Introduction
On Romans, roads and pushing back the frontiers
Hadrian’s Wall, indeed Hadrian himself, was a hard act to follow, but follow it was just what the new Emperor, Antoninus Pivs, had to do upon his succession in the year 138. It was deemed necessary that a new emperor show he was worth his salt and prove he was strong enough for the job of ruling most of the known world. Antoninus’s trouble was that he wasn’t a military man, never went within five hundred miles of a legion and never left Italy. Hadrian seems to have adopted him as his son and successor solely to continue his work of peaceful consolidation, but the people (bless them) wanted more than that. They craved blood and conquest and glory, and a sensible man gives the people want they want. We will probably never know his exact reasons for doing so, but four years after his accession to the throne, the unquestionably sensible Antoninus decided to send his troops over his father’s wall and deep into the territory of the Novantae, the Votadini and the Selgovae tribes, in, respectively, the modern provinces of Galloway, Northumberland and the unsurprisingly named ‘Borders’. We know next to nothing about this campaign and can only consult the scant archaeological record and speculate, but one fact, at least, remains concrete and undeniable after eighteen and a half centuries. A great wall was built on the Firth-Clyde isthmus between Bo’ness and Old Kirkpatrick, similar to Hadrian’s and, like his, presumably also meant to secure the territorial gains. Though sturdy and well-designed, needless to say, and with stone foundations, Antonine’s wall was built of turf and wood, and has perhaps therefore not survived the ravages of time as well as its illustrious forebear. Added to this is the fact that, unlike Hadrian’s, it was only occupied for about twenty years before the Romans abandoned their conquests and withdrew to the old frontier. Nevertheless, traces of the wall, its northern ditch, the military road to the south and the many forts and fortlets that defended it survive in abundance along this other, younger and surprisingly enduring Roman frontier road.
After long campaigning, the various archaeological sites were finally incorporated by UNESCO into the ‘world heritage’ site ‘Frontiers of the Roman Empire’ in 2008, but by the time I arrived a few years later, no new footpaths had been made to facilitate the traveller along the road the ancient fortifications define. It was as something of a pioneer then, that, after a few months locked up in a psychiatric hospital in Saint Albans, I hurriedly packed my rucksack and boarded the overnight train to Edinburgh, meaning to walk the length of this second ancient frontier road, feeling my way and finding the route as I went.
Deptford, 10thOctober, 2014
Dies nvllvs: To Rvmabo
From Northchurch, via Berkhamsted, Londinivm and Edinburgh, being the fifteenth day before the Calends of November, in the 2,764thyear after the founding of Rome, still during the third consulship of Silvio Berlusconi (Tuesday, 18thOctober, 2011)
On my first day back at work after the first frontier road, I found M beaming with a vaguely unsettling joy. I had been pestering my boss to let her change job titles and join me in my hitherto department-of-one for a year or more, but he had always prevaricated. Now, in my absence, and without informing me, my wish is suddenly granted, but it brings me neither relief of my burden nor pleasure. After her initial toothy happiness, M soon reverts to her sulky and apathetic self, indeed worse than ever, hindering, blocking or outright sabotaging my training programme in a thousand maddening little ways, and spending her office hours ‘chatting’ with me via the electronic messenger, gossiping about our colleagues, ‘surfing’ the ether and sending me ‘links’ to amusing films about cats or ghoulish tales of the macabre. I don’t complain. I never complained. To do so would have been foolish, because I always knew this would happen. Her pride was only matched by Lord Lucifer’s, and I knew full well there was no way in Hell she would ever have humiliated herself by letting me teach her something. But of course, I did not know this then. Would not know it. Didn’t know, wouldn’t know… Is there a difference?
A few months earlier I had been evicted from my flat, when my landlady wished to move into it herself. Though little enough bother in itself, for some reason the fact of the eviction troubled me greatly, and in my depressed state I had chosen my new home, a joyless little flat in a joyless cul-de-sac in a joyless neighbourhood higher up the northern side of the Chiltern Corridor, on the basis of a red kite hovering overhead while I was viewing it, which I took as a good omen. Lacking the advice of a good augurer, it may just as well have been a bad omen, and no sooner had I signed the lease and moved about a mile and a half from M than she also moved house to within a short walk of my new home. Alone after Miss T’s abandonment, I should have been happy about this touching gesture, and indeed managed to convince myself for a while that I was.
