In the Land of Giants

by Adams, Max;

  As I turned off the Fosse Way onto the lane that leads to Charlton Adam, the heavens opened: a great crashing bombardment of thunderclap artillery, lightning and torrents of rain that had me soaked to the skin in less than half a minute. Within four hundred yards I could not have been wetter had I jumped into a river. I came to a pub and dashed inside; thankfully they had stone floors so the extravagant pool I made at the bar didn’t much bother them. I ordered a pint of Guinness, took the pack off and wrung out my vest; and at that moment a tremendous explosion overhead took out the pub’s electricity supply, while a few customers who had been standing in the porch, watching the rain and smoking, scuttled back inside in a state almost of stupefaction. I had escaped the eye of the storm in the nick of time. One of the locals asked me if I would like a lift somewhere; or an umbrella, as if I were an object of pity, an inadvertent civilian trespasser onto a battlefield.

  The storm passed. I trudged squelching onward, up and along the wooded ridge of the Polden hills between two levels and above the town of Street, from where I got my first view of Glastonbury’s looming Tor; then on to the small village of Walton where I found my campsite, and a glimpse of sunshine, after a twenty-three-mile hike. Walton: not, as it appears, ‘wealh tun’, an enclave of Britons in an Anglo-Saxon landscape, but ‘weald tun’, the settlement in the woods. I hung damp clothes from the bowing branches of a walnut tree, and retired early to my tent. The next morning, confounding my prejudice against the white-goods campers of England, an elderly chap emerged from the small caravan on the next pitch and brought me a large mug of sweet, hot tea.

  The small town of Street is famous as the home of Millfield School and as the birthplace of Clarks, the shoemakers, who began making their trademark sheepskin slippers here in 1825 and who still employ twelve hundred people at the company’s headquarters on the original factory site, even if they do not make any actual shoes there these days. I made my passage along the high street too early in the morning to see the workers thronging to their desks. After yesterday’s storm and Saturday-night drinking, it had a ghostly, quiet charm. A pub called the Lantokay reminded me that Street, whose English name (from the Latin strata) reflects both the proximity of a Roman road along the south edge of the levels and a medieval stone causeway that ran across the marshes here, is lucky enough to retain in documentary form the memory of its Brythonic name. Lantokay was the church of St Cai (Lan- deriving from Early Welsh Llan—a church enclosure). The present church is a Victorian restoration of a fourteenth-century building; but the churchyard is large and seems once to have been circular, typical of the Early Medieval Llan layout.

  Avoiding the main road that links the high ground on which Street stands to Glastonbury and its Tor across the narrowest point of the levels, I tracked east along the edge of the peatlands for about a mile so that the Tor was in my sights all the time with the early sun silhouetting it against a sky of fluffy white cloud on a blue ceramic background. The Tor is such a striking and unmistakeable feature of the English landscape that to approach it on foot is to feel like a pilgrim reaching the base of a holy mountain. As if to reinforce that otherworldly sense, a young gentleman dressed in the guise of a Civil War cavalier pedalled past me on a bicycle, waving; and I was accosted by a man with a dog, who insisted that I share his packet of chocolate digestives. I wondered if I was beginning to look like a tramp, in need of alms.

  Looked at on a photograph from directly overhead the Tor is an ossified prehistoric cetacean stranded on a green beach, its flanks ribbed like a humpback whale, its blowhole the crenellated church tower that seems to poke out of the top of the hill; the sheep on its grassy slopes are barnacles; the snaking age-worn path the uncoiled rope from a hunter’s harpoon. The view from the top is quite stunning, especially on a day when cloud scurries before a brisk shepherding wind and the light is piercingly sharp. I found myself in the company of cross-legged yoga aficionados and t’ai chi practitioners, a couple of dog-walkers and a generic hippy or two in tie-dye baggies. We were tolerant of one another. I could pick out much of yesterday’s route, at least as far as South Cadbury whence the sun shone; and this morning’s walk across the orchards and meadows of the reclaimed peatlands, protected by levees that suffice to hold back its rivers in all but exceptional years. The ruinous outline of Glastonbury Abbey stood proud of its surrounding cluster of roofs; I could hear church bells faintly tolling. To the north, across another green expanse of wetlands lay the Mendip Hills, rich in minerals and history: my destination.

