The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  The protohistoric inhabitants of Britain were not, by name, the face-painted belligerents beloved of British nationalists. They were makers, not destroyers. They excelled in the arts of verse and incantation. The name ‘Prettanike’ belongs to the distant age when an early form of Druidism existed in the British Isles. The scientific traditions of the Druids may have been Hellenistic, but their bardic and religious heritage belonged to the ancient land that should now be reimagined as the Poetic Isles.

  The legend of a Mediterranean sun god impregnating the daughter of a mythical King Bretannos reflects the realities of trade and cultural transmission in the first century BC. Even for mortals, the Oceanus Britannicus was not a barrier. Branches of the Atrebates and the Parisii had migrated to Britain; the Catuvellauni of the Thames Basin were probably relatives of the Catalauni of Champagne. In the regions closest to the Continent, pottery, coins and burials show a similar culture developing on both sides of the Channel in the aftermath of the Gallic War. And far beyond the civilized south-east, there are places that bear the name of the god Lugh, and many others that were nemetons or ‘sky sanctuaries’ of the Druids (fig. 54).

  54. British tribes

  The tribal names are known from ancient historians and geographers, the civitas capitals of the Romans and inscriptions. In northern Scotland especially, the limits of tribal territories are a matter of speculation.

  If the Gaulish system of solar paths was extended across the Channel, the evidence should be easy to discover. Though the ethnographic information is scantier than it is in Gaul, enough British tribal centres have been identified to make corroboration possible. But at first, the patterns that are so vivid in Gaul are nowhere to be seen. Nothing in Iron Age Britain suggests that the Heraklean ratio of 11:7 was ever applied to any system of paths or hill forts. There is just the faintest whirring of a Druidic mechanism, but it comes from a place that lies a long way from the south coast, in a corner of the county of Shropshire, in the lands of the Cornovii.

  The market town of Whitchurch, which claims to be ‘old but not old fashioned’, prides itself on being the birthplace of the man who wrote the light opera Merrie England. It lies just three kilometres from the Welsh border. The town is recorded by Ptolemy and by two other ancient sources as ‘Mediolanum’. Disregarding its neighbouring hills, Whitchurch, like Milan, interprets its ancient name as ‘middle of the plain’. This is the only known Mediolanum in England, though there was a ‘Mediomanum’ (probably a scribe’s misspelling) somewhere in mid-Wales,46 and the Medionemeton on the Antonine Wall. Otherwise, the map of British Middle Earth is almost blank.

  Unlike the Scottish Medionemeton, which was the mid-point of a survey line joining sea to sea (here), Whitchurch is not an obviously significant ‘middle sanctuary’. It stands at a junction of Roman roads, but then so does almost every other place whose ancient name has survived. It does, however, possess some curious properties, which make it a British twin of the prime Gaulish Mediolanum, Châteaumeillant.

  55. The area of Whitchurch (Mediolanum)

  These are the historic county boundaries, before the reforms of 1965 and 1974. One of the ‘tripoints’ (where three boundaries intersect) is a ‘quadripoint’: four parishes meet at the place called No Man’s Heath.

  Like Châteaumeillant, Whitchurch-Mediolanum occupies a borderland that was probably a buffer zone between Celtic tribes. Parish, county and national boundaries, some of which date back to pre-Roman times, form such a tight knot in the vicinity of Whitchurch that a walker who finds a fascination in such things can set off from the town centre at dawn and stand on five triple intersections or ‘tripoints’ before noon.

  Whitchurch also shares with Châteaumeillant one of those happy accidents of geography that the Druids of Gaul exploited so skilfully. Châteaumeillant – the Mediolanum of the Bituriges – stands on the longest line that can be drawn through Gaul from north to south. Whitchurch – the Mediolanum of the Cornovii – stands on a meridian that runs almost the entire length of Britain. Anyone who has tried to trace a north–south route through the non-consecutive sheets of a road atlas will know that Britain is awkwardly skewed to the west. Leaving the part of southern England known as the West Country, and heading due north, one ends up in eastern Scotland; the Atlantic waters of the Severn Estuary are on the same line of longitude as the Firth of Forth, which is an inlet of the North Sea. The Whitchurch meridian is the longest line that can be drawn through the tilted island of Britain. It crosses three estuaries, but not the open sea, before reaching the northern coast of Aberdeenshire.

