The Ancient Paths

by Graham Robb

  On the first floor of the museum, a few steps from the meridian, a trained volunteer was sitting at a table. She was inviting members of the public to handle a selection of Roman artefacts, as though to convince them of the reality of the past. In the same room, between Prehistory and the Romans, I looked again at the face on the Aylesford Bucket and the other-worldly features that contain the formula for the map of Celtic Britain. I peered at the microscopic gold coins and tried to remember the human or divine faces and the shapes of the celestial horses as they can be seen in magnified illustrations. How those objects were produced without a powerful lens is hard to say.

  One of the glinting, mysterious discs in the British Museum’s cabinets is the oldest Celtic gold coin found in Britain, and one of the most beautiful objects of the ancient world. It shows the flowing oak-leaf hair of a sun god or a Druid and a star-field of indecipherable symbols surrounding a horse. A terminal connected to the museum database makes it possible to inspect the tiny details. The catalogue entry explained that the coin had probably been minted in northern Gaul in the second century BC and brought across the Channel as a gift or as a trade item: ‘Some of [these coins] were eventually buried in coin hoards and not recovered by their owners. The owner may have died, or simply forgotten where they had put them. Alternatively, the coins may have been intended as permanent, sacred offerings to the gods.’

  This particular coin had been found in 1849 ‘at Fenny Stratford, near Milton Keynes, England’. (The exact location is unknown or undisclosed.) After a morning spent in a labyrinth composed of a single, straight line, this fact, perhaps of no real interest, seemed all the more precious.

  The train from Paddington Station slows down as it passes Osney cemetery and comes to a halt in Oxford Station three hundred metres north of the omphalos of Celtic Britain. That evening, I cycled home past the remnant of Osney Abbey, where the only reminders of Lludd’s vat of mead were empty beer cans, then across the Wessex–Mercia border and up Cumnor Hill to Leys Cottage, which – thankfully, in view of the unconscious autobiography theory – lies a good kilometre and a half from the Oxford winter solstice line to Isca Dumnoniorum.

  81. Magiovinium and the solar intersection

  Outside, the only light was the crescent moon and the gleam of the excavators that had come to clear away the private woodland between the cottage and the farmer’s field. The screen shimmered into life and populated itself with roads and place names. On the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey map, Fenny Stratford, where the gold coin had been discovered, is helpfully labelled ‘Magiovinium’. ‘Great Something’ (‘vinium’ has defied translation) was a small settlement on Watling Street – Roman, but with a Celtic name. Now, it lies in the south-eastern suburbs of Milton Keynes.

  Ever since it was founded as a ‘new town’ in 1967, Milton Keynes has been a by-word for modernist banality. A Druid, however, might have felt more at home there than in central London. The designers of Milton Keynes were aficionados of the mystical paths known as ley lines, which were enjoying a revival in the late-1960s. At one stage, it was proposed that the entire town be organized along ley lines that would connect its brand-new roads, retail outlets and dwelling units to prehistoric sites such as Silbury Hill, Avebury and Stonehenge. ‘Conventional wisdom prevailed’, but not entirely: the three central thoroughfares of Milton Keynes – Silbury Boulevard, Avebury Boulevard and Midsummer Boulevard – are aligned so that the rising sun of the summer solstice shines through the middle of the shopping centre and turns the glassy facade of the railway station into a blinding wall of light.

  I had not heard of Fenny Stratford before reading the description of the coin in the British Museum, but I was familiar with Magiovinium as the place where the summer solstice line from Oxford meets the Royal Road from Londinium. In the area now covered by Caldecotte Lake, on the site of a deserted medieval village, a Celtic field system, Iron Age honey bees and a ditched enclosure have been found. The original Celtic settlement must have been far more extensive than the Roman town. The point of intersection lies between two lakes on the edge of the former settlement. This watery domain may well have been used by the inhabitants of Magiovinium for ritual deposition. A supermarket distribution centre, closed off by steel gates and surrounded by feeder roads, occupies most of the site. Somewhere under that tarmac blanket of amnesia – perhaps on that very spot – for a reason that will never be known, the golden image of a sun god was buried in the earth.

  For a twenty-first-century visitor to Celtic Middle Earth, the key cartographic tools are the maps of the Ordnance Survey (the British and the Irish), and the Institut Géographique National. In addition to the modern maps of France, the IGN’s superb public-access mashup provides cadastral maps, the eighteenth-century Cassini Carte de France and the nineteenth-century Carte de l’État-major. For archaeological sites and finds, the first ports of call are the multi-volume Carte archéologique de la Gaule (not yet online) and, for Britain, the records of the Royal Commissions on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and Wales, and the National Monuments Record. Each English county has a Historic Environment Record. Many can be consulted online via the Heritage Gateway,63 but some may still require a visit to the archive in question.

