by Adams, Max;
Most travellers passing this way know only Parkeston Quay, the unremarkable terminal whence ferries leave for Esbjerg in Denmark or the Hook of Holland. I needed to catch a much more modest ferry that crosses the mouths of the Rivers Stour and Orwell to Felixstowe. The ancient town of Harwich—its Old English name Herewic means ‘army camp’, probably in reference to an Alfredan campaign against the Vikings—is a lively huddle of Georgian houses and pubs on a narrowing peninsula bearing traces of a formerly grander presence in Britain’s naval history with its wharfs, lighthouses, Trinity House and castle. Back at the beginning of the eighteenth century, even before its heyday as an Admiralty dockyard during the Napoleonic wars, Daniel Defoe had much the same reaction to it as I did in the twenty-first. A night’s stay at the Stingray Inn on Church Street convinced me of the natives’ enthusiasm for beer and laughs.
On the morning of Saturday 7 June I took the passenger ferry from Harwich across the harbour and passed from the kingdom of the East Saxons into the kingdom of the East Angles. There was a strong breeze and showers periodically swept across the harbour mouth. As I sailed into Suffolk the spray in my face was part salty, part fresh, part bilgewater.
Felixstowe, whose inward-facing, unpopulated peninsula lies a mile or so across the estuary, ought to have been named after Felix, the Frankish bishop who came to help King Sigeberht underpin the Christianisation of the East Angles in the 630s. In fact the two are unconnected, the name deriving from the burgh of a thane called Filica by misassociation. The town begins as one rounds the peninsula and faces the North Sea proper: a miles-long sprawl of beaches, promenades, amusement arcades and B&Bs. The old part of Felixstowe, a down-at-heel Edwardian seaside resort now dominated by a vast container port on the banks of the Orwell, has been partly lost to the sea. There is an even older settlement here: the village of Walton, whose church stands on the hill behind the later town. The name denotes ‘farmstead of the native Britons’ in Old English. Off what is now the shore, in the late third century AD, a stone fortress stood, another defence against seaborne raiders34 and mirrored, in the late eighteenth century, by a system of Martello towers. Remnants of the fort at Walton were still visible in the seventeenth century before they were swallowed by the waves. Others survive along the Norfolk coast, in Essex (as at Bradwell), in Kent and Sussex. Several of them fostered early monasteries or churches.
You have to feel sorry for King Sigeberht. His Frankish-sounding name is a reminder that the East Anglian kings looked as much across the water for political support and inspiration as they did to the other kingdoms of the heptarchy. Sigeberht spent time across the Channel as an exile during the reign of King Rædwald (of Sutton Hoo fame), returning to claim the throne in the late 620s. His court, perhaps based at Rendlesham some miles north of here, welcomed not only the scholarly Bishop Felix but also a famous Irish holy man, St Fursa, who established a monastery in the kingdom at Dommoc (possibly Dunwich). The king was so taken with the idea of monastic retreat that, perhaps around 632 (while Mohammed was dying at Mecca) he gave up the kingship and entered a monastery which he had founded. Taking the tonsure became a popular way for reluctant or knackered kings to retire during the later seventh century. The monk’s tonsure is a form of emasculation, a premature alopecia and a sign that one’s testosterone-fuelled warrior inclinations have passed. In Sigeberht’s case it did him little good. Under his successor, King Ecgric, East Anglia was invaded by the armies of Penda, the expansionist Mercian warlord. Bede tells us that the East Anglians were no match for the rapacious Penda. Poor Sigeberht, once a noted warrior, was dragged out of retirement protesting as, perhaps, time-expired sporting champions do when called on one more time by their country, and took to the battlefield under protest, wielding only a staff. Bede recorded grimly that he and King Ecgric were both cut down, their armies ‘slain or scattered by the heathen attacks’.
Today, Felixstowe’s shore is protected by great linear dumps of stone blocks which keep the town’s precious sand from washing away. Unlike the wooden groynes of old on which children used to climb and slip on seaweed and barnacles to peer at crustaceans, their scale is superhuman: they do the beach and the children no favours. Nor does the sad pier, at whose entrance I passed two young women attempting to keep a plastic inflatable ice-cream stand from blowing over in the wind. Even Suffolk’s hardy folk, inured to British seaside weather, had abandoned the Edwardian yellow-and-cream painted wooden promenade shelters in favour of inland tearooms, although I spied a group of indefatigable wet-suited swimmers plying up and down the surf for their daily endorphin fix. Felixstowe ran out, eventually, at the mouth of the River Deben, marked by the tidy bunkers and fairways of a links golf course, and by two Martello towers.