And yet Miss T had not quite abandoned me. We met in Vervlamivm a few days after my return from the first frontier road, and over wine in The Fighting Cocks, I soon wrung out from her that she had lied in Lvgvvalivm about the ‘offer’ she had supposedly received from her Brazilian suitor, the offer she was supposed to be at that very moment pondering tortuously. It turned out that, far from losing sleep agonising over the decision, she had already been sleeping soundly with him for months and even gone on holiday with him somewhere on the shores of Mare Nostrvm. The lie hurt me, even though she was demonstrating thereby that she still preferred me to him, but her scheming made me dig my heels in: I would not be blackmailed and I would not divorce M under duress. However, my stubbornness did me no good, and soon after that I found myself begging her not to leave me. This in turn made her dig her heels in: even if I now divorced M, she announced, I would still have to ‘work hard’ to win her back again. Once more I refused, but this time I refused while writhing on the floor in a puddle of guilty tears. Her demeanour hardened still further: now I had not only to divorce M, but to make a clean break with my entire past life. I had to throw away all unhappy souvenirs of my past and burn my diaries, at least those parts which expressed sorrow or despair of any kind. This time I agreed to do it, and we met in Londinivm a week later to discuss the terms. We drank passito and laughed riotously in Regent’s Park, and I told her how I had burned not only the negative parts of my diaries and other writings, but all of them, wholesale, whether happy or sad, in the Chiltern Hills at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve in a symbolic bonfire. Miss T was overcome with joy, and indeed grew so excited that we were on the verge of cavorting in the bushes under five thousand eyes. However, before this could happen, I told her I had lied about burning my diaries, and in fact never would, and in any case, what the hell was she thinking in asking me to do such a thing? She seemed to age ten years in a moment, then grew furious and cursed me with a vehemence of which I had not known she was capable, even after the toxic bile she had spewed on me at her friend’s wedding. It was a cruel trick I had played, to be sure, but what she had asked me to do was cruel too, I believed. Dirty for dirty, I judged, but I was wrong again. Now Miss T held all but one of the cards, and I had in my foolishness given them to her.
After this I collapsed altogether. My begging and pleading grew hysterical, culminating in more tears, reproaches, grovelling, accusations, sailor-blushing curses and a slapped face on London Bridge — mine, after I had refused to slap hers. And yet still I would not leave M irrevocably, who in her turn moved closer in, alternating her heartfelt sympathy for my heartbreak with sardonic mockery. She invited me to her new flat for food or entertainments ever more frequently, and I usually accepted, afraid of refusing, though ever more reluctantly. I invented excuses for my dithering and to prove to myself why it would have been unfair to try and reunite with her, but as the weeks and months passed, my excuses to myself wore thinner and thinner.
Autumn came, and life withered both within me and without. I fought bitterly with my family, heartily encouraged, indeed goaded by M, who had always loathed them, my mother in particular, and I feared the consequent rupture in my family bonds to be final. Then I learned from a mutual friend that Fräulein K had recently died of breast cancer, leaving behind a grieving lover and a young son, and though we had not been together for twelve years, nor seen one another for four, I was greatly aggrieved myself. Other friends, family and colleagues now began to turn their backs on me. Only the loyal and constant M remained in my shrinking, freezing, emptying world, but I got no succour from her loyalty and constancy. The more my world shrank, froze and emptied, the more M offered to expand, warm and fill it. I accepted her offers gratefully, yet somehow shivered, cowered and quaked all the more.
And then one night, a little after the saddest yule I had ever known, M suddenly changed. Or did she? She had been utterly inscrutable to me from the moment we met, so perhaps the cold, cruel, sneering mask she first gave me a tiny glimpse of that night was her true face, and perhaps the warm, friendly, angry, wise, sympathetic face I had known for twelve years had been just a mask. But such knowledge is forever denied to human beings: even the mask’s wearer does not know which is face and which is mask.
