The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  78. A Pictish carving

  From a Pictish stone found in the Orkney Islands. (After Murray, here)

  When the first Christian chapels were built in Britain and Gaul, the creator of the Heraklean Way had long since ascended into the heavens. Meanwhile, stiff with cold and frost, and in a remote region of the earth, far from the visible sun, these islands received the light of the true Sun – which is to say the precepts of Christ – showing to the whole world his splendour, not only from the temporal firmament, but from the height of heaven, which surpasses all things temporal.

  In Gaul, the ‘true Sun’ shone brightest where the Romans had founded their towns and where the great cathedrals would be built. But it also shone on obscure and half-abandoned places that had been sacred to the Celts. On the mountain where the oppidum of Bibracte had stood, a chapel replaced the temple. Nemetons turned into Christian shrines, and sites named after the god Lugh acquired chapels dedicated to a ‘St Luc’. At least one Mediolanum changed its name to ‘Madeleine’. In Alesia, the mother-city of the Gauls, a Christian girl was said to have been martyred in 252. St Regina (Sainte Reine) had been decapitated, and where her severed head had struck the ground, a miraculous healing spring gushed out.

  79. Christianity and the solar network

  The early Christian sites (first foundation, up to the mid-seventh century) are plotted without prior reference to solstice lines. For exact coordinates, see www.panmacmillan.com/theancientpaths. In Wales, pre-eighth-century monasteries are shown. Hoards containing Christian artefacts are omitted because provenances are uncertain (Mildenhall, Traprain Law, Water Newton, etc.), as are Christian embellishments and private chapels in Roman villas. Later monasteries and cathedrals (c. 974–1248) are selected for their association with the system (e.g. those on the ‘Royal Road’ between Salisbury and Bury St Edmunds: here).

  Key:

  Early Christian sites (list of coordinates at www.panmacmillan.com/theancientpaths): 1. Iona. 2. Dumbarton. 3. Glasgow (Govan). 4. Dunfermline. 5. Mailros (Melrose). 6. Lindisfarne. 7. Kirkmadrine. 8. Whithorn. 9. Ardwall Isle. 10. Carlisle. 11. Bewcastle. 12. Jarrow. 13. Eamont. 14. Hartlepool. 15. Whitby. 16. Manchester. 17. Leeds. 18. York. 19. Caergybi. 20. Aberffraw. 21. Penmon. 22. St Asaph. 23. Chester. 24. Lincoln (St Paul in the Bail). 25. Clynnog Fawr. 26. Dinas Emrys. 27. Bangor on Dee. 28. Ancaster. 29. Bardsey. 30. St Tudwal’s Island East. 31. Meifod. 32. Llanbadarn Fawr. 33. Ashton. 34. Ely. 35. Soham. 36. Icklingham. 37. Llanarth. 38. Llanddewi Brefi. 39. Glascwm. 40. Leominster. 41. Hereford. 42. Malvern (St Ann’s Well). 43. Worcester. 44. Bannaventa. 45. St Davids. 46. St Brides. 47. Coygan Camp. 48. Carmarthen. 49. Llanarthney. 50. Llangyfelach. 51. Bishopston. 52. Merthyr Tydfil. 53. Llantwit Major. 54. Raglan. 55. Dixton. 56. Llandogo. 57. Caerleon. 58. Caerwent. 59. Mathern (St Tewdric’s Well). 60. Gloucester (Churchdown Hill). 61. Uley. 62. Bagendon (church in oppidum). 63. Dragon Hill, Uffington (chapel). 64. Abingdon. 65. Dorchester-on-Thames. 66. Cholesbury. 67. St Albans. 68. Witham. 69. Colchester. 70. Sutton Hoo (?). 71. Bradwell (Othona). 72. Silchester. 73. Chertsey. 74. Westminster. 75. Rochester. 76. Canterbury. 77. Reculver. 78. Richborough. 79. St Ives (St Ia’s). 80. St Michael’s Mount. 81. Phillack. 82. Perranporth (St Piran’s Oratory). 83. Carhampton. 84. Glastonbury Tor (St Michael’s). 85. Bradley Hill. 86. Muchelney. 87. Ilchester. 88. Sherborne. 89. Poundbury (Dorchester). 90. Winchester. 91. Lyminge. 92. Folkestone (St Eanswythe).

