The Secret History of Here

by Alistair Moffat

  13 February

  Almost two millennia ago news blew north on the wind. In the summer of the year AD 43 the people of the valley got wind of momentous events in the south. The most powerful man in the world had sent his armies to conquer the holy island of Britain. And when they had defeated the kings of the southern kindreds, the Emperor of Rome had ridden in triumph through their capital place, it was said, on a huge creature the like of which had never been seen before. It was called an elephant.

  Like the animals of the Wildwood who sniffed the air for the scent of predators, we still say we ‘get wind’ of things to come, often rumours, strange stories, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the news of the Roman invasion crackled like wild-fire up and down the length of Britain. There can be no doubt that the farmers of our little valley knew that the Empire had crossed the sea and moved north. ‘Have you heard?’ ricocheted around the western hills. It was an event that had been planned for months and was anticipated in much more remote parts of Britain.

  In AD 51, the Emperor Claudius had a triumphal arch raised in Rome that listed eleven British kings who came to Colchester to submit to him. One had come a very long way, more than six hundred miles to bow before the imperial throne. In advance of the invasion, the King of Orkney had entertained Roman diplomats and agreed to allow the islands to become a nominal part of the Empire. It was a vivid gesture, a demonstration that allowed a politically useful boast that Claudius’s power could reach across the ocean to overcome the peoples who lived at the ends of the Earth.

  In the fields around our farm, the Mason brothers had found evidence of wide-ranging networks of trade, and merchants always add news to the bargain. In the paddock near the farmhouse Walter and Bruce picked up two fragments of jet, a black, lustrous stone that was mined mostly at Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. Some of the flints Walter Elliot gave me came from Ireland and the Lake District, and, just as surely, stories of startling events, of gigantic creatures and vast armies of uniformed legionaries came up from Colchester and the south-east. In the same way that we are, our ancestors were especially curious about breaking news, and each traveller would have been interrogated for the latest developments.

  In the first millennium BC, politics in Britain had shifted focus. Warlords who commanded bands of warriors began to carve out small kingdoms and only a few miles to the east, on the northernmost of the three Eildon Hills, a huge building project had begun. Around the summit a vast rampart was dug, more than a mile in length, and on a shelved plateau on the southern flank of the hill three hundred roundhouses were raised. This vast hillfort was the capital place of powerful kings and it sits astride the ancient frontier between the shepherd-hunters of the Selgovae and the ploughmen-farmers known as the Votadini. Which kindred controlled the great hillfort is a matter of continuing conjecture.

  A cold wind blew this morning, bending the young trees by the Bottom Track, and I thought about the long past as I pulled up my collar. Just as we do when trouble arises, the people of the valley would have thought of the Roman invasion as a threat, but comfortingly remote. We see our farm as a refuge from the storms of the world, and we hope we keep the gathering chaos at arm’s length. Two thousand years ago the tramp of the legions, drums beating, harness jingling, was a distant rumble of breaking thunder, but it did not remain so for long. Perhaps that is a lesson of history we should learn.

  15 February

  On a spring morning, at the foot of the Long Track where it crosses the Hartwoodburn, the army of the Empire marched. Between six and seven thousand men – Roman legionaries and auxiliaries from the northern provinces of Batavia and Tungria, all in full armour, their shields slung, the eagle standards glittering in the sun – were making their way west into the hills to build a fortress. Flanked by detachments of mounted scouts on the northern and southern ridges of our little valley, the soldiers were probably led by Gnaeus Julius Agricola, their general and the governor of Britannia.

  Almost forty years after Claudius came to Colchester, the Emperor Vespasian had ordered the conquest of Caledonia. With detachments from the II, the IX and the XX Legions, Agricola advanced north in a pincer movement to surround the hostile Selgovae. One invasion force moved up the line of the modern M74, and the other up the line of the A68. In the lee of the vast native hillfort of Eildon Hill North, the legionaries built a large fort and depot. Once that base had been established, their general decided to strike into the heart of Selgovan territory, and on that spring morning nineteen centuries ago the jingle of harness, the creak of ox-carts, the thud of hobnailed sandals and the shouts of the optios to keep their centuries in formation rent the air of our valley. Rome had come and history had begun. Hard, recorded, reliable facts chased the suppositions and uncertainties of prehistory into the shadows.