  Between them, the abbey and Tor offer the Dark Age fantasist an irresistible potpourri of myth, conspiracy, forgery, mysticism and magic. I was lucky enough to be taught by Glastonbury’s pre-eminent archaeological investigator: from the first days of my undergraduate career as an archaeology student at York University I was steeped in both the Glastonbury myths and in archaeology’s achievement in testing them. Philip Rahtz was by no means a hardliner so far as fringe archaeology went. He was a polymath, a man of great intellectual appetite, an astoundingly prolific excavator and, with his second wife Lorna Watts, publisher of excavations. His is a unique legacy to our heritage. He was also an open-minded, hugely gifted and entertaining, if sometimes infuriating, teacher.

  No amount of academic scrutiny or scepticism will dull the bright Excalibur blade of those who believe that Glastonbury was the fabled Isle of Avalon or that Christ himself founded a church here (despite the fact that there was no such thing as a Christian church during the lifetime of Jesus). There is no evidence at all that Joseph of Arimathea came to Glastonbury (or ever left his native Judaea) in the first century. It is a story invented a thousand years later to enhance the fame (and profitability) of the abbey. The Glastonbury thorn which, according to legend, sprang into life where Joseph placed his stick, is a natural hybrid of the native hawthorn; it sometimes flowers in winter. I know of another example not far from where I live, at Houghton le Spring, said to have been taken as a cutting from the Glastonbury thorn. There is, as yet, no direct evidence of any Christian activity in Glastonbury before the fifth or sixth century, when a hermitage of sorts (excavated by Rahtz) was built on the Tor. An early church, perhaps seventh-century, was constructed on the site of the abbey but destroyed and built over after a disastrous fire in the twelfth century. There seem to have been two decorated stone high crosses here, later described in masonic fashion as ‘pyramids’. A well, sited close to the south-east corner of the earliest church, may belong to the Roman period. The supposed exhumation of the remains of ‘King’ Arthur and Queen Guinevere is almost certainly a deliberate forgery concocted by medieval monks in a bid to recover their prestige and economic fortunes after the fire. The Tor excavations aside, much of the archaeological or antiquarian work carried out in the grounds of the abbey was conducted before modern methods had been adopted; the sort of forensic detail that we might now obtain to resolve some of these questions is lost. It is a great shame.

  I am not one of those who give any credence at all to the idea of ley lines or zodiacal marks in the fields surrounding the Tor. More exciting, I think, is the knowledge that tracks of thoughtful design and engineering cunning, dating to the Neolithic period (from nearly 4000 BC), were demonstrably built to afford early settlers access to the abundant resources of the levels. The ingenuity of the early monks of Glastonbury in controlling and channelling water courses, in manufacturing metalwork and glass; in managing to import all manner of exotic items from the far end of the known world, including Byzantium, is remarkable enough to keep any sane and inquiring mind happy. Even so, one has to admire the ability of the religious community at Glastonbury, and elsewhere, to generate the sort of theme-park fantasy of relic and superstition that kept pilgrims coming here for over a thousand years and creating the wealth that the abbey relied on for its splendours. I wandered dizzily through the town and marvelled at the proliferation of businesses offering ‘psychic cartomancy readings’, ‘Wheel of light’ bed-and-breakfast accommodation, ‘Moon mirrors’
and any amount of crystal-stroking, dragon-charming, homeopathic vial sniffing and transformation-inducing tat, designed to relieve the credulous latter-day tourist of a great deal of money and to provide a comforting affirmation of the supposedly harmless mass psychosis which spawns it.

  Marvellous too, though invisible, is the site of the famous Lake Village which I passed on a back road lined with drainage ditches and pollard willows heading north-west out of town. It was excavated by two particularly brilliant and progressive archaeologists, Arthur Bulleid and Harold St George Gray, around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and shows just how sophisticated were the settlements of the late Iron Age on the edge of the marshes. Here, preserved anaerobically in the peat, was the settlement of a complex, hierarchical society whose dwellings consisted of roundhouses and barns, threshing floors, weaving huts and ‘special places’ for women, and whose social structure was evolved and perpetuated through each phase of rebuilding. Their repertoire of domestic artefacts finds modern equivalents in every household. The whole was enclosed in a large village compound whose foundations lay on stakes driven into the mud of the shoreline, consolidated by hazel hurdles laid flat to create a stable platform. These villagers were sophisticated managers of their environment and in their animistic kin-based, highly practical culture lie the roots of Early Medieval society.

