In ‘Uriconium: An Ode’, there is also a sense of the countryside’s continuity, indifferent to these minor human squalls: the Roman stones have rooted down into the landscape and become an inconspicuous part of a perfectly ordinary rural English life. ‘The village anvil rests on Roman base’, runs one line; the font in the church is ‘a temple’s column’ (as it still is). He does not mention the pair of Roman pillars that still serve as gateposts for the churchyard. Owen kept up his interest in antiquities through the war years: in April 1918, a month after writing ‘Strange Meeting’, he walked from the Yorkshire town of Ripon, where he was serving at the Northern Command Depot, to Aldborough. There he found ‘Roman Remains, and the finest tessellated pavement in Britain,’ he wrote to his mother. He added: ‘If in 1913 I used to wish to have lived in the 4th Century, how much more now!’ The companion of his youthful outings to Wroxeter was already dead. ‘I thought of poor Stanley Webb when I was among the “Remains”.’
Owen was not the first poet to find in Wroxeter a poetic metaphor through which to express the brevity of the human span. A. E. Housman published his sequence of poems, A Shropshire Lad, in 1896. Its deceptively simple, ballad-like verses are shot through with a quietly tearing sense of loss. Critical studies of his work have suggested he was impelled to write it in the wake of the departure to India of his friend Moses Jackson, with whom he was probably in love. His poems of yearning, and of youth cut off in its prime, resonated deeply for readers during the First World War. It was A Shropshire Lad, with its feeling for the rhythms of the English countryside, that soldiers read in the trenches, not Owen’s poems, whose creative flowering came at the end of the war and whose work found a public in the decades after it. Housman and Owen stand Janus-faced in relation to the war; Housman’s poems seeming obliquely to anticipate it, Owen’s posthumously shaping the public memory of it.
‘On Wenlock Edge’, Housman’s poem about Wroxeter, which Ralph Vaughan Williams later set to tremulous, febrile music, has one constant feature: the lashing gale, the ‘old wind’ that has troubled English yeoman and Roman alike. The Roman, now, is ashes under Uricon. And you will be too, soon, implies the poem. But the wind, indifferent and ageless, will go on blowing.
On Wenlock Edge the wood’s in trouble
His forest fleece the Wrekin heaves;
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
And thick on Severn snow the leaves.
’Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
There, like the wind through woods in riot,
Through him the gale of life blew high;
The tree of man was never quiet:
Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.
The gale, it plies the saplings double,
It blows so hard, ’twill soon be gone:
To-day the Roman and his trouble
Are ashes under Uricon.
In the summers before the outbreak of the war, the archaeologist J. P. Bushe-Fox was excavating at Wroxeter. A photograph shows him in knickerbockers and a straw boater, guiding visitors in plumed hats around the excavations: one of the little girls, with hair in long ringlets, looks like a character from an E. Nesbit story. One of the students at the dig was Mortimer Wheeler, who would later go on to become one of the most celebrated figures of twentieth-century British archaeology. He worked on numerous Romano-British sites, and on excavations in India; and, in co-founding the Institute of Archaeology at the University of London, was a crucial figure in transforming archaeology into an academic discipline. Owen and Wheeler almost certainly met at Wroxeter. In a letter to his mother dated 6 July 1913, Owen wrote: ‘I’ve not been to Uriconium again. Perhaps because of those two Oxford Blues, whose colours are to me as red to a bull.’ The ‘Oxford Blues’ were Wheeler’s fellow student diggers.
Wheeler had a good war and emerged a major. But by 1918 his generation, he recalled in his memoir, ‘had been blotted out’. He wrote: ‘Of the five university students who worked together in the Wroxeter excavations, only one survived the war. It so happened that the survivor was myself.’ The ‘Oxford Blues’ were dead. So was Owen, killed on 4 November 1918 as he crossed the Sambre-Oise canal in northern France with a raiding party. Wheeler experienced a profound sense of isolation, which, he wrote, became ‘a dominant element’ in the way he conceived of his life. ‘As a survivor,’ wrote his biographer, Jacquetta Hawkes, he felt ‘he had been entrusted with a mission on behalf of the dead’.
