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  MEIGLE

  FOR SARAH, WITH LOVE

  Wondrous is this stone wall, wrecked by fate;

  The city buildings crumble, the works of giants decay.

  Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed,

  Barren gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar,

  Houses are gaping, tottering and fallen,

  Undermined by age.1

  KILMORY

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Dedication

  Author’s note

  Prologue: It is written

  CHAPTER ONE: The kingdom of Dál Riata: Rothesay to Kilmartin

  Interlude Gilsland to Haltwhistle

  CHAPTER TWO: Marches: Telford to Wrexham

  Interlude Haltwhistle to Hotbank

  CHAPTER THREE: Looking for giants: London to Sutton Hoo

  Interlude Once Brewed to Warden Hill

  CHAPTER FOUR: Eda Frandsen: Falmouth to Mallaig

  Interlude A Corbridge circular

  CHAPTER FIVE: Heroes: Wareham to Yatton

  Interlude Walking on the Wall on the spot

  CHAPTER SIX: Time among the Britons: Anglesey to Bardsey Island

  Interlude The Tyne : Hexham to Ovingham

  CHAPTER SEVEN: Sense of place: Donegal

  Interlude Ovingham to Newcastle

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Speed: Meigle to Canterbury

  Interlude Newcastle to Jarrow

  CHAPTER NINE: Midwinter: York to Whitby

  Postscript: Who are the British?

  Preview

  Acknowledgements

  Plate section

  Front endpaper map

  Back endpaper map

  Appendix One Journey distances

  Appendix Two Timeline

  Notes

  Recommended reading

  About In the Land of Giants

  Reviews

  About Max Adams

  Also by Max Adams

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  Author’s note

  A FEW WORDS of explanation are required. The ten journeys took place over seventeen months between October 2013 and March 2015. With two exceptions they appear in chronological order. The sea voyage on Eda Frandsen and the motorbike trip, both for logistical reasons, took place out of kilter. I have put them where I intended they should be and hope that the reader doesn’t find the result disconcerting. The interlude walks took place as and when I could fit them in.

  At the end of the book is a record of the mileages for each walk: these include accidental diversions and getting lost; all have been measured with a map wheel apart from the sea voyage, for which the data were kindly supplied by James Mackenzie; and the two bike trips, which I measured on the bike’s milometer.

  All the photographs in the book were taken on the journeys as described. Inline photographs illustrate the text where appropriate; the gallery sections are divided into themes, and readers are invited to make of them what they will. The family of the young boy who accidentally jumped into the frame of a photograph taken at Din Lligwy will, I very much hope, forgive me for including the image in the gallery. He seemed to evoke perfectly the spirit of the place.

  The maps are intended to give an idea of the routes taken and the distances covered each day. I have added some Early Medieval detail where appropriate. With one exception I have used as my base maps the very excellent Reader’s Digest Atlas of Great Britain, long since out of print but a jewel of cartography and a treasure of information.

  At the very end of the book is a short section of recommended reading. Explanations of potentially unfamiliar words have been incorporated into the Notes (pages 433–​42) as appropriate.

  Prologue: It is written

  Hadrian’s Wall—Birdoswald fort—the Dark Ages begin—life after the end of the Roman Empire—natives and legions—granaries and mead halls—St Patrick and Arthur—Gildas and Bede​—​‘the Ruin’—a series of journeys

  THE WALL

  JUST AFTER DAWN on a late November day the North Pennines air is rigid with cold. A thick hoar of frost blankets pasture and hedge, reflecting white-blue light back at an empty sky. The last russet leaves clinging to a copse of beech trees set snug in the fold of a river valley filter lazy, hanging drifts of smoke from a wood fire. The sunlight is a dreamy veil of cream silk.

  I am surprised when I come suddenly upon the Wall. I have not followed the neat, fenced, waymarked route from the little village of Gilsland which straddles the high border between Northumberland and Cumbria, but struck directly across country and, with the sun in my eyes, I do not see Hadrian’s big idea until I am almost in its shadow. Sure, it stops you in your tracks. It is too big to climb over (that being the point), so I walk beside it for a couple of hundred yards. The imperfect regularity of the sandstone blocks is mesmerising, passing before one’s eyes like the holes on a reel of celluloid. This film is an epic: eighty Roman miles, a strip cartoon story that tells of military might, squaddy boredom, quirky native gods, barbarian onslaught, farmers, archaeologists, ardent modern walkers and oblivious livestock. I am somewhere between Mile 49 and Mile 50, counting west from Wallsend near the mouth of the River Tyne. The gap in the Wall, when I find it, is made by the entrance to Birdoswald fort. Birdoswald: where the Dark Ages begin.

