In the Land of Giants Read online

  This cosy scenario takes us well into the fifth century, when there is virtually no narrative history for the British Isles, just rumours of civil war and raiding Saxons, plague and famine. Traders from the Continent came to these parts less frequently. We know that Gaulish bishops visited, retaining their solidarity with the British church long after secular links had been severed. But no emperor came after the departure of Constantine III in 407. Rarely does archaeology have anything meaningful to say about the two centuries after 400: there are no new coins to date the layers; almost no inscriptions, and those few that do exist are difficult to date. The pottery found in native settlements might just as well be that of the Iron Age. Even radiocarbon dating is unreliable for these centuries and, unless you are in the peaty bogs of Ireland, wood rarely survives to be dated by its tree rings. The fifth century existed all right—we just can’t see it. It is like the Dark Matter which fills our universe but can’t be seen or measured. The record falls silent, even if echoes and rumours of echoes are heard across the Channel and in the courts of Byzantium, Arles and Ravenna.

  Almost the earliest indigenous written account of events in Britain after the end of Rome is a note in an Easter calendar called the Annales Cambriae, its only surviving copy belonging to hundreds of years after the event. Under Anno I, which historians believe equates to the year AD 447, is a simple, bleak Latin entry: Dies tenebrosa sicut nox: ‘days as dark as night’. That just about says it all, even if it is an obscure reference to some distant volcano or a really terrible winter.

  At Birdoswald life went on, perhaps until the first years of the sixth century. On top of the defunct north granary a timber replacement was erected using the old stone foundations to give it solidity and a floor. Years passed. Finally, a similar structure was erected in more or less the same place, only it was designed to line up with a remodelled gate on the west side of the fort. The new building, imposing in its dimensions and constructed using great hewn crucks, looks for all the world like one of the timber halls of poetic legend: the Heorot of Beowulf. And if, at times, the walls were hung with spears and shields and the air rang to the sound of drunken song and poetry, with boasts of victories and laments for fallen comrades, it was, after all, still a barn. Were its carousing warriors and petty chiefs, its quartermasters and poets Romans, Britons or Anglo-Saxons? Who can say? Did they themselves know or care? And was the successor to the commander in whose name this grand design was built a rival, an imposed replacement or a son?

  Even the casual visitor to Birdoswald can’t fail to be impressed by the solidity of the foundations where the north granary has been excavated, its footings and buttresses consolidated. Where the post pads for the new timber hall of the fifth century were sited English Heritage has installed great round logs, like oversized telegraph poles, standing a few feet high to give an idea of the size and layout. It is a crude reconstruction, and yet viscerally effective in demonstrating the moment and mindset that changed Roman into Early Medieval. What is particularly striking is that the new timber hall was much wider than the old granary. If the south-granary-cum-barn-cum-feasting-hall was mere adaptation, with a hearth at one end and perhaps a partition in the middle, then the new hall built over the ruins of the north granary was a more ambitious vision, designed for the commander of the fort (be he a dux of his cohort, a war-band leader or petty tribal chief) to sit in the centre of one of the long sides with his companions ranged on benches either side, a glowing fire before him in the centre and, perhaps, with doors at either end. This is truly a building in which the mythical Beowulf would have felt at home. And we must suspect that this was not an isolated structure: the Birdoswald of AD 450–500 was a busy place.

  The fort at Banna, high in the Pennines, may just have an even more potent role to play in our history. St Patrick claimed, in his Confessio, that he had been born and brought up in a place called Bannavem Taberniae, son of a local landowner called Calpurnius whose father, Potitus, had been a priest. His vita2 is difficult to date, but some time in the middle and later decades of the fifth century is plausible. Several modern scholars believe that this place name should read Banna Venta Berniae: the ‘settlement at Banna in the land of the high passes’. Berniae shares its root with the name Bernicia, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of north Northumbria. That Patrick, taken by slaves to Ireland, should have unwillingly launched his epic career as Irish patron saint at this remote, beautiful spot, is quite a thought.

