The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  Nothing else is known about the life of Caratacus in Rome. The story that he and his daughter became Christians and brought the new religion back to Britain is entirely spurious. If he had any dealings with devotees of a proscribed religion, they would not have been Christians, whom Claudius had just expelled from Rome, but Druids, whose ‘cruel and horrible rites’ the same emperor had banned. The Druids were popularly imagined to be soothsayers and healers with a propensity for human sacrifice and political agitation, but an earlier decree, which forbade Roman citizens from becoming Druids, shows that a Druid could also be an educated speaker of Latin. Since Claudius had recently persuaded the Senate to admit citizens of ‘Hairy Gaul’ to the senatorial class, it would not have been extraordinary if there were Druids living in Rome. Somewhere in that city of shiny monuments, a meeting might have taken place. With the solar map of Britannia unfolded in his listeners’ minds, this is the tale Caratacus might have told.

  The invasion of AD 43 caught Caratacus unprepared. He lost a battle somewhere in the south-east, and then another on the river Medway – probably near Durobrivae (Rochester) at the end of the solstice line from Noviomagus (Chichester). In one of those battles, his brother Togodumnus was killed. When the Romans crossed the Thames and marched on Camulodunum (Colchester), Caratacus shifted his campaign to the west. He retreated through the Cotswolds and across the Severn Estuary. Eventually, in about AD 49, he reached the lands of the Silures of South Wales.

  Even at this early stage in the conquest of Britain, the conventional view of disciplined Romans and chaotic Celts is untenable. Caratacus had ruled a small empire in the Thames Valley. Now, a child of the civilized south-east, he became the undisputed leader of the ‘swarthy, curly-haired’ Silures – ‘a particularly ferocious’ people, said Tacitus, whose cunning was matched by the ‘deceptiveness’ of their terrain. For a supposedly anarchic group of clans, the Silures were an effective political entity, able to form alliances over wide areas, ‘luring’ other tribes ‘into defection’, as Tacitus snidely puts it, ‘by bribing them with booty and prisoners’.

  Along the ridges and valleys of South Wales, a guerrilla war was fought that has left no visible trace. From there, Caratacus moved the theatre of war again, to the north, into the lands of the Ordovices, a week’s march from Roman-occupied Britain. His forces were now augmented, says Tacitus, by ‘those who dreaded the thought of a Roman peace’. His aim was presumably, in part, to open supply routes to the large tribal federations in the east – the Cornovii and the Brigantes – but there was another reason for his gradual retreat to the north-west. Behind the windy bulwarks of Snowdonia lay the holy island of Mona (Anglesey), where the Druids had their stronghold.

  Like Finistère, Fisterra and the Sacred Promontory, Mona was one of the ends of the earth. As an island, it belonged to this world and the next. Its connection with the lower world is well attested: between the second century BC and the period when Mona finally fell to the Romans (AD 78), hundreds of bronze and iron artefacts were cast into a lake in the north-west of the island. (The lake, Llyn Cerrig Bach, is now a marshy lagoon on the edge of a military airfield.) The artefacts included swords, slave chains, blacksmiths’ tools and cauldrons. Some of them came from Hibernia, others from Belgic Gaul. They might have been brought as votive offerings by the students who travelled to Britannia to study Druidism.

  Now, perhaps, for the first time in their long war against the Celts, the Romans had an inkling of the sacred geography that determined the movements of the enemy. The strategic value of Mona was obvious: the sea was its moat but also its highway. From the harbours of Mona, a troop ship could sail to northern Britain, to Hibernia or to the lands of the Dumnonii in the south-west. While the Romans consolidated their conquest of the south and east, the island fortress of the Druids became ‘the haven of fugitives’ and ‘the power that fed the rebellion’ (Tacitus).

  68. The role of Mona in British resistance

  Charted chronologically, the movements of the British forces form a pattern of which Mona is the oblique focus. In AD 48, governor Ostorius Scapula marched against the Deceangli of North Wales but was prevented from attacking Mona and its ‘powerful population’ by a sudden uprising among the Brigantes to the east. Soon after that, Caratacus took command of the Silures of South Wales. His strategy, too, seems to have been governed by the need to defend the sacred island: as Caratacus moved north, his lines of resistance always protected Mona. Later, the revolt of the Iceni and their allies would coincide with Suetonius Paulinus’s attack on the island and force him to call off his destruction of the Druids’ shrines (here).