Here the scale was more human. The estuary is only two hundred yards wide—on the other side a red-brick mansion could be half seen, blanketed by oak woodland. In the foreground wooden groynes dipped their toes in the sheltered tideway behind a sand spit; and the blue-green sparkling water was crowded with the small sailing dinghies of a yacht club. A few hundred yards along the riverbank I came to one of those water-margin settlements that was beginning to define, for me, a Saxon coast that is the human equivalent of the foreshore rockpool: a community clinging to its marginal niche, fascinating in its detail and easily neglected in favour of open sea and rich land. Precious, therefore. Here were huddles of clinker-built sheds and workshops, shacks and jetties, beached sea- and rivercraft, populated by transient visitors and the occasional wealthy punter, but above all by a community comfortable in its diversity and shared rejection of societal norms. The crevices between building, boat, slipway, mooring and path were jammed with still lifes: coils of faded rope and rusty cable, crab and lobster creels, fish boxes, crumpled tarpaulins, tins of bright paint, trailers, discarded rigging and fluorescent plastic buoys. I found the visual mosaic irresistible.
It seems that there has always been a ferry here: how else could east-coast communities connect with each other except by water? To the modern traveller, this might seem an inconvenience, a divide; but to a seafaring and riverine people like the native British and their Anglo-Saxon antagonists, water was a thoroughfare uniting and facilitating, an artery of storytelling and trade, kin affiliation and opportunistic exploitation. I sat in the ferry café and enjoyed a coffee and a cherry scone, listening to the conversations of a dozen other diners. I had seen a sloping wooden ramp that looked sufficiently formal to be the ferry jetty, but no sign of a boat or timetable. I asked the woman behind the counter what time the ferry would leave (and if I’d have time for another scone). She smiled and told me it would leave whenever I was ready: all I had to do was go down the ferry ramp to the flag pole, pick from its slot the table-tennis-like bat taped to the end of a stick, and wave it at the other side. If he wasn’t busy, the ferryman would see it and pop over. As indeed he did. Meantime I ate another scone.
An almost exactly similar arrangement must have operated here, and on a thousand other rivers and creeks, over the last two or three millennia. And on the other side? Somewhere among the sandy lowlands of Suffolk, along the north bank of the River Deben, I would find the place where the East Angles buried their mighty kings in ships. I saw no more weatherboard houses on the north side; it was all red-brick, often painted white, blue or pink with orange pantiled roofs; and now that the sun had come out decisively they made a very pretty picture against field, hedgerow and sky. This has not always been a rural idyll; not even in living memory. Seventy-eight years ago, in 1937, the first operational RADAR station was built here, close to the RAF research base at Bawdsey—the manor house I had seen from across the river. The mysterious 360-feet-high tower transmitters, as enigmatic in their day as any megalithic stone circle, were the key to intercepting Luftwaffe bombers during the Battle of Britain and became, in their turn, bombers’ targets. The towers have gone; the tallest creatures in this landscape today are a more familiar sight: Scots pines, long-lived natives perfectly adapted to the sandy h
eathlands of south-east Suffolk and magnificent on the skyline in their deep green early-summer plumage.
I spent my last night on the trail at a campsite in the cute village of Shottisham (brick cottages, roses, white picket fences and flowery verges; an unfussy inn), kept awake by the noise of children playing and the wailing of the vicar’s peacock from the nearby church. I woke at six-thirty with sunlight streaming through trees and filtering down into the tent. On a glorious blue-skied morning I had the broad, sandy heathland trail to myself. Stands of Scots pines formed the backdrop, scenting the warm air with resin. A cuckoo called. A few miles further north, taking a path off the main road to Woodbridge, I came across the National Trust sign that told me I had found my destination: Sutton Hoo, the burial place of East Anglia’s kings. It is a disappointment, to be sure. Fields full of rank cabbages and pigs gave onto a flattish, grassy field that could not be less evocative of the Dark Ages. Ploughing, drainage and Second World War anti-glider trenches have taken their toll. The River Deben, and Woodbridge across the water, were invisible beyond a line of trees. The only really impressive mound to survive the depredations of time and the archaeologist’s spade is a reconstruction, looking like a giant upturned bucket smoothed over with turf. Otherwise, this unique mortuary landscape of ship burials looks like so many mere tumuli. The signage was poor and the museum would not open for another ninety minutes. As so often on these journeys, I had the place to myself.