  And then there is Arthur. Historical references to the legendary Romano–British warlord are very few: a list of twelve battles; a great victory recorded at a place called Badon (perhaps Bath in Somerset); a death notice; a possible mention in a battle poem. Arthur may be, as many historians have argued, an irrelevance, a distraction. There are ‘southern’ Arthurs and ‘northern’ Arthurs, never mind the medieval romantic hero of Camelot. Those who favour the northern version argue that the notice of his death in 537 during the ‘Strife of Camlann’ places him on the Roman Wall; for Camlann seems to be derived from Camboglanna. It used to be thought, erroneously, that this Roman fort, mentioned in the very late Roman list of imperial postings called the Notitia Dignitatum, must be Birdoswald. Now it is accepted that it should be Castlesteads, some seven miles to the west. Either way, there are those who would place both Patrick and Arthur on this stretch of the Wall between the fifth and sixth centuries.

  Narrative histories do not get us very far towards an understanding of these islands in the centuries after Roman rule. An early sixth-century British monk called Gildas wrote of civil wars, of invasion, fire, sword and famine (and mentioned a victory at Badon without naming the victor), but nothing of the everyday comings and goings which sustained life. The Kentish Chronicle, fascinating in its melodrama but of doubtful veracity, tells of the foolish British tyrant Vortigern who made a fatal drunken deal with two Saxon pirates (a pretty girl was involved) and sold Britain’s soul and future.3 Even Bede, the greatest of our early historians, writing nearly three centuries later, covers the nearly one hundred and fifty years after 450 with a single paragraph. The odd memorial stone offers us the name of a Christian priest living in a far-flung community; but no suggestion of when, or why. Occasionally a Continental source records or speculates on the visit of a Gaulish saint or bishop to these islands or on their encounters with pagans and heresies, but not of how people moved around their landscape, how they grew old, tended their sick or brought up their children. Archaeology sometimes tells us where people lived and what they ate, how they constructed their houses; but it says frustratingly little about their relations or their identity. We must piece together these fragmentary sources and animate them. But if we cannot construct a narrative history, what can we say about the journey of the peoples of Britain between the last days of Rome and those of Bede or the Vikings?

  Birdoswald is the starting block for my own journey through an age when people believed that the material ruins of lost cultures—the walls and fountains, megalithic tombs and great earthworks, the aqueducts, henges and stone circles that populated their landscape and poetry and framed their psyches—had been built in a lost time by a race of giants. An Anglo-Saxon elegy called ‘the Ruin’, first written down, perhaps, in the eighth century, marvels at nature’s conquest of these great works. After the opening lines, quoted at the front of this book, which describe fallen towers, wrecked gates and crumbling city walls, the poet writes:

  The earth’s embrace,

  Its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen;

  They are perished and gone. A hundred generations have passed away since then. This wall, grey with lichen and red of hue, outlives kingdom after kingdom,

  Withstands tempests; its tall gate succumbed.

  The city still moulders, gashed by storms… 4

  These words could almost have been written somewhere along the Wall. Even if the story of these centuries is not written in words, it is surely written in the landscape. Christian or pagan, its denizens enjoyed an intimate psycho
logical and mythical relationship with the mountains and vales, woods, fields, rivers and springs of these lands. They knew the winding routes of ancient trackways, the folds of the hills, the places where bright metals and precious clays might be dug from the ground, the ruins where they might yet scavenge materials and lost treasures. Their intimacy with a world at once wonderful and pragmatic tells the story of the British people in those enigmatic centuries which separate the ages of King Arthur and King Alfred.

  It is tempting to visit the monuments of the Dark Ages, such as they are, and believe that we have understood them. Wandering among the Anglo-Saxon or Pictish displays in our national and regional museums and marvelling at the astounding workmanship of smiths and scribes appeals to a sense of awe; even more to an innate curiosity, the thirst to know more. I have been privileged to excavate at the sites of some of those monuments, and to have handled some of the art and craft of the peoples of the Early Medieval period. I have pored over texts and tried to insinuate myself into the mindsets of Gildas and Bede, Patrick and Arthur. Practising as an archaeologist fascinates and frustrates in equal measure: the more you think you know, the more you appreciate the severe limitations set on our understanding of the remote past. It feels as though one is a constant straggler, just keeping the tail of truth in sight on some over-ambitious journey into the unknown. In undertaking a series of journeys through the landscapes of the Dark Ages, mostly on foot but occasionally on the water and once or twice by motorbike, I hope to catch up a little.