At any rate, something had changed. We usually talked about a thousand impersonal things long after dinner, but that night, a few minutes after we had both finished eating, she stood up from the table with a curiously studied gesture and a tiny smirk on her voluptuous lips that somehow managed to indicate that I should leave and that the surprise and unease I felt at this sudden change in her behaviour gave her great pleasure. It was all over in an instant, and she was back to her ‘normal’ self again immediately afterwards, whether that normal self was fake or genuine, but in that moment I understood with icy clarity that our relationship would never more be as it was. Then I forgot again.
As the year 2011 got underway, I sank deeper into depression and grew impatient and irritable, often getting into fights with strangers, especially with large, aggressive, bigoted men who I judged would do me most harm when provoked. With Miss T and Fräulein K now gone forever and my family, friends and colleagues slipping away one by one, I was reduced to having long conversations with an old three-legged cat in the neighbourhood, who always hobbled happily towards me when I approached. During the last weekend of January, the two-faced month, I reached a low point. For the first time since we had separated five years earlier, M didn’t telephone and invite me over. Late on Sunday afternoon I met the cat on the way back home with my shopping bags, and we talked even longer than usual. I stroked his head, back and tail, crying and telling him how much I hated the nasty yuppie who had run him over with his nasty car and taken his leg away, and he arched his back and purred happily in reply, like a tiny jet engine. Do not think me mad. Many conversations between human beings are no different to this, once you strip away the elaborations, ornamentations and plain hot air.
When I got home, M finally telephoned and told me with me a broadly smiling voice (it’s funny how one knows that) that she had just spent the weekend with her new boyfriend, an English graphic designer twelve years her junior, and asked me, peculiarly, if I had any questions for her, as though she had just sold me an insurance policy. At that moment Cannonball Adderley’s ‘Aquarius’ was in ominous crescendo on my optical disk player, and I found myself suddenly unable to breathe. In fact, I could breathe; it just felt like I couldn’t. Alternatively, I felt like a balloon that had been pricked and all my air was rushing out, or that I was plummeting from a great height and my ears were popping. Whatever it might have been, it was more dreamlike than any dream, and this merging of dreaming and waking would grow and grow over the next nine months, to the point where they became indistinguishable, and anyway it no longer mattered which was which.
Over dinner a few hours later, M laid down the ground rules that would apply for the foreseeable future, once again bizarrely reminiscent of the behaviour of an insurance salesman. Her new lover lived in London, and was so busy in his job that they could only spend the weekends together, in her flat (not his, because he still lived with his parents), during which time I was forbidden from contacting her in any way. On weekday evenings, however, I was free to spend as much time with her as I liked. She would even cook me dinner, acknowledging how difficult this situation must be for me, and offering to look after me as much as she was able. After she left, I wept tears of gratitude, admiration, loss, grief and self-loathing.
A few days later, I wrote to C, whom you may remember was M’s half-brother, a homosexual some years older than her, living in the United States with his older, white lover while he waited for his residence permit, the much-coveted ‘green card’, to be granted. He had urged M to urge me to write to him, so that he could console me and offer some big-brotherly advice. He had been gravely ill for almost a year by that time, (his wealthy lover’s medical insurance apparently covering a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of hospital bills and allowing him to recover slowly), and M warned me that the heavy medication he was under might make him incoherent, and that I shouldn’t be alarmed in that eventuality. Again I did as bidden, and again shed more grateful tears. What saints they both were, suffering all the trials of Job, yet still taking time to comfort and console me, who was so little deserving of comfort and consolation, or indeed of anything at all. From the beginning, though, the tone of C’s replies was oddly ambiguous, alternating between affectionate and consoling and cold and indifferent, sometimes even switching from one to the other within a single sentence. The disorientating effect this created was compounded by the confused syntax and spelling errors caused by his medication, though from the next exchange his language grew largely coherent and lucid, poetic even. The ambiguity, however, remained, indeed increased, and the affectionate-to-indifferent switch seemed to be complemented by more and more leaps from understanding, forgiving and sympathising to judging, condemning and even threatening. I told myself I must be imagining all this. I trusted M and her brother implicitly, and I believed C when several times he explicitly stated that if his or M’s tone or treatment of me seemed harsh, I should know that it was for my own good: the future was uncertain, but whatever happened, they wanted only the best for me. His sister, he reminded me of what I already knew, was ‘a good teacher’, and so, it was implied, was he.