  POLLARDED WILLOWS

  That afternoon I walked along the lower slopes of the Mendip Hills from where the Romans extracted lead on an imperial scale to satisfy their voracious plumbing needs. On a more relaxed schedule I might have stopped at Wells, another important centre of pre-Conquest religiosity. But time pressed. As afternoon turned to evening, I came down from a delightful green lane that hugged the two-hundred-foot contour, through fields which had once been orchards and where I browsed on small, sweet plums, and into the village of Cheddar. Cheese and gorge notwithstanding, Cheddar’s archaeological fame rests on the Anglo-Saxon palace excavated close to the church by none other than Philip Rahtz. There is nothing to see of the great timber hall and minster, built probably in the reign of King Alfred; the site is marked by concrete plinths in the grounds of a school. Such is the way with the fragile remains of the distant past: the monument is the published report, often written in very technical language that fellow professionals understand and can interrogate. In Philip’s case, there has rarely been an archaeologist who did more to write accessible, unpatronising accounts for general consumption.

  I woke in a quiet corner of a campsite close to Cheddar’s medieval church on another perfectly clear morning to the sound of its bells tolling the sixth hour, struck camp early and, finding nowhere open for breakfast or supplies, climbed the south-west scarp of the Mendips through narrow green lanes and dense woodland. I broke cover on the crest at over six hundred feet, a quarry on my right a reminder of the precious treasures of the hills. A small tribe of hairy bearded goats with wicked-looking long horns accompanying me on the narrow road offered a sense of more ancient exploitation of the Somerset uplands. It was very fine to be high up and in the open and I motored along at a good pace, munching on the last of my oatcakes. From Black Down, at over a thousand feet, the view towards the Severn Estuary and the coast of South Wales was breathtaking and seductive and took my mind back to the sea. On either side of me squatted the mammiform burial mounds of Bronze Age pastoralists whose summer steadings can just be seen here and there as grassy humps in sheltered spots. A sharp descent on the north side brought me out through a shallow gorge and past the site of Avelina’s hole, a limestone cave where a very early cemetery, dating to 8000 BC, testifies to the enduring appeal of these rich coastal lands.

  At the small village of Burrington I attempted to make my passage along a green lane so choked with brambles and nettles that I finally gave in and had to backtrack, once again scratched and pricked and in militant pedestrian mood to berate the locals for allowing a right of way to fall into disuse. But there was nobody to berate; the twenty-first-century English live in their cars. I diverted via a winding lane that crossed the juvenile stream of another River Yeo and eventually brought me to Wrington: here my mood was lifted by the charming sweep of a Georgian terrace and an equally charming shop on the corner, where I was able to buy a packet of Eccles cakes, a beef sandwich, two hot sausage rolls and a can of ginger beer. The shopkeeper asked me if I would like a bag. No need, thanks, I said. Outside, I sat on the nearest bench and consumed the lot in a sort of last-day-on-the-trail demob happy ecstasy of guiltless gluttony.

  Refreshed and refuelled, I climbed the last hill, up through mixed broadleaf and conifer woods. A maze of paths, timber roads and trackways linking old mine workings soon had me lost. I reverted to navigational glimpses of the sun and the lie of the land to bring me out at last onto a promontory at the end of the ridge before it descended to the plain and thence to the Bristol Channel. Here is another Cadbury Hill. This Iron Age hill fort overlooks the village of Congresbury, where the holy man Congar is said to have built a monastery. The site of his foundation was still known, and identified by, no less a bishop than Asser, the Welshman who became King Alfred’s enthusiastic biographer at the end of the ninth century. Congar, a native of Pembrokeshire, lived during the late fifth century during the very earliest period of Western British monasticism; he may even have been a marginal contemporary of St Patrick, and of Halstock’s Juthware. Did he inherit or acquire the nearby Roman villa which lay on the banks of the River Yeo just downstream?