  Monasteries and cathedrals (selected): A. Bolton Priory. B. Fountains Abbey. C. Haughmond Abbey. D. Haverholme Priory. E. Croyland Abbey. F. Monmouth Priory. G. Tintern Abbey. H. Chepstow Priory. I. Osney Abbey. J. Newnham Priory (Bedford). K. St Neots Priory. L. Walden Abbey (Saffron Walden). M. Clare Priory. N. Bury St Edmunds Abbey. O. Ixworth Priory. P. Reading Abbey. Q. Plympton Priory. R. Exeter Abbey. S. Salisbury Cathedral. T. Waverley Abbey.

  The story of the saint of Alesia is typical of the early process of Christianization. The pagan gods of Alesia’s healing spring were officially obliterated in the ninth century, when a ‘Life of St Regina’ was concocted from the hagiography of another saint. Nothing was said of the battle that had been fought at Alesia in September 52 bc, though the day on which the saint is still remembered (7 September) may be the exact anniversary of Vercingetorix’s defeat. Thousands of other sites were ideologically cleared to make way for the new religion. Monasteries and hermitages were founded in places said to be so wild and barren – ‘in terra deserta, in loco horroris et vastae solitudinis’61 – that only demons had been able to live there until the grace of God had made them fertile.

  In the long dawn of western Christianity, older landscapes sometimes deepen the view like anachronisms in a dream. When St Columba and St Patrick processed ‘sunwise’ around chapels and holy wells, they were performing a Druidic ritual in the name of a new god. (As the native of a nemeton,62 Patrick may well have been familiar with Druidic rites.) In the curved ambulatories of their churches, monks paced out the invisible ellipses of Celtic temples. Pope Gregory had instructed that animal sacrifice should be allowed to continue, provided that the animal be eaten afterwards in a holy feast and ‘no longer sacrificed as an offering to the devil’. Many other ceremonies must have been retained, even as their meanings were erased.

  Traces of this merging of two religions are surprisingly evident in the British solar network. Several major Christian sites are strung along the Whitchurch meridian like beads on a rosary: Mailros Abbey, Lanercost Priory, Tintern Abbey, Chepstow Priory, the monasteries of Llandogo and Dixton near Monmouth, the church on Glastonbury Tor, and the ancient chapel at Eamont near Penrith, where the kings of Dark Age Britain accepted Christianity as the official religion of the Isles in 927.

  Apart from the lonely church on the Bewcastle Waste in Cumbria, which the Romans knew as ‘Fanum Cocidi’, the shrine of a Celtic god, these holy places seem to have been created ex nihilo. Yet they and many others adhere to the British solstice lines as though, along with some of the Iron Age tribal boundaries, knowledge of the system had somehow been preserved.

  Evidence of the first Christian sites in Britain is sparse and not always easy to interpret. It consists of saints’ lives and chronicles, inscriptions, lead fonts and other ecclesiastical remains, and cemeteries in which the skeletons are oriented on the sunrise. Far more is known about the great abbeys and priories of the monastic revival of the tenth to twelfth centuries, but there are no documents to explain why they, too, often match the solar paths. Monastic histories were stitched together from fictional accounts of the abbey’s patron saint, forged charters and snippets of folklore, suitably Christianized. No ambitious institution would have advertised its pagan roots. When Osney Abbey was founded as a priory in 1129 on sodden meadows beneath Oxford Castle, no reference was made to the site’s legendary status as the omphalos of Celtic Britain. The unpromising location was selected because the founder’s wife liked to walk along the riverbank and often stopped by a tree in which – miraculously, it seemed to her – magpies used to gather ‘and ther to chattre, and as it wer to speke onto her’. The garrulous birds, her confessor explained, were souls in purgatory seeking rest. Accordingly, the priory was built on that very spot.

  Abbeys, priories and even hermitages were founded where they would be fed by the flow of pilgrims’ money. They stood where people had passed or congregated in pagan times. Travellers’ tales and local legends were incorporated into the founding myth. Monks and abbots, too, believed in witches and demons; they knew and feared the names of the pagan gods. Their mental maps of the abbey’s environs included magic wells and trees, and the mounds where fairies went to and from the lower world. Some of the medieval abbeys were joined to other holy sites by straight tracks called ‘fairy paths’, ‘trods’ or ‘corpse roads’. These tracks were said to have been made by the feet of saints or angels. Some were remnants of longer routes such as the Icknield Way, and although the paths were prehistoric, Christian pilgrims walked along them towards a new life with the sun’s light in the
ir eyes or their shadows rushing ahead to the horizon.