  As a line of mid-longitude (here), the Whitchurch meridian could hardly be bettered. It begins at a hill called Beacon Knap above the Dorset coast and ends at Portsoy or Port Saoidh, whose name means ‘Harbour of the Warrior’ or ‘the Scholar’. By contrast, the line of mid-longitude that was chosen by the British Ordnance Survey – and perhaps, too, by the first Roman surveyors – crosses one hundred and seventy kilometres of the North Sea.

  A legend preserved by medieval scholars suggests a native British tradition of long-distance surveying predating the Roman conquest. One of the first to have recorded it was Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’) was written in about 1136. According to the Historia, in the old days before the Romans, a mythical King Belinus ordered a causeway to be built ‘which should run the whole length of the island, from the sea of Cornwall to the shores of Caithness, and lead directly to the cities that lay along that extent’. Like Herakles on the Via Heraklea, Belinus conferred on all who travelled on his roads ‘every honour and privilege, and prescribed a law for the punishment of any injury committed upon them’. Whatever the source of the legend – a tale told by a Welsh bard or a manuscript found by Geoffrey in Oxford – it has the mark of the Druids: the name of the mythical road-building monarch is that of a Celtic god of light, Belenos or Belenus.

  The Druids’ geometric plotting exactly matches the mythical truth. The Gaulish meridian, projected from Châteaumeillant to Loon Plage and across the Channel, would have missed the British mainland by about thirty kilometres. In order to extend the system into Britain, retaining the points of reference that defined the place of Celtic lands in the wider world, the Druids would have chosen the meridians or lines of longitude that run ten-minute increments to the west of the prime Gaulish Mediolanum. And this is what the map reveals: the more westerly of the two lines, directly connecting Heraklean Gaul to the homeland of the Druids, is the Whitchurch meridian.

  56. Meridians of the British Isles

  Given what we now know about the Druids, the coincidence can hardly be called astonishing, though it is, all the same, astonishing. As is the tidy fact that if the same operation is extended to the west, into the remotest of Celtic lands, the next meridian passes through the Hill of Uisneach (within twenty-nine seconds of daylight). In Celtic mythology, the Hill of Uisneach, with its royal burials and ring forts, was the sacred centre or omphalos of Ireland (see here).

  Without the corresponding solstice lines to reveal a network of solar paths, the Whitchurch meridian is a slender thread on which to hang even a virtual expedition. Yet that slender thread traces out a comprehensive mystery tour of ancient Britain and the geometric basis of a wonderfully coherent system.

  Shortly after leaving Beacon Knap in Dorset, the meridian passes by the foot of Glastonbury Tor, near the site of a nemeton, and then through the village of Nempnett Thrubwell, whose name has the same origin. Comparatively few British tribal capitals are known, but the meridian bisects several of them, as though in obedience to the commands of Belinus: the road ‘should run the whole length of the island . . . and lead directly to the cities that lay along that extent’. These tribal capitals include more than half the likely centres of Scottish tribes.47 The meridian also encompasses twenty hill forts, some of which may have marked an ancient Welsh frontier.

  On several sections of its unerring course, the Whitchurch meridian sho
ws a remarkable attraction to boundaries and their intersections. After reaching the tripoint where Wales meets the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, it follows the Welsh border for twenty-two kilometres, then crosses back into England near the tripoint of Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Monmouthshire. At Whitchurch, at approximately one-third of its total distance, it crosses the boundary region shown on the map (fig. 55). Further north, before the Mid Hill that marks two-thirds of its length, it crosses the lonely clearing in the Kielder Forest where Cumberland and Northumberland meet Scotland.