  I was out with Maidie on a crystal morning of brilliant sun, and I decided that we should go and walk in the footsteps of the legions and look at what remained of their presence in the western hills. In a slanting winter light, I followed the line of an old drystane dyke up to a plateau topped by a rectangular plantation of sitka spruce. This was the site of Oakwood Fort, about three miles west of our farm. Only discovered in 1949 by a sharp-eyed surveyor looking at aerial photographs, it is a mysterious, unsuspected place. I had hoped that the low sun would show up the shadows of banks and ditches amongst the tussocky marsh grass. But there was virtually nothing to be seen. On the east and south sides all I could make of the place was a plateau with gently sloping sides and on the north and west what might have been ditching. But, to my eye, they looked more like natural features.

  When in 1951 and 1952 archaeologists surveyed the area and lifted the turf, they uncovered an extraordinarily rich record. To the north of the intended site of the fort was a temporary camp of thirty-three acres built to protect Agricola’s legions and their auxiliaries while they worked on the defences of the fortress. In a more or less square design, they raised a rampart of between eighteen and twenty-three feet in width by piling up turf, using the sods like large bricks. On top was a palisade of rammed stakes and at each of the four gateways were two high towers or fighting platforms on either side of double portals, one gate for entering and the other for leaving. The oak stumps of these towers were found by the archaeologists to be still in situ. Each gate and its towers was set back thirty feet from the line of the rampart to create a funnelled entrance way, just like at the fort on the motte. It made attackers vulnerable, forced to take fire from two sides.

  Oakwood’s three and a half acres housed five hundred soldiers, a legionary cohort as well as a mounted detachment. It was placed on this site because it is possible to see the summit of Eildon Hill North through a gap in the eastern hills. There the garrison at the large fort known as Trimontium built a signal station and messages could be exchanged in moments.

  As the Selgovan warriors watched from the high ridges, Rome was planting its standard in the heart of their territory. Seen from long distances up the Ettrick Valley to the west, this fortress was a mighty military symbol, garrisoned by professional, hardened soldiers protected by cavalry. It was an early example of a glen-blocker fort, the sort built to contain the mountain kindreds of the Highlands when Agricola’s army marched further north.

  Contact with native farmers and herdsmen must have been constant. With more than five hundred mouths to feed, and with horses to graze and find winter forage for, the fort’s quartermaster bargained with local food producers. There are five native enclosures, ramparts that were probably palisaded, within a mile of the garrison and in two of them Roman coins have been found. Fortifications as close as that would only have been tolerated if they were useful and friendly. Oakwood was occupied for only twenty-four years. In 105 the Emperor Trajan recalled legions from Britannia to fight a flaring war on the Danube frontier and the Romans abandoned their conquest of Caledonia. Archaeologists found evidence that the wooden towers had been burned. Perhaps the kings of the Selgovae made a bonfire of their humi
liation.

  I know that the legions of the Empire marched past our farm because in a brilliant investigation of the ground over considerable distances archaeologists found the road they built between Oakwood and Trimontium, the army depot below the Eildon Hills. There is evidence that it was used much later as a boundary between farms and in places the road-mound is very clear, sometimes as much as five metres in width. The soldiers at Oakwood spent almost all of their time not fighting. Road-building kept them busy and out of trouble.

  16 February

  This is the time of the year the native kindreds called Imbolc, the feast that celebrated first fruits, when ewes let down their milk before lambing. It was a welcome signpost in an annual cycle of change and renewal. This morning I saw straw bedding being taken into the lambing shed up at Brownmoor. In two or three weeks’ time, depending on the weather, the first of the little ones should be staggering around their pens, blinking under the heat lamps, bleating for warm mother’s milk. Perhaps my granddaughter will be old enough to see the wee lambs.