  This is the mystery glimpsed in the scriptorium at St Albans: the solstice line labelled ‘Icknield Way’ on the map of the Four Royal Roads passes through five abbeys and one cathedral (Salisbury), despite the fact that most of those institutions had existed for less than a century. How did a new cathedral come to find itself on an ancient solar path? The mystery would be impenetrable without a legend which explains how the site was chosen. From the top of the old cathedral inside the circular earthworks of the Iron Age oppidum three kilometres to the north, the Bishop of Old Sarum or his bowman shot an arrow. Where the arrow landed, the new cathedral would be built. Instead of falling to the ground, the arrow pierced a deer, which ran to the banks of the river Avon. It died, somewhat inconveniently, on a marshy floodplain, on the site of the future Salisbury Cathedral.

  The deer’s sense of direction in the throes of death was as keen as that of Boudica’s hare. It died on a piece of land called Myrfield or ‘boundary field’ at which three ancient territories met. This zoomantic divination practised or sanctioned by a medieval bishop is one of the rare clues to an actual process of transmission. Druids, too, deciphered messages in the struggles of slain animals. Whether or not they grasped the whole picture, hermits, seers and pagan worshippers ensured that the sacred places of the new religion would be aligned, like its altars and graves, on the paths of the old sun. Hermits colonized Druidic sites, and on those sites, abbeys were founded – which is why, when St Patroclus of Bourges made his cell ‘in the deep solitudes of the forest’ in the early sixth century, his secluded retreat already had a Celtic name: Mediocantus or ‘Middle of the Wheel’. In churches standing on the foundations of temples, and in basilicas built from the rubble of oppida, half-converted congregations heard words of wisdom very similar to those they had learned from the Druids:

  ‘Honour the gods, do no evil, and exercise courage.’

  ‘Death is but the middle of a long life.’

  ‘Souls do not perish but pass after death from one body into another.’

  More than a thousand years after the advent of the Celtic gods, their sun was still shining on the mortal earth. All over Europe, pilgrims followed the roads that could be concealed but not destroyed. The new religion was spreading its own map over the world, and although the sacred centre was now Jerusalem and many of the coordinates of the Celtic earth had been erased, certain places that had fallen into obscurity recovered some of their ancient glory. Every year, hordes of Christians passed through Châteaumeillant, the omphalos of Gaul, heading south-west to the Pyrenees and the shrine of the apostle James at Compostela. They imagined themselves to be guided by the blur of the Milky Way, which is still known in some parts as ‘the Way of St James’. The white road in the heavens had once been associated with Herakles and his mother’s milk, and with the glowing trail that was left by the dying sun as it descended towards the Ocean.

  Half an hour of daylight south of Châteaumeillant, beyond the mountain forests that Herakles had turned into the world’s biggest funeral pyre, the latitude line of the northern Mediterranean leads to Santiago de Compostela and, from there, to the End of the Earth called Fisterra. The ‘Altar of the Sun’ vanished long ago. It may have stood on the hill above the lighthouse or on the site of the twelfth-century church of Santa María das Areas, where pilgrims still pray to a miracle-working Christ of the Golden Beard.

  Centuries before, Carthaginian vessels had passed the Altar of the Sun as they sailed north on the tin route to Finistère and Belerion. The rocky headland on the Costa da Morte was the scene of many shipwrecks, and treasures may still be awaiting rediscovery beneath the Atlantic storms. According to the legend of the Fisterran Christ, a statue with a golden beard was cast into the waves from a ship in distress, to lighten the load or to calm the raging winds by propitiation. For an unknown length of time, it was lost in the Ocean. Then, one day, it was caught in a fisherman’s net. Like many other images of ancient gods, it was interpreted as a miraculous image of Christ. But a golden beard had been one of the attributes of the Carthaginian Herakles. He could still be seen in all his splendour in the fifth century, on the African shores of the Mediterranean, before Christians removed his beard and felled his mighty trunk. His ritual death, in an ancient storm at the end of the earth, was the god’s salvation. He plunged, like the sun and the souls of the dead, into the roaring sea, and the ship that had carried him sailed on in the certain knowledge that light would soon be spreading from the east.

  Epilogue

  A Traveller’s Guide to Middle Earth

  When this book was on the verge of being written, I walked through central London on the Celtic meridian. This is the line of longitude that would have run between the meridians of Whitchurch and Châteaumeillant if the solar network had been translated directly from Gaul to Britain, as, indeed, it may have been at an early stage (here). I wanted to confront the magical mathematics of Middle Earth with the randomness of present reality, and to counteract the excitement that turns every suspicion into a truth.