  My first journey, which I have presented as a sequence of eight interleaved fragments between accounts of nine longer itineraries, will end at Jarrow near the mouth of the River Tyne. It was here in the early eighth century that the monk Bede, in a career of astonishing productivity and erudition, began to lift a veil for his contemporaries (and for us) on these lost centuries by giving an account of the origins of the English peoples and their church from the arrival of Pope Gregory’s emissary, Augustine, in 597, onwards. At Bede’s World, close by the ruins of his monastery, are reconstructions of Early Medieval houses and a farm. And then, Jarrow has its own special place in the history of journeys and dark ages: there are still one or two left alive who remember stories of the Great Depression and of the Jarrow Crusade of 1936.

  Sometimes I will follow the Wall; but I want to know how these landscapes fit together as a complete picture, so I may deviate from the path from time to time to follow other trails through the land. Since this is my own backyard, I can walk this walk in stages as the fancy and the weather suit. It is little more than a gentle sixty-mile stroll. I have other landscapes to explore: the Welsh Marches and Wessex, the lands of the Britons, and the west coast archipelago ruled by the Dálriadic Scots; the creeks and woods of Essex, and the Inishowen peninsula of County Donegal. I want to know if the map of the Dark Ages can be read from beneath our city streets. Some of the routes I follow are authentically those of the saints and warriors, kings and craftsmen whose lives I want to understand. And I want to get some idea of how the peoples of the Dark Ages used, and abused, the Roman road system which they inherited. Walking that, while interesting, might not be good for my health, much of the network now being subsumed by our own arterial routes. So that’s an adventure to be undertaken on the bike. And I have a strong hankering to sail, in as old a craft as I can find, up the west coast of Britain from the Lizard to Iona in the wake of those intrepid, foolhardy or misdirected traders, pirates, princely exiles and pilgrims who made the same journey fifteen hundred years before me, carrying exotic pots, wine and oil from Byzantium and Gaul, tales of wonder from the Holy Land or merely hopes of a glorious future.

  By Bede’s day something quite new, breathtaking in its ambition, had emerged from the dark centuries (if, indeed, they were dark): the idea of a rational kingship embodied in a coherent model of statehood and a three-sided relationship between land, church and ‘nation’. With King Alfred (r. 871–99) it achieved an unprecedented expression of maturity and intellectual subtlety which allowed him to fend off the most formidable enemy of the age and elevate the kingdom of Wessex towards something like a core of the nation of England. The same goes for Wales in the person of Hywel Dda (r. 942–50) and in Scotland with the dynasty of Cináed mac Ailpín (r.841/43–58/59): three distinct entities that survived the next twelve hundred years and played their parts on the global stage. If the Dark Ages began with nothing more sophisticated than a barn conversion, that takes some explaining.

  I want to answer a few burning questions of my own: how can we explain the revolution in political thought and practice that takes the self-serving, augury-watching petty chief of fifth-century Birdoswald on the journey to becoming the rational head of state of the seventh century and beyond? What is the cultural engine that drives this new idea? Is it revolution or evolution? I want also to trace its inspiration: the inherited wisdom of the past, or a new idea imported from the other side of the known world?

  It is eleven o’clock in the morning on a perfect day in late November. With Birdoswald fort at my back, I head east along the Wall, following its uncompromising, celluloid ribbon towards the distant crags of the Whin Sill and beyond, to the sea.

  § CHAPTER ONE

  The kingdom of Dál Riata : Rothesay to Kilmartin

  Argyll and Northumbria—walking insights—Bute—landscapes of memorial—Dunagoil fort—wild camping—Dark Age entrepôts—Kingarth and St Blane—St Ninian’s Point—Inchmarnock—rescue by boat—Tarbert—St Columba’s cave—Cladh a Bhile—Kilmory chapel—another rescue—Lochgilphead—Dunadd—Kilmartin Glen

