by Rod Mengham
2003
Soluble Culture
Flag Fen, on the outskirts of an industrial estate near Peterborough, is a triumph of the invisible. One of the most important Bronze Age sites in Britain, it has neither the dramatic monoliths of Wiltshire or Orkney, nor even a bank, ditch, barrow or enclosure to mark the spot. Everything remains buried, apart from one small plot where the Bronze Age levels have been stripped of their cover and enclosed by a square brick hall. Inside, the material remains consist of several rows of three-thousand-year-old posts, alder and poplar, now dark and blasted but once the exposed tips of a timber platform stretching over water for one kilometre. Ten metres wide, the completed monument was an assemblage of over 66,000 posts, arranged into five rows. In use for some four hundred years, from about 1300 BC to 900 BC, its purpose was to make things disappear.
A religious recycling centre, the platform enabled the inhabitants of dry land to walk over water and consign their worldly goods to oblivion. Everyday objects in tip-top condition, flint tools and beautifully modelled pots, were dumped in huge quantities. High status ornaments and valuable weapons were deliberately smashed and decommissioned before being reassigned to another dimension, which is where the dead must live. The ancestors required food in the after-life, and so packed lunches were provided. Two completely unused quernstones were couriered over to enable them to grind their own corn. The point about all these votive offerings is that they were abandoned unconditionally, there was no cultural reclamation scheme, subsequent generations could not scavenge like metal detectorists, there were no Bronze Age repomen. It was only in fantasy, or in archaeology, that a hand would bring back Excalibur for a second chance, or that anyone would think of taking that chance.
The water began to rise after about 900 BC, and the whole edifice was drowned. Layers of silt accumulated steadily for over two and a half thousand years until the seventeenth century, when the long process of draining the fens was started. Channels were cut, guiding the water elsewhere, allowing the soils to dry, oxidise and blow away. At this point, the Wizard of Oz failed to turn up in East Anglia, and was filed away for another three hundred years. When enough soil had been exhausted, the felled timbers began to surface once more. The archaeology has left them in situ, but the situs is radically different. They are now cloaked in the spray of Anglia Water’s ‘innovative misting system’, although this operates according to a rhythm of alternating showers and dry spells. The intermissions are extraordinary, when the silence begins to stage a comeback, as it thinks to do every few minutes, allowing the wood and mud to produce its own tiny capillary sounds. When this happens, you can hear the platform start to dream. It fully expects the whole process to shift into a different gear. The coordinates are scanned, the portals line up, the Stargate is about to open.
But there is no SG-1, no expeditionary force that did not go safely from one area of dry land to another. The passage between elements, between dimensions, was not a moving staircase designed by Powell and Pressburger. The journey was never undertaken, not even in imagination. The Bronze Age reconnaissance party was only ever given the practical task of sending objects down a conveyor-belt. They knew the experiment would go horribly wrong if you rearranged the molecular structure of personnel as well as utensils. Entering the portal, going over to the other side, is what we do now. But in case we should miss it, the Fenland Archaeological Trust has given us a sign: not ‘Staff Only’ but ‘The Door to the Past’. The door requires a good shove: ‘Enter and Step / Back in Time to the / BRONZE AGE.’ First, we see the tangle of wooden piles enjoying their endless sauna; and then behind, or rather above them, on all four walls, a mural depicting the scene outside on a summer’s day, three thousand years before the present. This painting is nearly as interesting as the prehistoric walkway, and after a while it is more interesting. Blatant, kitschy and as flat as a Julian Opie, it operates on the Tardis principle of giving an infinite extension to something shut in a box. Wherever you turn, you can see to the horizon. The painting is continuous through 365 degrees: over concrete blocks, under light switches and heaters, around exit signs. Its main effect is to make you stand still and absorb the details of a landscape that is not there – alerting the senses to sights, sounds and smells no longer available. The rituals of the Bronze Age would have suppressed this immediacy. The souls of objects were released into a muddy, obscuring medium, muffling all sound and extinguishing taste and smell. Sliding into the depths, they passed out of use and memory.