  The practical intricacies of charting a solar path are described at various points in this book.64 The basic problem is that of projection. The shortest path between two points on a sphere is not the same as the path drawn by a straight line on a flat projection. When, several decades ago, I flew the short distance from Manchester to Dublin, the flight path made perfect sense: there was the Irish Sea and the coast of North Wales, just as it looked in the atlas. But when I first flew to America, expecting to see Ireland and then nothing but ocean until the Statue of Liberty, the pilot took a scenic route and descended into the United States over icy wastes which turned out to be Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. My imagined flight path was a rhumb line or line of constant bearing. The actual flight path was a Great Circle, which, in that case, is two hundred and nineteen kilometres shorter but demands a continual adjustment of the bearing.

  Solar paths, and any pre-modern alignments or routes, are inevitably rhumb lines, which is why a straight line drawn on a road atlas or almost any other commonly used map will not be identical to a line produced by sundials, gromas and other antiquated equipment (fig. 82). By good fortune (and design), the projection currently used by Google Maps is a variety of Mercator projection. In Celtic latitudes, this is entirely acceptable for Druidic purposes. The angles and trajectories are those that an ancient surveyor would have derived, for example, from triangulation. (It is important to note that this applies only to large scales. When the maps are zoomed out to show areas the size of large countries, a different projection is used.) The bearings can be checked using the formula for calculating rhumb lines.65 A comprehensive list of coordinates (to four decimal points) produced for the writing of this book is available at www.panmacmillan.com/theancientpaths. Several programs allow these coordinates to be plotted on a map.66

  82. Rhumb line and Great Circle

  If Lludd had possessed the technology available to a modern pilot, his flight path would have taken him and the dragons, not over the outskirts of Middleton, but over Downton Hall, one and a half kilometres to the north. The deviation on this Mercator map is exaggerated.

  A certain amount of experimentation is required to determine an appropriate margin of error: variables include the length of a path, its point of origin, and the theoretical accuracy of the surveying method. It was Alexander Thom (1894–1985), a Scottish engineer, who introduced precise measurements to the study of prehistoric alignments. His painstaking work helped to give this mystic-muddled sphere some academic respectability. Ironically, though, it also introduced an incongruous degree of complexity. The problem is that modern notions of exactitude are not those of an Iron Age or Roman surveyor. If an ancient road or temple is aligned on the solstice sun to within one-tenth of a degree, the match is almost ce
rtainly coincidental. On the other hand, if a margin of one degree or more is allowed, any number of sites could be included in the hypothetical pattern. Common sense suggests an occasional accommodation with physical reality, but it can never be said too often that a straight line drawn between a handful of points is not necessarily significant, especially if the line is traced in sleepwalking obliviousness to history, legend, archaeology and science.

  Any reader who has travelled this far in the book without taking shortcuts will certainly possess the patience necessary for visiting Iron Age sites. Some oppida are still major features of the landscape from Britain to the Danube Basin. A few even have visitor centres and exhibitions – Alesia, Bibracte, Castell Henllys, Ensérune, Glauberg, Hauterive-Neuchâtel, Heuneburg, Numantia and Parc Samara – but nearly all are deserted. ‘Settlements of the ancient Celts’ would be a perfect theme for a misanthrope’s holiday. The remote and exposed locations of many oppida have preserved them from vandalism, and archaeologists of the recent past will find some almost pristine examples of pre-war signage. Sometimes, the only indication that the oppidum has been discovered is a stake and a plank of wood resembling a signpost in an Astérix comic, etched with the words ‘Ancien site fortifié’ or ‘Keltské oppidum’.

  Celtic treasures can be found in the national museums of most European countries, but also in local collections in small towns and villages. This scattering of artefacts is inconvenient for a researcher, but it makes the dramatically different population patterns of Iron Age Europe impossible to ignore. Here, too, persistence is required. The staff of one museum, which holds the unique and beautiful stone carvings from the Celtic shrine of Roquepertuse, were unaware of their whereabouts and even their existence until they were shown a photograph of the carvings in a book sold in the museum’s own bookshop.

  Since the solar network was based on celestial phenomena, a traveller to Middle Earth will naturally arrive in places where there seems to be nothing to see. In Britain, perhaps the most intriguingly uninteresting sites are the boundary intersections called tripoints (here). Those that have a name – Three Shire Elms, No Man’s Heath, etc. – are likely to be ancient. A typical tripoint is marked by a clump of ash and hawthorn or some other tenacious tree. Humanity is represented by a heap of discarded tyres and electrical appliances, though sometimes there are prehistoric mounds in the vicinity. Enormous crowds once gathered at these places to attend cockfights and boxing matches. Occasionally, there were reports of witches’ covens and other suspicious activities. These illegal meetings may be the last recorded echoes of the inter-tribal assemblies of Celtic Britain.

  In the spring of 2011, I visited some of these sites with a Welsh Hispanist from the University of Nottingham. An explorer of geomantic intersections may feel like an intruder and inevitably often is. Solar paths are not respecters of property, and it should be said that in cases of trespass, a magistrate or juge d’instruction is unlikely to accept the existence of a nodal point of Celtic Middle Earth as a mitigating factor.