As the correspondence wore on, I continued to pour out my soul to C, despite my daily growing misgivings. Often M verbally echoed C’s written words, yet denied she was in communication with her brother about me, and her increasingly evident lie poured oil onto the rising flame of my perlexity. If I idolised M, I idolised C more. Like his half-sister, he was dark-skinned, of mixed Latin American and West Indian heritage, cultivated, well-read and wise, and like her he had suffered greatly but stoically in this life, at least according to the sworn testimonies of one sibling about the other. They and their entire extended families had been trying to escape Venezuela’s raging Maelstrom since the nineteen-eighties and, thanks to the business acumen of M’s other two half-brothers (C’s whole brothers), were increasingly successful. As a child, M had been a pawn in her parents’ divorce wranglings, had ended up in her father’s and his new wife’s custody, the latter apparently an adherent of some kind of cult religion. C, having a different father, was spared these trials, but in return he was a homosexual raised in a heavily Catholic, morally conservative, supremely judgemental culture. The year before this, I had read Malcolm X’s remarkable autobiography, as related to the novelist Alex Haley, and just as that martyr had ‘adored’ the Nation of Islam’s leader, Elijah Mohammed, before he was betrayed by him — ‘adored him with the original Latin sense of “to worship and fear”’ — so I adored my wife and her brother, and as a result could not break free of them, no matter how much they seemed to torment me. In any case, I thought, even if they were lying about their good intentions, their mocking and torment was much less than I deserved.
This torment escalated daily, perhaps even hourly. M knew my self-doubt and self-loathing like no other, and she prodded them with sharp claws clothed in silken gloves, yet still I believed unshakably in her good intentions. At the same time C, now gently, now firmly, now sarcastically, admonished me and encouraged me to accept my fate. At some point in early March I thanked him for his help and expressed my resolution not to burden him anymore and to seek help elsewhere, or continue alone. He wouldn’t have it, citing all the times he had ‘divorced’ his family, yet had always come back to them. No, I was to stay with him and his sister and be looked after by them. The sinister ambiguity of his tone began to creep into the dismal dreams that plagued me in the ever rarer hours of those days when I could sleep at all. Once I dreamt I was a baby, happy and gurgling in my cot, when C’s shadow fell over me and I heard a bestial growl that was scarcely of this world. I realised too late that the horrible sound came from C, and before I could do anything more than turn over (in any case I was helpless), he leant over the cot and broke my back. After this I was so terrified of sleep that I hardly did. My fears were vindicated. Sleepless hours turned into nights, then weeks, and in those exhausted moments when I blacked out for a few minutes I was visited by nightmares so frightful and vivid, almost as real by this stage as my waking hours, that sleep eventually abandoned me completely. By then only powerful drugs could restore it to me, but I only managed to procure those some months later after several doctors had refused to give me them.
Still convinced of my tormentors’ good intentions, I managed to persuade myself that all I needed was a holiday, and to this end I decided to walk the Antonine Wall. I mentioned it to an old school friend, J2, who had a business trip to Aberdeen planned in the coming weeks, and he expressed a wish to accompany me if I could time it to coincide with the end of his visit. I agreed, and preparations were made.
Of course, it had long been my habit to tell M everything that happened to me, or that I thought, dreamed or planned, except that which pertained to my relationships with other women, and sometimes even that, often at her pressing, and so naturally I told her about the projected trip and gave her, at her insistence, an exact itinerary, even down to the addresses and telephone numbers of hotels, and so on. Soon after this announcement, she was stricken by an eye infection that, as a result of the unsightly reddening of the afflicted sensory organs, prompted her to take the week off work to recover. She also forbade her lover from visiting her, and, ever eager to assuage my gnawing guilt feelings and curry favour with the ‘angry goddess’, as she had once referred to herself, I offered to look after her. She accepted, but only with great reluctance, as usual. For the next ten days I ran endless errands for her, often repeatedly, as I would inevitably get some detail wrong, to her great annoyance. I also cooked her meals in the evenings and at the weekend, as often as she would permit me at least, and generally amused and entertained her in the intervening time. According to the by now well established routine, she peppered her flattery of me with cutting criticism and bewildering insinuation, but also did the same in inverse proportion when talking of her absent lover, seasoning criticism with praise. She allowed me to massage her feet and back, as in the old days when she had complained ceaselessly of the skeletal pains blamed, along with a great many other things, on the bad Afro-Indian genes of her parents and grandparents, having apparently inherited “the worst of both races”. Dog-like I wagged my tail furiously at the favour I was suddenly receiving, especially delicious as being apparently at the expense of the other dog, but at the same time I was deeply ashamed of my fawning and flattery and schadenfreude.