A more ambiguous door into the past swings on the hinges of the old Visitors’ Centre. Although its replacement has been open for less than four months, this ancestral hall of wetland archaeologists is already suffering neglect. Only a quarter of its area is occupied by displays; the rest is a wilderness of outdated furniture and amplified plumbing sounds. It has the tranquillity of abandonment, broken suddenly by one burst of nervous laughter, coming from an unidentified source. The sound, which is cloaked and distant, is abruptly stifled. Like a conspirator in an English novel of the 1930s, this hidden day-dreamer is revelling in the details of a fantastic hoax, which members of the public must not know about. In any case, they only seem to stray in here by accident, nearly missing the extraordinary concentration of artefacts and residues of the Bronze Age farmer’s encounter with cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, waterfowl, fish, eels, wheat, barley, hay, thatching, timber and peat. There is a wealth of domestic paraphernalia, but also an astounding display of fine metalwork, damaged but not ruined. Including a group of miniature swords of the late Wilburton type (900–800 BC) whose pale bronze sheen makes them look for all the world like a set of Mycenaean daggers. The polished armour of the beetle Donacia impresa, which feeds exclusively on bulrushes, tells an important story about the extent of wetland in the prehistoric epoch. It would have made the drovers curse, when their heavily laden carts got bogged down. The earliest wheel in Britain (1300 BC) is here, an assured piece of joinery whose tripartite structure would have allowed for quick-fit maintenance. But Ministry of Transport inspectors aside (taking road tax where no tax has gone before), everyone else on site has turned into so much diverted traffic.
The focus is elsewhere, on the reconstructions. First up is the Iron Age roundhouse. I have been in this twice, and on both occasions there was the strong smell of a recent fire lingering around its tooled rafters. The light enters via pinholes in the roof and along horizontal shafts bursting through the door to pick out a series of superimposed modern bootmarks: 2001 Brashers, 2000 Meindls, 1999 Hi-Tecs – none of any real archaeological interest except perhaps the worn down prints of a pair of 1996 Timberlands. They bespeak some kind of ceremony carried out in the ash and dust and perhaps involving the vibrantly red minifire extinguisher. But the Iron Age is a polite afterthought at Flag Fen, where the real stock in trade is the alloys market. There is now a number of Bronze Age huts to choose from. Birds depart rapidly from the eaves as you enter the prototype. They have been caught taking Bronze Age roofing materials to heart, as well as to their nests. On my last visit, there was a nice new roundhouse next door, walls of hazel interlarded with a mixture of clay, straw and cow dung. The high finish to the plasterwork was needed for the curator’s most audacious move, a series of speculative wall-paintings with geometric patterns. I realised suddenly I was in the showroom of a Bronze Age housing estate, and that a whole sector of the construction industry was poised for downsizing into Heritage. Outside grazed the simulacra of prehistoric sheep, trimming the edges of neat gravel paths, woolly exegetes of the universal aroma of manure. Laddish enthusiasts began to stake out the territory for a display of authentic skills such as hurdling and Australian-rules body painting.
Meanwhile, the archaeology continues to disappear. The cross-section of Roman road is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese produced under licence in Cheshire. A beehive has been established in the centre and nearer the bottom are several animal burrows. There is the powdered detritus of a sequence of miniature landslips. In the wood ta
nks, the water levels have dropped (there are condensation marks on the plastic sheeting). Exposed timber surfaces have started to fur over with moss. The pace of deterioration quickens into a legionaries’ march. The only replenishments are those of plant species surviving from the Bronze Age: pondweed and great reedmace. Sedges flourish alongside flag irises, water plantains, water violets, purple loosestrife, devil’s bit scabious and bog bean.