  Some historians argue that Druid priests and their island base played a negligible role in the British resistance. This was not the view of the Roman commanders. Agricola considered the invasion of Mona an ‘arduous and dangerous’ undertaking. When Suetonius Paulinus launched his attack, he was hoping to outdo a rival general, Corbulo. In his mind, the conquest of that small island in the Oceanus Hibernicus would be an achievement equal to Corbulo’s recent subjugation of Armenia.

  The common soldiers, who included large numbers of Germans and Celts, agreed with their commanders. As they advanced through the hallucinatory landscapes of highland central Wales, they were conscious of approaching a place from which an occult power radiated. They had been reluctant even to cross the Oceanus Britannicus. ‘Indignant at the thought of campaigning beyond the known world’, according to Cassius Dio, they had cheered up only when a flash of light had shot across the sky from east to west – sunwards – in the direction of Britannia. Now, as they chased Caratacus to the north, they saw the clouds gather into a dark thunderhead. It loomed over the mountains of Snowdonia, beyond which the world came to an end. When Roman troops stood at last on the shores of Mona in AD 60, they would be ‘paralysed by fear’ at the sight of ‘women dressed like Furies in funereal attire, their hair dishevelled, rushing about amongst the warriors, waving torches, and a circle of Druids raising their arms to the sky and pouring forth dreadful curses’.

  Only the Druids and the British commanders could see the whole panorama. The dragons’ solstice line from Oxford to Dinas Emrys crosses the Menai Strait at Abermenai Point, where the earliest recorded ferry connected Mona with the Dinlle Peninsula, whose name means ‘fort of Lleu’ or ‘Lugh’. It was there, no doubt, at the narrowest crossing, that the Roman legions would push their flat-bottomed boats through the sandbanks and the shallows to find themselves confronting the weird army of Druids. Beyond the strait, the line reaches Holy Island off the north-west coast of Mona and the white mountain of Holyhead which guided sailors on the Hibernian Ocean (fig. 69).

  In AD 51, the sun god who had mustered the Gaulish tribes at Alesia a century before induced Caratacus to make what a recent historian has called ‘a crucial error’: like Vercingetorix, ‘Caratacus consolidated his forces for a last stand, giving the Romans exactly what they wanted: a set-piece battle’. The site of this final battle has never been discovered,53 but on the map of Middle Earth, the solar signposts point to a place which corresponds in every detail to Tacitus’s description.

  The road connecting the two mountain passes that lead to Mona is guarded by the fort of Dinas Emrys, known in older days as Dinas Ffaraon Dandde (‘Hill Fort of the Fiery Pharaoh’). Here, as we saw (here), three solar paths converge: the dragons’ solstice line from the omphalos of Oxford is intersected by lines of latitude and longitude. The hill was once an Iron Age settlement. Now, the only noticeable remains are those of a thirteenth-century tower. Nearby, a ‘lapis fatalis’ (‘Stone of Destiny’) called the Carreg yr Eryr (‘Eagle Stone’) marked the meeting-point of three cantrefi – the medieval districts that are thought to have been based on Celtic tribal kingdoms.

  For Caratacus, the fabled hill fort at the intersection of three solar paths was a British equivalent of Alesia. It also happened to satisfy his strategic requirements. The battle was fought, according to Tacitus, ‘in the lands of the Ordovices’ a
nd in a place where ‘advance and retreat would be difficult for the enemy but easy for the defenders’. In front of the fortress ran ‘a river of uncertain ford’ or ‘of varying depth’ (‘amnis vado incerto’): this would be the lake-fed river Glaslyn, which swells rapidly with the rain but which is fordable at other times. Downstream of the lake called Llyn Dinas, the valley is almost blocked by the hill of Dinas Emrys. All around, an ‘impending’ or ‘menacing’ ‘ridge’ or ‘range of mountains’ (‘imminentia iuga’) daunted the Roman commander. This can hardly refer to the modest hills of Shropshire where the battle is often assumed to have taken place.

  69. North Wales and Dinas Emrys

  North Wales and the strategic significance of Dinas Emrys. Most of the Roman forts were probably constructed in the 70s or 80s AD, after the defeat of Caratacus.