  The sacred tree of the Druids tends to live in communities of genetically similar specimens, and so the Three Shire Oak, which stands in derelict woodland on the Royal Road from Isca Dumnoniorum and on the borders of Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, could well be the direct descendant of an Iron Age oak. ‘Normanton Thorns’, as the wood is called, shows what happens when woodland is neglected: it turns into an overgrown shrubbery in which native trees straggle towards the light like prisoners begging for food. Somewhere in the tangled depths, despite the failing light, a man was firing a shotgun at some woodpigeons. On its northern edge, the wood is hemmed in by a brutally illuminated business park. By squeezing along the security fence, it is just possible to reach the corner where three counties meet. An aged trunk had been protected with a picket fence. In the gathering gloom, Dr Roberts identified the tree by its sticky buds . . . Thanks to the arboreal ignorance of the council employee who had been sent to cordon it off, the Three Shire Oak had become the Three Shire Chestnut.

  In such unpredictable ways, realities that have decayed into legends fade and change their form as they disappear. The woodland was as much a mystery to the anonymous fencer as a curiously patterned Celtic ornament to a Dark Age Pict.

  The sun appears to accelerate as it descends to the horizon. The present breaks down into a succession of blurred moments, and the remote past acquires a solidity that it seemed to have lost. The Camelot theme park closed at the end of 2012 after almost three decades of existence. The Avalon Arena, the Mad Monastery and Merlin’s School of Wizardry now belong to history. The place where ‘Camelot’ stands empty was once the edge of Martin Mere, the largest freshwater lake in England. A local legend claimed that this was the lake into whose waters, in what sounds like an act of ritual deposition, the sword Excalibur was thrown. In view of the unusual preponderance of nodal points in the environs of the vanished lake, this now looks more plausible than ever.

  Chronology

  BC

  8th century

  Hallstatt kingdoms in eastern Alps and middle Danube; Tartessian culture and language in south-western Iberia.

  c. 680

  Oldest dated features of Emain Macha (Navan Fort, Northern Ireland).

  c. 600

  Massalia founded by Greeks from Phocaea; ‘Keltoi’ living on northern shores of Mediterranean.

  6th century

  Hill forts in Bohemia; Massalian trading posts on the Mediterranean; Lepontic (a Celtic language) spoken in northern Italy and Alps.

  Late 6th century

  ‘Princely residences’ in Burgundy (‘the Lady of Vix’), Marne, Rhineland; Massalian and Greek wine imported to central Gaul.

  c. 500

  Carthaginian navigators reach equatorial West Africa and North Atlantic coasts.

  5th century

  La Tène culture, from the Balkans to eastern Gaul; hill forts in southern Gaul, open settlements in the north.

  Early 4th century

  Gaulish migrations to northern Italy and to lands in and beyond the Hercynian Forest.

  396

  Destruction of settlement on site of future Mediolanum (Milan).

  387

  Celtic occupation of Rome.

  350

  Aristotle, Meteorology: klimata and zodiacal circle.

  335

  Celtic envoys meet Alexander the Great in Macedonia.

  331

  Lunar eclipse observed at Arbela, Syracuse and Carthage, perhaps also at Rhodes and Athens (international longitude experiment?).

  c. 325

  Voyage of Pytheas of Massalia.

  310–260s

  Belgic tribes arrive in northern Gaul from Germany and Central Europe.

  c. 300

  Euclid’s Elements; invention of the dioptra; definition of meridians and parallels by Dicaearchus.

  c. 280

  Battle of Ribemont-sur-Ancre; Celts invade Illyricum, Pannonia, Macedonia; first coins minted in Gaul (principally Arvernian).

  279

  Celtic army plunders Delphi.

  278

  Gauls cross the Hellespont; Tolistobogii, Trocmii and Volcae Tectosages settle in Galatia.

  250–41

  Gauls recruited for Carthaginian army in Sicily.

  c. 240

  Eratosthenes calculates circumference of earth; invention of solstitial armillary sphere.

  225

  Battle of Telamon (Tuscany): defeat of Celtic coalition by Rome.

  218

  Hannibal marches from Spain to Italy; September – crossing of the Rhone; November – crossing of the Alps.

  197

  Eastern and southern Iberia divided into two Roman provinces, Hispania Citerior (‘Nearer’) and Ulterior (‘Further’).

  196–189

  Rome conquers Celtic northern Italy (later, the province of Gallia Cisalpina).

  187

  Completion of Via Aemilia.

  182–133

&n
bsp; Celtiberian Wars.

  181

  Massalia appeals to Rome for help against Ligurian pirates.

  c. 180

  Oppida in central Germany, Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary.

  c. 175–50

  Gundestrup Cauldron.

  c. 150

  Hipparchus calculates klimata and meridians; Antikythera Mechanism; Polybius travels through southern Gaul.

  146

  Fall of Carthage.

  133

  Siege and destruction of Numantia.

  c. 130

  German oppida (Basel, Berne, Breisach, Bad Neuheim, Manching, etc.).

  125–121

  Roman conquest of southern Gaul.

  123

  Roman garrison at Aquae Sextiae (Aix-en-Provence).