable sighting of the northern Caledonians is in Tacitus’s account of a renegade cohort of German auxiliaries in Agricola’s army. After killing a centurion and some soldiers, they hijacked three galleys and set off on ‘a grand and memorable exploit’. They, rather than Agricola’s admiral, are the first people known for certain to have sailed around the north of Britain. Provisions exhausted, they went inland in search of water and food, and ‘encountered many Britons who fought to defend their property’. Some of the Germans eventually returned, as slaves, to the Rhineland, where ‘their tales of the extraordinary adventure made them famous’.

  The Caledonians themselves, having ‘red hair and long limbs’, were considered by Tacitus to be Germanic in origin. Since the German tribes had no Druids, this might explain why, in vivid contrast to southern Britain, there are few signs of a solar network in Caledonia. Even if the angles are adjusted to more northerly climes, any hypothetical solstice lines are as indistinct as shadows on a sunless day.

  The map of Middle Earth reflects a cultural divide: it suggests a sphere of Druid
ic influence in the parts of Britain closest to the Continent which had been colonized by Belgic tribes. In the early Middle Ages, Britain was conventionally divided into north and south by an imaginary line running west from the Humber Estuary, following what would have been the old southern borders of the Brigantes. North of the line, in the kingdom of North-Humbria, the pan-tribal authority of the Druids may never have been recognized. When Caratacus the Catuvellaunian had thrown himself on the mercy of the Brigantian queen, Cartimandua, no Druidic council had prevented her from handing him over to the Romans.

  The territory that is now Scotland had no perceptible Heraklean Way or Royal Road, and yet the Caledonian tribes seem to have known where they were in relation to the rest of the world. Some of their capitals lie on the Whitchurch meridian (here), others on the meridian that passes through Dinas Emrys and Medionemeton, and still others on a third line of longitude that runs through the western Highlands. Whatever their ethnic origins, the names of these tribes are clearly Celtic,58 and so is this alignment of centres of power on the meridians.

  There are no equivalents of the myth of Lludd and the dragons to provide a clue to a Caledonian omphalos, only untraceable local traditions which purport to identify the centre of Scotland. Each of these traditions identifies a different centre, but when the various sites are plotted on the map, they suddenly seem to be in harmony. One ‘centre of Scotland’ is the little white house on the Montrose parallel (heren). Four others line up on the meridian which passes through Dinas Emrys. The first is the ‘middle sanctuary’ of Medionemeton. The second is Gartincaber Tower near Doune (a folly built in 1799 on a site believed to be the geographical centre of Scotland). The third is the village of Fortingall, where a two-thousand-year-old yew tree twists on its crutches in the middle of an ancient monastic site. (On the edge of the village, which is also the fabled birthplace of Pontius Pilate, a stone circle stands at a place, Duneaves, whose name comes from ‘nemeton’.) The fourth ‘centre’ on the same meridian rises behind Fortingall to the north: this is the great granite cone of the mountain called Schiehallion. Its Gaelic name – Sìdh Chailleann – means ‘Fairy-hill of the Caledonians’. In the language of lowlanders, its name was Maiden Pap, which means ‘Middle Mountain’.59