  One of the meridian’s most intriguing characteristics is its close relationship with long-distance routes. In Dorset, it bisects an important town of the Durotriges called Lindinis (Ilchester). In the early days of the Roman conquest, this was the southern terminus of the Fosse Way, which runs diagonally across the country to Lincoln and forms what many historians believe to have been the first Roman frontier in Britain. After crossing the Severn Estuary at a hill-fort complex of the Silures tribe, it meets the southern terminus of another ancient route, marked by the eighth-century earthwork known as Offa’s Dyke. Over its entire length, the meridian passes over eight and perhaps nine Roman road junctions, as though the Romans had somehow keyed their network into the ancient road of Belinus.

  Of course, one straight line is not a network, and there are so many hill forts, especially in south-west England and the Welsh Marches, that if an ant walked across the printed map, its trail would probably take in about the same number of significant places. Appropriately, the meridian passes through the hills and dales that were the stamping-ground of Alfred Watkins, the discoverer or inventor of ley lines (here). In the dense scatter of pre- and protohistoric sites in Herefordshire and Shropshire, the possibilities for single-minded expeditions along an ‘Old Straight Track’ are practically endless.

  As Watkins found, different eras merge in these forts and refuges that were inhabited for thousands of years. Out of this confusion of eras, oral tradition conjures simple figures to speak for all the centuries. One of those figures is the Devil, whose ‘Mouthpiece’ – on the meridian by the deserted village of Witchcot – is nothing more mysterious than an old sandstone quarry. Another is the real or legendary King of the Britons, Arthur. He first appears at Glastonbury Tor, one of the fabled locations of the Holy Grail and a portal to the Underworld. Arthur’s second appearance on the meridian is at the cliff-top fort of Little Doward on the Welsh–English border, above a great bend in the river Wye. It looks down on a village coincidentally named Whitchurch (one of eight Whitchurches in England).48 According to a legend transmitted by Geoffrey of Monmouth, it was here that the fifth-century warlord Vortigern was besieged and burned to death by the Romano-British hero Ambrosius or, as he appears in this telling of the tale, Merlin. In the bowels of the fort, a round ‘room’ in ‘King Arthur’s Cave’ is said to have contained a table of the same shape . . .

  The Whitchurch meridian is astronomically compatible with the Gaulish system, but it presents only a few pieces of the puzzle, and Whitchurch itself differs from Châteaumeillant in one important respect. Châteaumeillant visibly sits at the centre of Gaul, whereas Whitchurch could never be described as the centre of Britain. If the system had been translated directly from Gaul to Britain, another line of longitude should have run ten minutes to the east, between the Whitchurch and the Châteaumeillant meridians. It would have passed through central London, with a likely point of origin at Thorney Island, where the Thames could be forded at low tide. Perhaps it was there, on the future site of Westminster Abbey, that Caesar’s army waded across the river in 54 BC. But in contrast to the Whitchurch meridian, the London line has little of ancient interest, apart from a tripoint on Flag Fen near Peterborough. Its treasures and tribal centres belong to a much later age: Tate Britain, Number 10 Downing Street, the British Library and the Great Court of the British Museum.

  Beyond these longitudinal paths, the clouds descend and thicken, until the British sun unexpectedly appears.

  In the meadows and cricket fields of the University Parks, where much of this book was ruminated, even people who consider Oxford to be the centre of the civilized world can recapture some of its early insignificance. Most tourists never venture this far north of the college lanes. The spires are eclipsed by trees, and there are few signs of academic life apart from white-coated technicians moving among their apparatus behind the glass front of a science building. Ironically, the University Parks are the only important protohistoric site in a city whose every stone is a memorial. During the long, dry summer of 1976, linear marks appeared in the fields and were identified by archaeologists as ‘a substantial ritual focus’ dating from the Bronze Age or earlier. Practically nothing of that ‘ritual focus’ is visible today. It was still in use after the arrival of the Romans, but the town itself hardly seems to have existed before AD 911, when it was recorded as Oxenaforda. Oxford’s principal connection with the world of the Celts is J. R. R. Tolkien of Exeter College, and so it is not surprising that the following peculiar and unexplained detail has received almost no attention.