The organic material crumbles, the strata bleed into each other. This is an inevitable process, part of the evolution of the site, which has taken on form and significance through a history of ramifying, syncopating, converging and diverging narratives and performances of loss and abandonment. Flag Fen is all about being resigned to a culture of giving things away. Disposable culture, relinquished, yielded up in a series of acts of surrender all held in solution, literally and figuratively.
But there is one set of artefacts that does not belong in the same scenario. Perhaps it did once, but it certainly does not now. This is the unique collection of timbers that composed the monumental circle of ‘Seahenge’, disclosed by a storm on the beach at Holme-next-the-Sea in October 1998. They are all there, the fifty-five posts that made up the circle around the massive central oak stump weighing two and a half tons. Sea water makes crystallised salt that damages prehistoric wood once it is unearthed, which is why English Heritage mounted a rescue operation to transport the various worked pieces of oak – and a honeysuckle rope – to wherever they could be studied properly. This had to be Flag Fen, and the research done has been meticulous and amazing, revealing that the great central stump was dislodged in either late spring or early summer of 2050 BC, when it was already two hundred and sixty years old. The total ensemble was hewn from between eight and fifteen trees, using broad-bladed bronze axes whose multi-directional strokes are individually fingerprinted according to irregularities in the metal.
But these massive fragments have been left in the morgue for nearly four years. And they have given up. The smaller posts, wrenched and bleeding, have sunk into deadness. The great altar, whose roots once pointed to the starlight, has been strapped down on its side. The trunk is striped with the flow channels of four years of douches, while the foam padding has become decrepit and addled with mould. It looks stunted, shrunken in on itself under loops of green piping and sacking off-cuts. There is enough green slime in the tank to bring you out in a cold sweat. I never thought I would say this, or think it, but the henge should never have been moved. It was part of a repertoire of sands and soils, of woods and waves, that gave it permission. It took its bearings from the masses and contours of the surrounding landscape, and in return it organised the materials and their meanings.
The latest fad among TV archaeologists in the era of the mixing desk is archaeo-acoustics. The idea is that certain neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, including the great chambered tombs and stone circles, have been given a structure that will resonate with particular frequencies, that will create the conditions for a certain pattern of sounds to be reproduced, even today. The spatial arrangements are what guarantee the time-links. I don’t believe in this, but I can understand what motivates the thinking behind it. Monuments have only one context – which is not that of the earth they are mystically tied to: none of that pietism. The look and feel of the land have changed enormously over four thousand years, although it is still difficult to walk for an hour on the sands at Old Hunstanton, two miles further south, without counting the stumps of at least twenty neolithic trees. Location means belonging to a particular history of use, above all a history of giving, of letting go, in the terms of a social and religious economy that seems alien to us even though it germinated the beginnings of our own customs. Maybe it is only in the work of the imagination that we can match the generosity of that culture in its place. And if that is so: back to work with a vengeance.
2003
Walking with Sebald
Sebald’s work was diagnosis. When you got to the end of The Rings of Saturn, you felt that you had been given a forensic trail uncovering the steps leading to the ruined condition of the European sensibility. And this was enough to account for the state of near-paralysis suffered by the narrator in the first few pages of the book. The first person dominating this text – despite the many extensive passages of ventriloquism – felt crippled personally by the chronic wasting disease know as the European cultural tradition. No other explanation was necessary. History was a burden whose full weight was borne individually, and the more one understood of it, the more one sank beneath its overwhelming pressure. It was a brilliant stroke to issue this report of a walking tour from a position of complete immobility. It meant that the idea of travel, and the purposes of travel, could be entertained first and foremost as a journey of the mind. Sebald’s itinerary along the Suffolk coast was literally and metaphorically eccentric, missing out several major foci of historical interest, including Aldeburgh and Sutton Hoo. These and other omissions allow one to gauge something of his motivation in choosing the particular tracts of country he explores in such detail, even though the detail is rendered much more in terms of historical associations than with regard to the physical reality of the landscape. Sebald pauses in his journey in order to recall the stories of individuals linked to specific places, and he is especially drawn to those episodes in their lives concerned with moments of choice, often of critical importance not just for one or two people, but decisive in the way they reveal the condition of an entire class, or the way of life of a sea-faring nation, or the collective psychology of an imperial power. This is a book of forking paths, a record of turning points in history, of the roads not taken. Sir Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Chateaubriand, Edward Fitzgerald and Swinburne are among those figures who provide scenarios of diverging trails, and of misgivings that they have taken the wrong turning, that the route they have pursued has caused them to lose the lives they should have led. Sebald’s own passage through the Suffolk countryside is constantly bedevilled by labyrinthine indirectness and actual mazes; he is thwarted by culs de sac and obliterated footpaths, turning this elegy for lost directions into a chronicle of anxiety.