  ELLARY

  IN THE EARLY MEDIEVAL period the west coast of what is now Scotland, together with its islands from Arran to Skye, formed a Gaelic-speaking kingdom with very strong ties to the ancient lands of Ulster. As a historical entity it comes into focus only in the later sixth century: from then on the fortunes of its four principal kindreds, the Cenél Loairn of central and northern Argyll, the Cenél nGabrain of Kintyre, the Cenél Comgaill of Cowal and the Cenél nŒngusa of Islay are recorded in the annals of the famous monastery on Iona. Scholars cannot agree whether Dál Riata was originally carved out by Irish warbands or emerged from an immigrant community, but its kings laid claim to much of Ulster and its greatest holy man, St Columba (more properly Colmcille), was born in Donegal. Dál Riata came into conflict with its neighbours the Picts, the Britons of Dumbarton and the Northumbrians; but its most celebrated king, Áedán mac Gabrain, had a daughter who married into the Bernician royal family and the monastery on Lindisfarne was an Ionan foundation. Kings and clergy travelled between the two kingdoms regularly through the seventh century.

  Much of that traffic must have come by way of the sea and the Stanegate. But other cross-country routes existed. I explored one of these in 2011 when I walked from my home on the north-west edge of County Durham to Glasgow, the city on the Clyde founded by the enigmatic sixth-century saint Kentigern, or Mungo as he is often called. That walk reminded me that a proper journey is more than a day trip; that the trail only makes sense when you live on it; that landscape can best be read at walking pace. In choosing a place to camp, you have to read the countryside with your senses far beyond merely checking for car parks or cafés.

  A more profound insight is that when you are teasing a route through a landscape which has changed only superficially over the millennia—that is to say, the hills and rivers have not moved much, and many of the settlements are very ancient—you find yourself confronting and solving problems that would have been familiar to generations of travellers on foot or horseback. Sometimes the names of places give you clues: fords will naturally enough guide you towards crossing points on rivers; welles offer the chance to locate fresh spring water; a tun with the prefix straet suggests an establishment on a Roman road where goods and repairs might be sought. And some ancient settlements were named after local landmarks with prominent features like flat-topped hills so that you could navigate your way towards them. The landscape
is full of signs and waymarks for the informed traveller. The name Peebles means both a place where tents are pitched (handy) and a shieling 5 where animals were pastured in the summer. If I didn’t have a map or the internet, I would head for this place, hopeful of a night’s stay and food. Peebles still has a very excellent campsite (hot showers, soft grassy slopes; a washing machine) and offers plenty of good food. Travellers, like columns of ants, tend eventually to find the best routes through the land, avoiding hazards like bogs and brigands, often keeping to high ground once it has been gained and trending towards the gaps between major river systems, although just because a ford or ferry exists doesn’t mean to say that the traveller wishes either to pay the fare or attract what might prove to be unwanted attention.

  These days, bridges have replaced ferries and fords for the most part. Even so, the traveller on foot aims to avoid main routes, by and large. Walking along the verges of a busy A-road is a form of sensory torture and a risk to life and limb. So it was that I found myself making for the gap between the headwaters of the Rivers Clyde and Tweed. This gap, in the glen where Biggar sits, is no more than seven miles across. A Roman road runs through it and in experiencing for myself this age-old reality, I came closer, I thought, to an insight into the ancient mind. The whole journey, ending in Paisley where St Mirren, the Ulster-born contemporary of Colmcille, founded his famous church, took eleven days and spanned a hundred and eighty miles; but it took me back fifteen hundred years and more to the days when saints, pilgrims and warriors trod the same paths.

  For my venture into the Land of Giants I wanted to complete the journey between Northumbria and the ancestral seat of the kings of Dál Riata, so I persuaded my partner Sarah (an Ulster Scot) to join me on a small adventure through the hills, lochs and glens of Argyll to Dunadd in Kilmartin Glen, where a footprint carved in rock tells of kingly inaugurations and where excavation has revealed a treasure trove of exotic European luxuries. Even today this is not an entirely straightforward journey. By car it is a much longer route than it would be as the crow flies. Sea-lochs must be crossed where there is no ferry service. But the improvisational spirit in which we set out from Paisley in October 2013 (friends; a warm welcome and send-off) seemed entirely in keeping with the Dark Age task in hand. We knew there would be days when we might see no shop. No campsites existed on our route, so we took big packs, more than I have ever carried before on a long walk.