  Coincidences had become everyday occurrences. A few days before, the Druid network had shown its astonishing power to illuminate the long-buried past by revealing the location of the legendary court of King Arthur. The line that crosses England half a klima north of the Aberystwyth parallel meets the Whitchurch meridian in Greater Manchester. The intersection lies in the Wigan suburb of Standish. Two thousand years ago, Standish was a Roman road junction called Coccium . . . Once again, the solar paths and the Roman road system were in mysterious harmony.

  To be precise, the point of intersection is at the end of a cul-de-sac running off Old Pepper Lane, where a track leads into the council-owned woodland of Shevington Moor. The other edge of the wood, one hundred and fifty metres to the east, is skirted by the Royal Road from Tripontium. It was along a southern section of this trajectory that Boudica had marched to her last battle with the Romans.

  80. The solar location of ‘Camelot’

  When the solar paths were plotted on the virtual map, a fourth line became visible: this was the summer solstice path running northeast from the dragons’ tomb of Dinas Emrys. Then a word appeared on the computer screen as though the solar network could generate digital hallucinations: ‘CAMELOT’. The pattern unfurled itself like a flag in a sudden breeze: Hannibal, Vercingetorix, Caratacus, Boudica and now, it seemed, Arthur, King of the Britons, had all been followers of the sun god. ‘Arthur’s Cave’, on the Whitchurch meridian, marks the site of Merlin’s victory over Vortigern (here). On the same meridian, the monks of Glastonbury had excavated an ancient royal burial containing what they claimed were the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere. It was possible after all that in post-Roman Britain, when the old Celtic territories were re-emerging as Dark Age kingdoms, the court of Camelot had been sited at an auspicious nodal point of the network.

  The approximate date of Camelot’s foundation was revealed almost in the same instant by the two words which appeared beneath ‘Camelot’: ‘Theme Park’. For some unfathomable reason, in this zone of solar intersections, the latest incarnation of Merlin, according to the Camelot website, ‘can be found performing his illusions twice a day in his spellbinding magic show which takes places in the Castle’.

  As soon as a geometrical pattern is imposed on the inhabited earth, significance rushes in like water into a channel dug in a damp field. The London meridian crosses the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge near the site of a Bronze Age causeway and heads north to Westminster. A short distance away, beyond the Houses of Parliament – as though the network had been common knowledge all along – stands the equestrian statue of Queen Boudica, her commanding bronze thighs conveying an unusually positive impression of an Iron Age aristocrat’s diet.

  At the time of Boudica’s rebellion, Westminster was an island. A medieval charter described it as a ‘locus valde terribilis’ – ‘a truly terrible place’. Despite the mirthful interpretation of the word by W
estminster schoolboys, ‘terribilis’ means ‘awe-inspiring’ or ‘venerable’. Thorney Island was a sacred place. One of the earliest Christian churches had been founded there, according to a sixth-century legend, by King Lucius of Britain. No king of that name ever existed, and so ‘Lucius’, like ‘Luc’, is probably a corruption of the name of the god ‘Lugh’ or ‘Lugus’. An early British chronicle stated that the primitive church was replaced by a temple to Apollo, then restored in AD 488 by Ambrosius Aurelianus, the Romano-British chieftain whose name, like that of Apollo, evokes the immortal sun.

  As the mouths of the Tyburn stream silted up, Thorney Island was joined to the north bank of the Thames. The area is now a temple to the governing spirits of the Poetic Isles. The meridian passes through Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, across Downing Street, through the Cabinet Office and Horse Guards Parade, and along the east side of Trafalgar Square. Druid architects would have been amazed by these vast stone alignments, though they might have wondered why the orientations were so approximate.

  Every city swarms with coincidence. It was only now, several weeks after discussing this book with my editor, that I realized that the meridian bisects the restaurant where the discussion had taken place, and that it continues north to the left-luggage office of St Pancras Station, where the bicycles had completed their journey back from Mediolanum Biturigum. Geomantic expeditions are not for the neurotically disposed. At the Euston Road entrance to the British Library, and in the Great Court of the British Museum – both bisected by the meridian – a voice proclaimed the ‘Druid network’ to be nothing but a huge and complex system of personal reference, a testament, not to the Druids’ genius, but to the ruthless ingenuity of the unconscious mind.