The narrative commences with elegiac evocations of the characters and habits of three friends who have died within a short space of each other. The first two are scholars, the third a retired judge, but all three exemplify a complete immersion in the world of their study or contemplation, turning them into guardians of a body of knowledge, conduits for a particular current in intellectual or cultural history. When they die, an exceptional way of seeing the world dies with them, something that can never be replaced. Elsewhere in the book, it is not the tragic loss of individuals, but the slow death of entire families, the irreversible decline of complete industries, that appear to gather momentum in the telling. One of the most poignant reveries of all concerns the historical standing of the Ashbury family, residents of a large Irish country estate who cannot afford to defend their property against dilapidation. The physical deterioration keeps pace with the erosion of their will to survive and their ability to cope. Despite the inevitability of their eclipse, the narrator confesses his desire, formed during his short stay with them, to spend the rest of his life in the shadow of their bewildered stoicism, and this passage takes the full measure of Sebald’s devotion to expired hopes and lost illusions. Even when the road not taken leads nowhere, it remains the occasion of lasting regret.
As the narration progresses, it thickens with the details of ways of inhabiting the landscape that have nearly all disappeared, and as it follows a course never very far from the Suffolk coast, it traces the outline of a constantly shifting threshold between land and sea. The East coast is where more of the English landscape has crumbled away than anywhere else. And the most spectacular marker of this vanishing territory is the town of Dunwich, once one of the busiest ports in the country, now reduced to the partial remains of a small complex of ecclesiastical buildings formerly on the very edge of town. But the lament for a lost landscape
is even more profoundly felt in the remarkable section of the text concerned with the ecological trauma of 16 October 1987, when millions of mature trees, comprising the heart of Britain’s ancient woodland, were devastated by hurricane force winds. Every adult in Britain now has a double focus on particular parts of the landscape, a before and after effect in their awareness of something missing that has to be supplied by the imagination. And this experience of loss is parallel to the émigré’s feeling of dislocation from the landscape he grew up in, the environment in which the very template for his sense of landscape was formed. Perhaps this is why the human centre of the book seems to be provided by the narrator’s visit to the home of another German-speaking emigrant, the writer Michael Hamburger, exiled from his native Berlin when only nine years old.
While the text is genuinely moved by the loss of physical features in the ensemble of town and country settings, of customs, ideas and personalities that it so scrupulously explores, it is arguing ultimately that landscape is something you carry around in your head, perhaps even more than it is something you encounter necessarily in your movement through a sensuous world. Perhaps this is why there is a high incidence of dreams in the text, since in dream it is common for the landscapes of one’s past to be re-worked and combined. The writing fuses the log-book of a pedestrian journey with the flight of the imagination – its plotted itinerary keeps turning into an exploratory wandering. Just as the mind keeps pace with the body, and then moves away from it, so the text functions partly through retrieval and commemoration, partly through invention. Its strategy is reflected in the life-work of one of Sebald’s heroes, the farmer Thomas Abrams, who has gradually abandoned farming – with the immediacy of its link to the landscape – in order to devote more of his time to the construction of a large-scale model of the Temple in Jerusalem. No one living knows what the Temple looked like, but the cultural imperative to remember its significance can only be achieved with an imaginative meticulousness otherwise known as love.