  The Mabinogion is the collective title of Welsh tales that were probably first written down in the eleventh century. Despite the medieval interpretations and embellishments, these tales, like the Irish myths, preserve fragments of legends dating back to the days of the ancient Celts. Since many of the locations can be identified, they often seem to speak of people and things that are very close at hand.

  One such tale is ‘The Meeting [or ‘Adventure’] of Lludd and Llevelys’. Beli the Great, King of Britain, has died. His eldest son, Lludd, has inherited the kingdom. He rules it prosperously and makes London his capital. But the island is troubled by three ‘plagues’, one of which takes the form of two squabbling dragons. Lludd seeks the advice of his youngest brother, who has become King of France. After secretly equipping a fleet, Lludd sails for France; his brother sails out to meet him, and this is the advice Llevelys gives him:

  When you arrive home, have the length and breadth of the island measured, and where you find the exact centre, have a pit dug. In the pit, place a vat full of the best mead that can be made, and cover the vat with a silk sheet.

  Lludd returns to Britain, has the length and breadth of the island measured, and finds its exact centre to be Rhydychen, which is the Welsh name of Oxford. Somewhere in Oxford, he digs the pit; the dragons fall in and drink up all the mead. Lludd wraps the unconscious monsters in the silk sheet and locks them ‘in a stone chest in the most secure place he could find in Eryri’. (Eryri is Snowdonia, the mountain massif of North Wales.) ‘And thereafter, the place was called Dinas Emreis [or Ambrosius], though before, it had been Dinas Ffaraon Dandde’ (‘Hill Fort of the Fiery Pharaoh’).

  The place where Lludd buried the dragons is well known. It was recently acquired by the National Trust. Below Mount Snowdon, the disintegrating hill fort of Dinas Emrys guards a road that joins the Llanberis Pass to the Aberglaslyn Pass. These are the two main routes through Snowdonia to the Menai Strait and the Isle of Anglesey (fig. 69). In the Welsh tale, little else is said about the dragons, but in the Historia Brittonum (‘History of the Britons’), written in about 828, they are identified by the boy-prophet Myrddin Emrys (Merlin Ambrosius) as symbols of the native Welsh and the Saxon invaders. The hill fort itself, which may already have been a mound of rubble when the Historia Brittonum was written, is said to be the dilapidated royal palace of Vortigern, whose towers collapsed as soon as they were built.

  These anachronistic interpretations, devised several centuries after the original myth and woven into the much older narrative, form the basis of most modern retellings of the tale. Though the nation of Wales did not exist, the nub of the tale is supposed to be the red dragon, which now appears on the Welsh national flag. Oxford, having no obvious connection with the birth of a Welsh nation, is omitted as an irrelevant detail. Yet the dragons transported by Lludd from the centre of the kingdom in Oxford to ‘the Hill Fort of the
Fiery Pharaoh’ are not simple emblems of nationalism: they strongly suggest a Celtic solar myth, while Llevelys, King of Gaul, is related, by name and by deeds, to the Irish Lugh. The scribe notes that ‘Hill Fort of the Fiery Pharaoh’ was the earlier name of the fort, implying that one of his sources was even older than the ninth-century Historia Brittonum. The tale had taken shape when there were neither Saxon nor Roman soldiers in Britain.

  The Druidic experiment is easily performed: measure the rhumb-line trajectory of the dragons from Oxford to Dinas Emrys. At the conclusion of the experiment, two facts appear. First, the path of the dragons is a solstice line – not the standard Gaulish trajectory with a ratio of 11:7, but something closer to the actual solstice as seen from Britain. Second, the halfway point of the line falls near ‘The Devil’s Mouthpiece’ and a village north of Ludlow called Middleton. Llevelys had evidently given his brother some excellent and accurate advice: the village of Middleton lies precisely on the Whitchurch meridian.

  These two facts present themselves with the sound of an iron key turning in a lock.