Wheeler himself was not an ‘Oxford Blue’ but studied at University College, London, where A. E. Housman taught him Latin – the great man seemed often distracted, remembered Wheeler, ‘though liable to rally unexpectedly in caustic comment, whether the subject were Martial’s text or its luckless exponent’. Owen had himself passed the matriculation exam for U.C.L., but he failed the exam for a scholarship, without which his family could not afford to support him; which perhaps accounts for his bitterness towards the ‘Oxford Blues’.
In time, Wheeler became the embodiment of the idea of archaeologist-as-hero, a swashbuckling figure and a household name, thanks to a broadcasting career in the 1950s and 60s. In the memorial address given after his death in 1976, he was uncompromisingly described as ‘a fire-breathing giant … relentlessly, inflexibly driven to achieve his aim by a mechanism which enlisted the help of lesser mortals and compelled them to bow in his path’. An early cover for his autobiography, Still Digging, shows him in half-profile; Indian excavators toil away in the distance. His military moustache is as stiff as a banner in the breeze, and his gaze is intense, intelligent and just a shade devilish. ‘Women were of immense importance to him and he enjoyed and made use of them in a marvellous variety of ways,’ wrote Hawkes, who then provided a typology: ‘young girls – including, I have been told, the domestics of at least one country house … women he met on his innumerable cruises and other travels … Any who were attractive, light-hearted and unlikely to interfere with his work … exceptional young women with fine looks … and with the character, vitality and temperament to offer the “resistance” – flint to his steel – that he needed to kindle his fires.’
In 1912, Wheeler had married a bright, small, charming young woman called Tessa Verney, who had grown up in Lewisham in the affectionate, if slightly unconventional, household of her mother and stepfather, who were not married to each other. She and Wheeler met at U.C.L. – they both served on the committee of the college literary society. If Wilfred Owen had passed his scholarship exam, he and Verney would have been exact contemporaries at the college. Verney threw over a scion of the building firm Mowlem to become engaged to the charismatic ‘Rik’, as he was known. She henceforth anchored her endeavours to his, setting her quick mind to the work of archaeology that so absorbed her husband. In 1920, he was appointed keeper of archaeology at the Museum of Cardiff, and the couple moved to Wales with their young son, Michael. Over two consecutive summers, 1924 and 1925, they excavated a remote Roman site at a farm near Brecon, simply known as ‘Y Gaer’ – the hill fort.
Y Gaer, slipped into a crook of the river Usk, is not easy to find. Roger Wilson’s Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain gives meticulous instructions, a catalogue of ‘unsignposted crossroads’, and ‘turn back hard on your right’ and ‘the second turning to the left, after crossing a stream’. We coaxed the camper van through the maze of minor roads; Wilson did not fail us. I knocked at the farmhouse door, asking: ‘Do you mind if I look at your Roman fort?’ The farmer did not: in fact he interrupted his lunch to give directions and advice (‘the west gate’s worth seeing’). I asked him what it was like, to have your own Roman fort. He shrugged. ‘I have g
rown up with it,’ he said, his voice the gentlest of Welsh melodies. ‘I’m more interested in their engineering, in what they could do in that way. These days, we shall be going backwards if we are not very careful. There is a Roman drain out there that still works when it rains. Quite an epitaph, isn’t it, really? Imagine the council doing something and expecting it to last two thousand years. It’s all plastic piping now. People want it all done yesterday, this is the problem.’