To understand the significance of Sutton Hoo, you first have to know the background. In 1938, with war looming and not long after the erection of those first giant RADAR towers, an archaeologist called Basil Brown was invited by Sutton Hoo’s owner, Mrs Edith May Pretty, to investigate her intriguing-looking mounds. Three of them yielded a mix of cremations and an inhumation that seemed to have been contained in a small boat. They had been disturbed, ransacked by treasure hunters, perhaps. In 1939 Mrs Pretty commissioned Brown to open the largest and most elongated of the mounds, then supposedly standing to a height of nine feet. Oddly, despite its size, it had not been disturbed. Mound 1 yielded the most significant Anglo-Saxon treasury that Britain had, or has produced: a kingly burial complete with trappings of immense wealth and power contained in a great ship, ninety feet long, whose planks and rigging had decayed in the acid sandy soil, but whose surviving rivets perfectly mapped the grace and scale of its hull. Those treasures reside at the British Museum, much studied and admired over the decades since. In recent years the identity of the mound’s inmate (no physical human remains were ever retrieved) has been pinned, by general consensus and using the dating evidence from its contents, on King Rædwald (circa 599–624) of the line of Wuffingas. He was not just the greatest of the kings of East Anglia, cited as a Bretwalda in later annals, but also played a significant part in the conversion story told by Bede.35 To his court, probably at Rendlesham a few miles to the north-east, Edwin of Deira fled as a refugee in about 616. Emissaries of Edwin’s rival—and brother-in-law—King Æthelfrith of Northumbria first tried to persuade, then bribe, then threaten Rædwald with destruction if he did not give up his hostage. Rædwald initially refused; then agreed but then, under pressure from his queen, decided to fight Æthelfrith instead, on a point of honour. At a great battle on the River Idle, south-east of the Roman town of Danum (Doncaster), he and Edwin destroyed the Northumbrian overlord and his armies. The rest is history.
Rædwald’s equivocation towards Edwin was matched by his attitude towards Christianity. He was born a pagan; underwent a conversion sponsored by King Æthelberht of Kent, but was said to have kept both Christian and pagan objects in his shrine and, perhaps, to have apostatised on his deathbed. The ship burial is distinctly heathen, a real-life expression of the sentiment so movingly evoked in Beowulf’s funerary rites.
Then the lords of the wind-loving people upon a seaward slope a tomb wrought that was high and broad, to voyagers on the waves clear seen afar; and in ten days they builded the memorial of the brave in war, encompassed with a wall that the fires had left, in such most splendid wise as men of chief wisdom could contrive. In that mound they laid armlets and jewels and all such ornament as erewhile daring-hearted men had taken from the hoard…36
As if to reinforce that tension, among the artefacts retrieved from the burial were a pair of silver spoons, carrying monograms of Sts Peter and Paul, an enamelled bronze cauldron, perhaps of Northumbrian workmanship, in whose base is a remarkable rotating fish; a whetstone sceptre with a stag motif; and the possible remains of animals sacrificed to accompany the dead king on his journey into whatever afterlife he believed in. The iconography on the purse, the famous helmet and the great gold brooch are distinctly pagan.
That Sutton Hoo was the burial ground of the Dark Age East Anglian kings is widely accepted. Even so, I left with a sense not, perhaps, of deflation or anti-climax, but of emptiness. My expectations had been too high, the road too long. I had not been able to read it in its landscape context; it seemed, like a museum exhibit, divorced from its original environment. To bring it to life I had to imagine away a thousand years of change; I must picture those mounds in costume: bristling shields and spears clustered around a totem decked with battle standard, perhaps the skulls of dead enemies hanging there. I had to visualise a funerary feast: warrior companions, a pall of smoke, the smell of cooking meat; the sound of drunken lament.