  There is no one here but me on this shining day. The farm that has stood here in various guises for around fifteen hundred years is now a heritage centre. On a winter weekday I have Birdoswald to myself. Just me and the shimmering light and the odd chough cawing away in a skeletal tree. In places the stone walls of this once indomitable military outpost still stand five or six feet high. Visible, in its heyday, from all horizons, the Roman fort layout was built on a well-tested model: from above, it is the shape of a playing card, with the short sides facing north and south. Originally designed so that three of the six gates (two in each long side, one at either end in the centre) protruded beyond the line of the Wall, the fort was not so much part of a defensive frontier, more a launching pad for expeditions, patrols and forays in the lands to the north. Rome did not hide behind its walls; the legions did not cower. Any soldier from any part of the Empire would have known which way to turn on entering the gate; where the barrack rooms would be; where to find the latrines and bread ovens; how to avoid the scrutiny of the garrison commander after a late-night binge or an overnight stay in the house of one of the locals. Uniformity was part of the Roman project.

  Any native on any frontier would get to know the layout too. The British warrior might, in those first years of the Wall’s existence during the 120s, try to attack it; when that failed he would herd his livestock through its gates to his summer pastures and pay a tax on his sheep or cattle. British women would barter their homespun goods for ironwares or posh crockery; one day their sons might be recruited into its garrison. The Brittunculi or Little Britons, as a Vindolanda tablet suggests they were called by their imperial betters, might grow to like the idea of the Empire.

  Outside Birdoswald fort, to the east, the frosted surface of a smooth, grassy field conceals the magnetic traces from geophysical mapping of a small village, or vicus, which grew up alongside. These vici were native British settlements, clinging like limpets to their military protectors, supplying them with goods and services and probably with children, wanted or unwanted. Much the same thing happens in frontier provinces today. You see it on documentaries filmed in the dodgier parts of Afghanistan—only there the Taliban
regards such integration or fraternisation as a capital crime. When the Western troops leave, and they are leaving as I write, one fears for the safety of the inhabitants. When Rome came to this frontier, she came to stay.

  To the south, the line of the Wall, and this fort, are protected by the deep, sinuous gorge of the River Irthing, the western of two rivers which between them create the Tyne–Solway gap linking east and west coasts. This gap has been a lowland route through the Pennines for many thousands of years. Two generations before Hadrian the Romans built a road along this line, known in later times as the Stanegate, so that they could rapidly deploy troops along its length. Much of that road is still in use, or at least passable. And long after Hadrian, General Wade had his redcoats build a road following much the same route and for much the same reason—in his case to keep Jacobites at bay. The gap between the headwaters of the Rivers Irthing and South Tyne is narrow: no more than four miles. Near Greenhead, just to the south-east of Gilsland, is the watershed boundary, the pass, a choke-point through which modern road and railway, ancient Wall and eighteenth-century military road must squeeze.

  To the north, Birdoswald—Banna to the Romans—looks onto a landscape of boggy mires, dispersed sheep farms and conifer plantations, with another twenty odd miles before the modern border is reached. It is an odd thought: this land, so often fought over, has been at peace for two hundred and fifty years. The old border garrisons of Carlisle and Newcastle have almost lost their walls; standing on either coast halfway up the island of Britain, they are just like other modern cities. Had Scotland voted for independence in September 2014, that defunct border could have been revived; we might have had customs posts, and police on either side might have spent their time chasing smugglers once again. It may still happen. It would amuse the legionary builders of this place to think of their imperial customs booths being reopened after nearly two millennia; it would not surprise them. Sometimes borders are self-defining.

  During the middle of the fourth century, long before the traditional date of AD 410, when Roman administration dissolved in the province of Britannia, the roof of one of the granaries (horrea) at Birdoswald collapsed. These things don’t just happen. The Roman auxiliary cohorts who had been stationed here for two hundred years relied on periodic resupply from the coast ports and on storing the fruits of each year’s harvest. Leaky roofs and military efficiency don’t go together; so either slackness was creeping in or the fort had been abandoned. That’s how it seems at first sight. But the subtle text of stratified deposits read by archaeologists tells a more complex story. The fort was not abandoned; and when, in the 360s, a huge barbarian onslaught threatened to overwhelm the province, Rome and her generals responded. After the north granary at Birdoswald lost its roof, its stones and tiles were used elsewhere. The floor of a second granary, immediately to the south, was reflagged, its under-floor heating flues blocked—to keep out draughts, or rats? The centurions’ quarters were remodelled to allow for the construction of a building with a small apse—a by then fashionable Christian church, perhaps. The abandoned north granary was used as a rubbish dump, but part of the main street frontage was refaced with dressed stone and a new barrack block was built. Neither slackness nor abandonment explains the halving of the fort’s storage facilities. More likely, the realities of the frontier zone changed.

  Rome was not a static force any more than the British Empire was in its day. Three hundred years is a long time. As the empire stretched, then overstretched, as emperors’ fortunes waxed and waned, as troops and political interests migrated from one distant land to another, local commanders became increasingly autonomous. Centrally organised lines of supply, overly bureaucratic and too bloated to adapt to local realities, were superseded or bypassed. Pay wagons turned up with hard cash less often. Commanders took an active role in supplying garrisons from their immediate hinterland; probably they got more involved in the administration of local politics. The relationship between occupying force and native elite became more intimate, the integration more complete. By the middle of the fourth century Wall garrisons consisted mostly of troops called Limitanei, that is, frontiersmen. Many of the men had probably been born within a few miles of Birdoswald; their fathers had been soldiers before them. They spoke the native language known as Brythonic—an early form of Welsh—and were embedded in the native communities of the Wall zone. They revered a suite of local divinities and the odd imperial god, especially Jupiter. After Constantine, who was declared emperor in York in 306, they may have felt inclined, or obliged, to rationalise their pantheon and worship the one true God Jehovah and his charismatic, earthbound son.