  17 February

  I love the early mornings, the hour when the darkness slowly dissolves, the day begins and the mind clears. An open sky promised sun, and Maidie and I climbed up to the ridge where the Top Wood once stood. Because she is little more than fourteen inches off the ground, the terrier likes to jump up out of the tall grass onto a tree stump and see a little more of the world. The ridge commands wide views of the whole valley, and long vistas to the west and east. While we waited for the rays of yellow warmth to rise over Greenhill Heights, seven swans flew over us, no more than forty or fifty feet up, so close I could see the orange of their beaks and the black markings above them. The great birds were honking, as though encouraging each other to fly faster, stay together, and I wondered at their urgency. Where were they going in such a hurry? And why?

  As the sun bathed the land, rising very quickly, and the dieback glowed gold, the seven swans flew west. I could see the plantation of sitka spruce at Oakwood Fort peeping over the far horizon and wondered what the sentries would have made of these majestic birds. There were seven, a magic number, and perhaps they muttered to each other that this was an omen, good or bad.

  First light in the fortress would have followed a strict military routine. In the principia, the headquarters building that stood where the scruffy sitka now grow, the fort’s centurions would meet for morning report with the prefect. They submitted lists of men available for duty, and those who were absent or sick were recorded. The password of the day was agreed, the sentries around the garrison’s standards were named and orders were given. At Oakwood, patrolling and the gathering of intelligence in hostile territory will have been a prime concern and reports will have gone regularly to the regional headquarters at Trimontium. Work rosters were drawn up. The fabric of the fort needed constant maintenance, materials had to be sourced and roads built, kept passable, especially in the winter. Mounted messengers would have moved between Oakwood and Trimontium, and heavily escorted packhorses, ox-carts and mules laden with supplies would have creaked along the new road at the foot of the Long Track, half a mile from our farmhouse. When I cross it, I feel an intersection of history.

  Standing with Maidie on the ridge of the Top Wood, and knowing how echoic our valley is on still mornings like this, I am certain we would have heard the tubicen, the trumpeter, sound orders as legionaries and auxiliaries left the fort on patrol or drilled on the parade ground by its walls. Highly organised, well trained and ruthless, the Roman garrison dominated the valley and the hill country around it. The contrast between these uniformed soldiers, with their red cloaks, shining armour, plumed helmets and disciplined marching columns, and the native homespun of the warriors of the Selgovan kings could not have been more stark.

  For twenty years our valley was drawn into the Empire, a highly connected wide world that stretched south to Africa and east to the deserts of Persia. The cohort in the fort may have been Spaniards from the IX Legio Hispana, or Gauls from II Legio Augusta, or perhaps Italians from the XX Legio Valeria Victrix. When Oakwood was built, Rome was in its pomp, its Emperors masters of the known world. But it would be a mistake to confuse the Empire with civilisation.

  Because the Romans left written records, were spectacularly successful in warfare, created an Empire that lasted until 1453, when Constantinople fell, were ingenious engineers and, most important of all, were an urban culture, historians give them a disproportionately prominent role in our history. Indeed, many histories of Scotland and Britain begin with the Romans, devoting only a few introductory pages to prehistory, the story of our ancestors, those who peopled our landscape for eight or nine millennia before the Roman armies brought slaughter and destruction. It seems to be forgotten that the soldiers at Oakwood and across Britannia were colonists, exploiters and oppressors. Just because the early history of Britain is difficult to piece together does not mean it should be ignored.

  18 February

  It rained so heavily this morning that even taking the dogs out to pee earned me a soaking and a first change of clothes. So much of our clayish mud stuck to my boots that I had to stand even longer in the downpour to scrape it off. The Anglo-Saxons called February Solmonath, Mud-Month. It is listed in a text that fascinates me. In addition to much else, and his magisterial Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede of Jarrow wrote a treatise called De Temporum Ratione (On the Reckoning of Time) in the early eighth century. It was enormously influential and shaped the way our culture sees the passage of time.