  The stories that cling to Dinas Emrys like the river-mists are as confused as the archaeological remains. After Caratacus’ death, a memory of his great battle with the Romans may have survived in bardic records or local legends, which then became entangled with the original myth. Centuries later, when the Romans had abandoned Britain to the Celts and the Saxon invaders, the tales of other warriors were woven into the text. By then, the faces of the old Celtic gods and heroes were little more than abstract patterns in the weave. And yet, in certain lights, they can still be recognized.

  In early medieval legends, the beleaguered king who chooses Dinas Emrys as his fortress is not Caratacus but the British warlord Vortigern, forced by the Saxons to flee to the remote west. This would have happened four hundred years after the time of Caratacus. Vortigern’s ‘magi’ – a common medieval Latin translation of ‘Druids’ – instruct him to build a citadel. The masons start work, but, every night, the towers mysteriously collapse. The magi then advise Vortigern to ‘find a fatherless boy, kill him, and sprinkle the citadel with his blood’. The sacrificial boy turns out to be the orphaned son of a Roman nobleman. His name is Ambrosius (in its native form, Emrys) or Ambrosius Aurelianus.54 The boy escapes death by revealing the true cause of the towers’ collapse: underneath the fort, inside the hill, there is a pool in which two dragons lie buried.

  The legend of the Roman boy whose blood was to protect the citadel is reminiscent of one of the ‘cruel and horrible rites’ of the Druids (here). During their nine-year campaign, the forces of Caratacus would have acquired prisoners and hostages, and the son of an important Roman may well have served as a blood offering before the battle. His name preserves the religious significance of the sacrifice: ‘Ambrosius’ means ‘immortal’, and ‘Aurelianus’ comes from ‘aureus’ (the adjective means ‘golden’ and was commonly applied to the sun).

  On the eve of the battle at the sacred hill fort where Lludd had buried the dragons and where three solar paths converge, the ‘Immortal Sun’ was symbolically interred. A treasure, later said to be the Throne of Britain or the gold of Merlin, was entombed beneath the hill or in the nearby lake, just as the gold of Delphi had been deposited in the pools of Tolosa (here). The belief in reincarnation was one of the principal tenets of the Druids; it was subsequently expressed in the legend of King Arthur and his sleeping knights, and in the stories of a saviour crucified by the Romans who descended into hell and ascended into heaven. One day, the warriors of Caratacus who died in battle would rise again like the sun in the eastern sky.

  On the gentler slopes of the hill, Caratacus ‘piled up stones to serve as a rampart’, but, says Tacitus, ‘the rude and shapeless stone construction’ was swiftly demolished by the Romans. Perhaps this is the historical origin of Vortigern’s crumbling citadel. The Britons, caught between the legionaries and the auxiliaries, were overwhelmed. The wife and daughter of Caratacus were captured; his brothers surrendered. Caratacus himself escaped to the north-east, where the queen of the Brigantes, Cartimandua, hoping to tighten her delicate hold on power, handed him over to the Romans. From northern Britain, Caratacus crossed the conquered land in chains. It would have taken over a month to reach Rome, and on that long journey through Britain, Gaul and Italy, there would have been plenty of time to compose the speeches that would save him and his family from execution.

  The tribes of South Wales fought on, inflamed by a report that governor Ostorius Scapula had called for the very name of the Silures to be ‘utterly extinguished’. The island of Mona was left to its own devices for another nine years. It was not until AD 60 that the soldiers of Suetonius Paulinus crossed the Menai Strait, massacred the Druids, and set about the unsoldierly task of extirpating groves of oak. But even then, their victory was incomplete. While they desecrated the Druids’ groves in the far west of Britain, where the dying sun turned the ocean red, news reached them from the mainland that a great fire was rising in the east. The whole province of Britannia was in revolt. This time, the military application of Druidic science would have devastating consequences for the Romans.

  While Suetonius Paulinus was rushing from Mona towards Londinium ‘amidst a hostile population’, a messenger arrived with an order for the camp prefect of the Second Augustan Legion, based at the fortress of Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter). The prefect would normally have been third in command, but the Mona campaign had left the fortresses undermanned, and Poenius Postumus found himself in sole charge of the legion. He was ordered to proceed immediately to the province and to join forces with Suetonius Paulinus.