  The garrison commanders were an elite cadre. They could afford to modify their official quarters with bespoke trappings like Christian chapels or bath houses. Their dress and social class set them apart culturally and politically. In many places they brought with them in their deployments personal retinues from far-flung provinces of the geriatric, obese empire, now disintegrating and under threat of being overrun. The rigid formal structure of the old imperial army, mirrored in the fixed, square-shaped identikit forts of the first and second centuries, became flexible, individualised. The emergence of a vernacular tradition, blending native and foreign with a distinct local cultural flavour, meant that each fort and town was recognisable by its own regional idiosyncrasies. Many of the late imperial commanders had been recruited from the northern boundaries of the Empire from whose ongoing conflicts and edginess fine warriors were raised. Many of them must have spoken Germanic tongues.

  No one noticed the beginning of the Dark Age in Britain. It started in different ways and at different times in different places. Rome never lost interest in these islands; they bore valuable minerals, their soils were fertile and their conquest had been a prestigious triumph of the imperial project of the first century AD. But distance stretches and thins one’s interest; as the Empire reformed in the East and as Western emperors focused their attentions on Gaul, Hispania and Germania, it became harder to keep up with what was happening in Britannia: the distant relative was slowly lost to the family. In the towns of Roman Britain decline may have begun as early as the third century, as local elites increasingly favoured the country life and became bored with Rome’s urban experiment, its high-maintenance sewage and water supplies, tedious civic snobbery and the tendency of the urban proletariat to riot on almost any pretext. On the coasts, vulnerable to a Continental penchant for piratical raiding, life from the early fourth century onwards could be uncomfortable even with the presence of the imperial navy to watch Britain’s shores facing Ireland and Saxony, Frisia and Pictland. In the cultured, decadent luxury of the Cotswolds, where superb country villas sat in an ordered, fertile and bucolic landscape, reality might not have dawned until the middle of the fifth century when effete toga-wearing Romano-British aristos woke up to find revolting peasants stealing their prize heifers and touting the heresy of a suspiciously liberal British-born cleric called Pelagius.

  At Birdoswald the moment can, in its way, be quite precisely identified, with fifteen hundred years of hindsight to draw on. At the very end of the fourth century the south granary, renovated some decades before, had a succession of hearths built into its west end. When excavated, their ashes were found to contain some rather nobby personal items: a green glass ring, a gold and glass earring. More importantly for the excavator, Tony Wilmott, there was a worn coin of the Emperor Theodosius (reigned 388–95), which gives some idea of the date after which these fires were in use. Archaeologists, when finds and structures tell them they are excavating deposits of the fifth century, get a shiver down their spine: these moments are desperately rare.

  Hearths seem odd things to have in a granary: fire and grain are a dangerous combination. Was the garrison now so compact, were the other buildings in such a state of disrepair, that the garrison commander had moved himself and his family into the grain store and fitted it out as domestic quarters because it was the only building left that would keep out
the winter weather? Were these people cowering among ruins?

  There is another way of looking at it. We are talking barn conversions. Not so much retreating to the corner of a barn because it’s the only building with a roof; more likely, the commander liked to have the company of his men for good cheer and fireside stories in those long nights of winter when they talked of the old days, of battles and life on campaign. The barn still had a good solid roof, maintained because it was where all the local produce came in and had to be stored for the year ahead. This produce was no longer paid for in cash (these late coins of Theodosius were about the last to make it to Britain from the imperial mints); the natives were required to give a few days’ labour and to donate a proportion of their harvest and other agricultural produce—say, a tenth. The commander still had his own quarters—nice bath suite, private chapel—wife from a local well-to-do family or perhaps an exotic Dacian bride who played a quasi-diplomatic role in the local community and kept a small but tasteful salon, as British army wives sometimes did in colonial India. Often, and especially when there had been a good harvest or on the quarter days of the native festive calendar when communal gatherings were de rigueur, it seemed right to have a feast in the barn, to share the land’s bounty, dispense a little justice and a few trinkets from the bazaars of Alexandria and reinforce old and prospective loyalties. The man who sat at the centre of the long feasting benches was more of a local worthy and judge than a garrison commander. One is tempted to use the word ‘squire’. Gifts were exchanged; promises made; eligible young men and women affianced. Poems were composed and sung, wine and local mead consumed: drinking horns for the men, Rhineland glass beakers for the commander and his wife. Understanding the rules of patronage was becoming just as important as running a tight ship or ruthlessly enforcing the imperial law.