Wheeler, remembering the excavation in Still Digging, described this fort as ‘celebrated’, something that seems unbelievable now. The farmer told me that there was ‘a guidebook once’, but today there was not a signpost, nor an information board, nor the merest hint that behind the swallow-nested barns of his neat farmyard there was anything of interest at all. The fort is in effect a large sheep field, set about with walls and still-fine Roman gateways. It was simply built in about AD 80 with timber buildings, and remade in stone in the middle of the next century. A cavalry force was garrisoned here – 500 Vettones, from north-west Spain – and it was one of Wales’s most important forts, part of a network that dotted the hills between its twin fortresses of Isca (Caerleon, near Newport) and Deva (Chester), presiding over south and north respectively. Wheeler described the two summers of the dig as ‘the happiest and least anxious of all my enterprises’. Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist, who had famously surveyed Giza, spent his summer holiday nearby, amusing himself, recalled Wheeler, by measuring stone circles using ‘a single slender bamboo pea-stick and a visiting card’ – the visiting card to provide a right angle, and the pea-stick a line for surveying. (On one occasion, he and his wife Hilda were ‘treed’ by a bull.)
Wheeler too regarded the excavations as something of a holiday, according to Nowell Myres, one of the student diggers, later a great historian of the Anglo-Saxon period. He would begin the day by issuing instructions to the students and the ‘handful of unemployed Welsh navvies who comprised the labour force … and would then disappear, suitably equipped, in the direction of the river. In the evening he would return, not always overburdened with trophies of the chase, listen to what we told him of the day’s work on the dig, and explain to us what he thought it meant.’ It was Tessa who ‘coped with all the organisational and administrative chores that a dig entails, including the provision of enormous picnic meals’. Later, Petrie would write to Wheeler remarking on the fact that the eventual site report ‘effaced any record of the unfailing driving power of Mrs Wheeler, which seemed the back-bone of the carry-on’. It is hard to tell whether his tone is critical or approving.
At Y Gaer, it was pure pastoral. The air was filled with the plaintive baaing of the fresh-shorn sheep; a pair of red kites floated serenely on the hot summer thermals above us. The day blazed; Matthew and I picnicked under an oak, leaning on the Roman walls. It was an eclogue afternoon: made for lying, as Virgil wrote, ‘lentus in umbra’, leisurely in the shade.
It is a trope of Augustan Latin poetry to cast back to the distant past and imagine the thronged streets of modern Rome before it was built, when it was all meadows and bucolic. In the eighth book of Virgil’s Aeneid, Evander, an Arcadian who has founded a kingdom in Italy, shows Aeneas round his domain: which happens to be the future site of Rome, to be founded three centuries hence by Aeneas’s descendant Romulus. Evander points out the future Capitoline Hill, which in Virgil’s time was the site of the greatest temple of the city, dedicated to Jupiter. The tree-fringed summit and its grove cause the local people to tremble in religious awe, Evander tells Aeneas. He says: some god lives there, but we don’t know who. Virgil is giving the topography of Augustan Rome a numinous aetiology, suffusing its everyday modernity with the mythical.
The spot has its own ancient ruins, too. In tour-guide mode, Evander continues: ‘Haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris,/ reliquias veterumque vides monimenta virorum’ – ‘Here you can see two buildings with shattered walls. They are the relics and monuments of ancient men.’ The buildings, he explains, are citadels built by Janus and Saturn – deities who occupied this place in the deep past and ruled over it for ‘aurea saecula’, a golden age. The group approaches Evander’s lowly dwelling, ‘passimque armenta videbant/ Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis’ – ‘and everywhere they saw herds of cattle lowing in the Roman forum and the smart Carinae’. Virgil lets time collapse here, such that for a moment his contemporary readers would have been given the head-spinning image of cattle roaming the streets of their own busy city – a kind of double exposure, past and present in the same frame. Reading these lines in the twenty-first century, there is a different frisson again: the oleander- and cyprus-fringed Forum of our day is once more empty but for tourists and old stones. For us, a visit to the Roman Forum is more like Aeneas’s tour-guided trip round Evander’s ancient realm. Time has come full circle: from pastoral ruin to pastoral ruin. But in a curious way, our modern perspective is implicit in the passage: it is as though by conjuring the ruins of Saturn’s old city, Virgil can foresee the ruins of his own Rome. Nothing lasts for ever; empires come and go. As I lay in the shade, lulled by the breeze-shifted canopy of leaves above, I felt how eloquently and sorrowfully realised were Virgil’s lines, here in the pasture of Y Gaer.