  For some reason, the camp prefect disobeyed the order. Between Isca Dumnoniorum in the far south-west and the Roman province in the east lay the hill forts of the Durotriges, the most impressive of which was Maiden Castle near Dorchester. Seen from the air, its mazy earthworks resemble the knotted oak-wood swirls of Celtic art, which suggests that they served an apotropaic as well as a practical, strategic purpose. Traces have been found at Maiden Castle and other forts in the region of hand-to-hand fighting and ballistic assault. While the evidence is often associated with the invasion of AD 43, many of the signs of destruction are more consistent with a date of AD 60–61. If Poenius Postumus failed to join his commander, it was probably because he, too, had a rebellion on his hands.

  The attack on Mona had sparked off two simultaneous revolts – one in the south-west, extending perhaps as far as Noviomagus (Chichester) and Venta Belgarum (Winchester), the other in the southeast, affecting an area of about ten thousand square kilometres. Seventeen years after the Roman invasion, the British tribes must have retained a message system as efficient as that of the Gauls. ‘Secret conspiracies’ had been hatched by the Iceni, the Trinovantes and their allies. Now, the gods themselves appeared to be taking a hand.

  The Roman merchants and administrators who had settled in Camulodunum (Colchester) were unnerved by strange occurrences. A statue of Victory was found flat on its face, as though it had been fleeing from the enemy. ‘Frenzied women’ screamed prophecies of destruction in the streets. As though in confirmation, a ruined city was seen in the waters of the Thames Estuary. In the English Channel, the flood tide ran blood-red, and the ebb tide revealed ‘effigies of human corpses’. The witches of Camulodunum, like the torch-waving Druidesses of Mona, could strike fear into a Roman heart, and the most disturbing news of all was that the rebel leader was a woman.

  Boudica, queen of the Iceni, whose name means ‘Victorious’, is the first heroine of British history. Every modern retelling of her tale mentions the rape of her daughters and the whipping she received at the hands of the Roman administrators who were bleeding the province dry. The only evidence for these outrages is Boudica’s rabble-rousing speech to her troops, reported (or invented) by Tacitus. The sexual humiliation of the Icenian royal family was supposed to explain how a woman – albeit one ‘possessed of greater intelligence than often belongs to women’ (Cassius Dio) – came close to reconquering a Roman province. Boudica’s bloody rampage through southern Britain showed what could happen when a Celtic woman’s righteous passion was unleashed. It hardly needs saying that to wreak comprehensive destruction on several major settlements within a
short period is impossible without a well-coordinated and well-supplied military campaign. Boudica was a soldier and a politician. The rape of the princesses and the scourging of the queen may well have taken place, but they also belong to the rhetoric of rebellion, and they provided the Celtic troops with a casus belli more inspiring than the financial malpractice of Roman officials.

  The most obviously Druidic detail is missing from many popular accounts of Boudica’s meteoric career, either because it seems too weird to be true, or because it sits awkwardly with the image of Boudica as a mother and a victim of Roman male aggression. Boudica addressed her troops, according to Cassius Dio, in a ‘harsh voice’, from ‘a tribunal made out of marshy [or ‘fenny’] earth’. She wore a tartan tunic and a thick cloak. A mass of auburn hair fell to her hips. In her lap, a throbbing creature waited to be released from its prison. The queen opened her arms, and a hare bounded off in a direction which the Druids proclaimed to be auspicious.

  The brown hare (Lepus europaeus) will flee in a straight line for a kilometre or more, and usually in the same direction as the wind, which made it the ideal choice of animal for a Celtic commander who wanted to convince her troops that the gods agreed with her plan. The likeliest location for this ceremony of divination is the fortified settlement of Wardy Hill in the Isle of Ely, where the easterly line of longitude meets the Pendinas line of latitude and the solstice line from Oxford (fig. 62). The ‘hill’ rises no more than ten metres above sea level, but in the Cambridgeshire fens it occupies a commanding position. Excavations in the early 1990s showed that Wardy Hill was an important defensive site long before a pillbox was erected on its summit in World War Two. It was a major settlement of the Iceni tribe: ‘a resident élite persisted here’, even during the Roman occupation.