  There is no spectacular approach to the fort as there is at South Cadbury: one emerges from the woodland on the ridge, catches a glimpse of the village below and ascends through a hollow way beneath more trees onto a scrubby hilltop from which there is no view. It felt more like enclosed and secretive Dorset than open Somerset. Part of the summit interior of the hill fort was excavated in the late 1960s and early 1970s by a distinguished team of archaeologists, not least of whom was the indefatigable Philip Rahtz. The rock-cut features made excavation and recording complex and challenging; the reward for their endeavours was evidence for major circular buildings occupied during and after the Roman period; and a large quantity of imported Mediterranean pottery (amphorae for carrying olive oil and wine; late Roman fine tableware), type G penannular brooches (a decidedly unsexy name for a distinctly Early Medieval British decorative artefact) and a longhouse of barn-conversion form. One of the more modest but significant finds was a circular ceramic sherd, which archaeologists recognise as the stopper from an amphora—the implication being that Congresbury’s masters were no second-hand receivers of dodgy goods or empty containers, but capable of purchasing unopened, full casks of wine or olive oil from the Graeco-Byzantine world of the Emperor Justinian. This was the Dark Age equivalent of a Fortnum & Mason hamper sent to an Indian rajah. Congresbury was not merely visited, but inhabited, and pretentiously so. It was a busy place, with much rebuilding and restructuring over two or three centuries, even if the complete picture of settlement and ritual activity here was not available to the excavators. The site also has to be seen in the context of a pagan Roman temple complex which lay very close to the north at Henley Wood; was Congresbury its ostentatious Christian successor?

  The broader significance of the site is obvious when one looks at the geography. This River Yeo is tidal as far up as Congresbury village, which means that there is and was access to the sea; a former wic site lay down on Woodspring Bay where coastal craft could have pulled up onto the beach and traded elite, valuable goods in return for perhaps slaves, furs, hunting dogs and silver or lead. I might almost imagine this as the place where the Alexandrian ship’s captain had his lucky landfall in the days of John, the almsgiving patriarch. And on the other side of the Bristol Channel lies Dinas Powys, a more or less contemporary kingship site and hill fort which has also yielded significant amounts of exotic, imported material.

  The native Christian elite of the South-west, immersed perhaps in a folk memory of their status under the Romans as town-dwe
lling traders and magistrates and even, conceivably, harbouring mythological fantasies of their tribal Iron Age ancestors, were attempting to live in a sort of imperial manner, even if they did not have a very clear idea of what Imperial Rome had been like, or had meant to the Romano-Britons. They refortified some of the great former hill forts, fitted them with grandiose houses and collected trinkets from distant lands. Occasionally they were able to drink wine from cracked glass goblets; their smiths made them beautiful brooches from recycled Roman metalwork, and they indulged in the sort of ostentatious tribal warfare, on a rather reduced scale, that allowed them to sing songs and tell tales of heroism; to dress up in battle finery once in a while; to celebrate minor war leaders like Arthur and praise both the gods of the animistic universe and the crucified one of the far distant Holy Land.

  From the summit of Cadbury Hill down to the village of Yatton, its coffee shops and railway station, was a mere eye-blink on an epic journey in search of heroes. If those heroes are in most cases long departed, their spoor can still be followed in the folds of the hills, the river crossings and the names and stories that they left in their wake.

  Interlude Walking on the Wall on the spot

  Prince Oswald’s vision—fluxgate gradiometer—Heavenfield—Ionan mission to Northumbria—Whin Sill—crossroads—leaving the Wall behind

  PRINCE OSWALD IDING’S brief sojourn at Heavenfield, some time in the early summer of 634, matches for impact the arrival of St Augustine in Kent thirty-seven years before. His victory against Cadwallon of Gwynedd ensured his immediate recognition as king of Bernicia and overlord of nearly all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. He restored Northumbria’s lapsed Christian kingship, founded the Irish missionary church at Lindisfarne and instituted the beginnings of an English Christian monarchy that survives today.50 Two accounts exist of that fateful night before battle. Adomnán, Colmcille’s hagiographer, recorded that Oswald saw a vision of the great Irish saint and that it inspired him and his small army to victory. Bede told a story, remembered by his own generation, of how Oswald raised a wooden cross that same night and how, in years afterwards, sick people were healed by virtue of its miraculous properties. Oswald’s rich tradition as a saint and martyr, whose relics possessed great potency, begins at this spot where Roman Wall, Dark Age myth and the origins of the English state come together.