  Because he was the first genuinely scrupulous and generally accurate native historian in British historiography, Bede took great trouble with dates in his Ecclesiastical History. To make the sequence of events as clear as possible, he adopted the AD system of dating we use today. It was invented by Dionysius Exiguus (Little Denis), a monk who died in AD 544 at Tomis on the Black Sea coast. He worked out that AD 1 was the year when Christ was both conceived and born. There is no evidence that he was correct, and some that he got it wrong. According to the gospel writers, Christ may have been born in the last year of the reign of Herod the Great – that is, 4 BC. Or in the year of the first Roman census of Judaea, which took place from AD 6 to AD 7. And so we may all be living in the wrong year.

  Bede had other reasons for writing De Temporum Ratione. The early British church had been riven with dispute over the dating of its principal festival of Easter and Bede used the new system to work out a table of dates for Easter up to AD 1063. He also wanted to sort out a chronology of world history up to the reign of his contemporary, Leo the Isaurian, Emperor of Rome in the East at Constantinople. Although AD was a concept created by someone else, it was Bede’s adoption of it that led to its use in Europe, particularly at the court of Charlemagne, and its ultimate ratification in AD 1048 by Pope Leo IX.

  What became known as the calendar originally had nothing to do with dates. It comes from kalendarium, Latin for an account book, more precisely a moneylender’s account book. It was specifically applied to the first day of the month, the kalendea, the date on which bills had to be paid and debts settled. This habit of monthly accounting is ancient and persistent. It gave rise to thirty days’ terms for invoices and is still widely followed in modern business transactions.

  All of these systems and nomenclature developed a sense of the march of time, that it was linear, a progression. And it also fed the notion that history really began with the Romans. The system of BC dating, counting backwards through the millennia Before Christ, only became current much later, in the seventeenth century. It was as though nothing much mattered before AD, and anything that did was only a prelude.

  Paradoxically, religious belief offered another, different way of understanding the passage of time. No specific references to a Day of Judgement exist in the Old Testament until its twenty-seventh book, the Book of Daniel. This was written comparatively late, in the second century BC and it described how the dead would be resurrected on that fateful day. The m
ost comprehensive account, as with so much that is now accepted as popular doctrine, is found in an apocryphal text, the Second Book of Esdras. Before the day itself, there would be a temporary messianic kingdom on Earth, then a week of primeval silence, and only then would the dead rise and be called to account. This event marked the end of an age and the beginning of a new mortal era. Such thinking challenged the linear model – and the history of the world, of humankind, was seen as cyclical. The term Middle Ages originally signified the middle age between Christ’s first coming and his second.

  Now, with the decline of Christian belief, the linear model dominates and is intertwined with ideas of progress, improvement and greater understanding. It is an attitude that might prove fatal for our planet as the evidence mounts that we are destroying it much faster than scientists believed possible.

  20 February

  I believe I was born with no distance in me, no detachment. I can quickly get close to my work and many of my enthusiasms have been lifelong. I have been too loyal to friends and sometimes been badly let down. But most important to me is family. In a moment of uncharacteristic harshness, my grannie once said, ‘All that matters is family, the rest are strangers.’ Bina was wrong, I think, but the more I discover about the mysteries of her early life, the better I understand her outburst.

  One side of my family was busy, densely populated, vibrant. Raised in the textile town of Hawick, my mum was one of seven sisters and a solitary brother. Consequently I had dozens of cousins, and after dad had bought and done up an old banger we saw our Hawick family often. ‘Cruising at forty,’ he used to say with pride, as we drove up the Teviot Valley in the black Morris Series E. I remember going on holiday to Hawick, sleeping in a box bed in Auntie Jean’s ground-floor flat in Gladstone Street. We all went to the pictures – on a weekday! It was the era when films were shown on a continuous loop and it gave rise to the phrase ‘This is where we came in.’