I came back onto the main road and, crossing the bridge over the River Deben, took to the footpath that ran along its south bank. My thoughts went back to rivers and creeks and their denizens, and to the sea. The English had come by sea; Rædwald’s ship had been dragged from the river up to that place on the hill; these were boat people just as the East Saxons were. Water and land, earth and sky, Christianity and paganism fed the tensions that had brought their kings here. Huge swathes of fenland separated, protected them from their Midland enemies in the north and west. They looked across the water for inspiration and support: to Scandinavia, to Kent and to Francia. They lived at the edge literally and figuratively. As I approached Woodbridge, another of those edgy communities of houseboats, small yachts, barges and assorted shore-bound clutter distracted me. This jumble of cultural treasures speaks louder to me than bare mounds in a field. It is absolutely uncontrived, artless and authentic. But, not for the first time, I had underestimated the potential for the Dark Ages to intrude on the present.
The sparkling, eddying waters of the Deben drew my eye across the river. On a rise, through a gap between trees on the far bank, the flat horizon was pimpled with the distinct shape of a mound, grass-covered, beneath which, in my mind’s eye, lay the soul of Beowulf and his dragon’s treasure.
Interlude Once Brewed to Warden Hill
Companions—monomaniac Wall—long-distance walking—peregrinatio—Dark Age travellers—Housesteads fort—transhumance—Cold Comfort Farm—Warden Hill
WHEN I RESUMED my Wall journey, it had been snowing. I asked my old friend Malcolm Pallister to join me for a day’s walk. Malcolm is a fellow veteran of the West Highland Way and has travelled the whole eighty-four-mile length of the Wall on foot and solo. He is a clever, thoughtful systems engineer; a Buddhist, blacksmith and musician. He fixes things: he would do rather well in the Dark Ages.
The hills, farms, loughs and lanes of the Tyne–Solway gap wore their winter coats like old bears. There is nothing new in ice and snow, storm or flood; the small death of winter is just one more rotation of the unchanging, ever-turning wheel of renewal. Spring will come. Today the light, a monochrome palette of white, grey and black, erased all but the essentials of form and line, pattern and texture. There was hardly anyone else out: we had the Wall and the hills more or less to ourselves.
We parked next to the visitors’ centre at Once Brewed (there is an old inn close by called Twice Brewed, but there is no agreement on the origins of the names), clad ourselves in lurid winter gear, and struck out eastwards. I had already walked the first part of this section, the cliff above Crag Lough, with Sarah. Malc
olm had, on his long march, come the other way, from the east. Neither of us had seen this landscape stripped bare to the white bone as it was now. Now I began to see Hadrian’s project for what it was. The line of the Wall was visible for miles in either direction, geological in scale, timeless in extent; but minuscule against sky, hill and moor, as intangible almost as a pure mathematical line. Up here on the crags it could have no defensive function: it was superfluous. What had it all been for? Fort after milecastle after turret: ditch in front, vallum behind, the theme repeated end over end like the cycle of the year, only stopping at the wet, salty sea. To the north and on our left, we are supposed to believe, the unwashed, uncivilised Britons who, having not bought into the idea of Empire, were outside it: legally and psychologically labelled barbarian. To our right, the south, like it or not, everyone was a citizen of the Empire.
The sheer stubbornness of the enterprise struck us: a monomaniacal idea pursued beyond reasonableness, a psychosis of a project. Where Offa’s Dyke spoke of real political might, of public power arrayed against a foe, of subjugation and tribute, of one people abutting another, the Wall—as opposed to the frontier, which already existed in the line of the Stanegate and its forts—now seemed like fantasy realised: a folly, a hamster wheel of engineering endurance and squaddie fatigues, designed not to keep anything out, but to show what the legions could do when they put their minds to it. It seemed to monumentalise, also, a Rome that outgrew the bold Republican ideals of its early centuries to become a bloated oligarchy. Thus the Wall was maintained, rebuilt, reenvisioned and reinvented over three hundred years for no better reason than that it already existed. It became the whitest of elephants; it was never, had never, been useful. At no time has it ever formed the border between races or nations. It just was.