In the sixteenth century, a Roman tombstone was found near the farm. In the Wheelers’ day it was on the Roman road leading away from Y Gaer into the valley; now it is in the sleepy, agreeably tatty Brecknock Museum at Brecon (outside which stands a bronze sculpture, by John Thomas, of Boudica brandishing a sword as her daughters huddle in her skirts, which pre-dates Thornycroft’s group at Westminster Bridge by almost half a century). Although the Roman tombstone is much worn and weathered, we could still clearly see the subject of the carved relief. R. G. Collingwood, the great authority on the inscriptions of Roman Britain, wrote it up for Mortimer’s archaeological report on Y Gaer thus: ‘Above, full-length figures of a man and his wife are cut in relief. The woman’s left arm rests on her husband’s shoulder, while her right arm seems to cross her body so that she may clasp her husband’s right hand, but the weathering and flaking of the stone obscures all details and only permits us to see that the group has been a dignified and well-designed composition … The local name, Maen y Morwynion (Maidens’ Stone) betrays the impression made by the group on the minds of passers by.’ Of the inscription beneath, only the words ‘coniunx eius h. s. e.’ can be made out – meaning ‘her husband put this up’. (The abbreviated letters are short for ‘hic situs est’, or ‘put this up’.) Though the image is worn almost to complete smoothness, there is something ineffably touching about it, as Collingwood betrays even through his objective epigrapher’s description.
In July 1926, the summer after the Wheelers finished work at Y Gaer, Mortimer took up a new job, as the director of the then embryonic Museum of London. The South Wales News covered the leaving-party speeches: ‘In Mrs Wheeler Dr Wheeler had a wonderful chief of staff … Mrs Wheeler, in replying, said she had always endeavoured to be a part of the shadow behind her husband.’ Notwithstanding Mortimer’s new job, there was still unfinished business to be attended to in Wales: he had already laid plans for another excavation, this time near the mouth of the Usk at Caerleon.
Caerleon had been the garrison of the 2nd Legion; now it is a small, pretty town, despite being jammed up against the motorway and the sprawl of Newport. The twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales described in his Itinerarium Kambriae, or Journey Around Wales, what he saw there. ‘Caerleon is of unquestioned antiquity. It was constructed with great care by the Romans, the walls being built of brick. You can still see many vestiges of its one-time splendour. There are immense palaces, which, with the gilded gables of their roofs, once rivalled the magnificence of ancient Rome. They were set up in the first place by some of the most eminent men of the Roman state, and they were therefore embellished with every architectural conceit. There is a lofty tower, and beside it remarkable hot baths, the remains of temples and an amphitheatre. All this is enclose
d within impressive walls, parts of which still remain standing. Wherever you look, both within and without the circuit of these walls, you can see constructions dug deep into the earth, conduits for water, underground passages and air vents.’
It is not quite as splendid now as Gerald described it 900 years ago, and his ‘gilded gables’ were surely something of a fantasy, but when Matthew and I visited, we still could see a fragment of the great baths with their swimming pool, and a portion of the pillared, naved exercise hall, once the size of a cathedral. And out on the town’s edge was the great amphitheatre, traditionally known as King Arthur’s Round Table, grassy-bottomed and high-banked. On the hot June day when we met my brother and his family here, boys were kicking a ball around the sheltered green enclosure. We walked in through the Roman gates and, like other visiting families, laid out a picnic, crowding into the sparse shade cast by the stone-supported seating banks. Tilda and Eleanor, my nieces, ranged around the amphitheatre, mapping the hunks and hollows of the structure as they made it their playground; we lazier adults dozed in the sun. Before he had accepted the job in London, Wheeler had announced his plans for excavating the amphitheatre, using the Arthurian associations as a hook to tempt the newspapers. The ploy worked. The Daily Mail was down in a flash, and offered to pay £1,000 towards the cost of the excavation in return for exclusive news from the dig. Archaeology had – as Wheeler wrote – ‘acquired a new market value’. That was surely down to the sensational discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb three years before. South Wales was not Egypt: but Wheeler, a journalist’s son, was learning how to harness the power of the press.
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