Once again there was an abrupt sea change, this time on the day of my departure to Edinburgh for the trip. Gone suddenly was the friendly, maternal, flattering-chiding of the last days, and in its place stood naked malice, yet still I did not see. In a perfectly choreographed demonic dance, a running of the gauntlet between only two people, M kept me scuttling on errands between her flat and mine, and every time I arrived back home, more exhausted and confused, a new electronic mail from C was waiting for me on my portable computing machine, where normally I had had to wait several days. Over and over I dissected these supposedly hastily written yet elegantly composed digital epistles, but failed as ever to disambiguate them, and the more ambiguous his tone grew that day, the more I begged for mercy in my replies, rapidly typed while I fretted about M’s latest commands and their correct execution. It was only on my return from the last errand before my departure for London that C let his mask fall just enough to let me know his true intentions. In that moment my gut fell from my body and my exhausted and sleep-starved brain reeled and staggered. The unbearable truth was now no longer deniable, even to me, the Great Pretender who had spent his life scorning the folly of my fellow pretenders: C, my brother-in-law, who I heeded like a prophet, revered like a father and loved like a brother, hated me and intended to torture me until, with the conviction of my own worthlessness, a conviction he now revealed himself to endorse so freely, I did the honourable thing, the only worthy deed left open to me, the only productive act of my long, unproductive, worthless life, and killed myself.
I left for London in a daze, much too early for the overnight train to Edinburgh but in desperate flight from a now unambiguously evil ‘virtual’ presence. I was scarcely aware of anything happening around me, or even of my own body, and with three or four hours to go before my departure, that being the only thing I was able to fix on with any clarity, I struggled to find my bearings in the chaos of the old metropolis. Inarticulate instinct drove me from Euston Station towards the anonymous, hedonistic frenzy of Leicester Square, but when I descended into the Euston catacombs to take the subterranean locomotive thither, despair crushed my throat and heart, the twin valves that drive all animal life, as it had never done before. I knew then that I had arrived in Hell, or at least in its antechamber, and sure enough, before long its wraiths found me. As though previously unknown channels of communication had been wrenched open, I felt I could now see and communicate freely with those dead and dying souls, and to no others. One after another lurched towards me on the platfrom and spoke to me, while healthy, living bodies seemed to fade away. I knew I would not survive this hell for long, and so I waited for the locomotive to come, so that I could leap down in front of it.
Fortunately, the ‘Northern Line’ service was as slow as ever, and so I had some minutes to wait for my death, and in that interval, it dawned on me that it was only C who had let his mask fall. M, though just as cruel, ambiguous and inscrutable as her brother, had nevertheless kept her true intentions, whatever they were, well hidden. Might they yet turn out to be good? I fixed on this possibility now, however unlikely it might have been, and when the locomotive came, I stood well back from the edge of the platform. It was C who was evil, not M, I reasoned feverishly. Most men are wont to adore beautiful, suffering, middle-aged women (Hollywood had already tapped this golden vein for a century, and the Catholic Church for nearly two millennia), but homosexual men worship them, especially when the women in question are their already adored sisters or mothers. Though still in pain over his betrayal, I could live with the treachery of a viciously sentimental ‘queen’, as long as the object of his worship had not yet betrayed me, and so I decided to live a little while longer, at least until that had been established.
In the following days, the second frontier road was a disaster, despite my fast flagging resolution to live. My old friend J2 was much inconvenienced by my rapidly disintegrating mental state, and dragged his dog closer to himself, as though afraid my mental illness might infect the excitable hound. Even after I explained my predicament as well as I could under the circumstances, he remained perplexed. I shuffled heedlessly past the glories of the ancient world, more dead than alive, and when I got home, the slow descent into Hell soon turned into a free fall. The initial abandonment of friends, colleagues and acquaintances now became a stampede, though they soon returned. At first they had looked horrified and afraid, but on second and subsequent encounters, they wore the sardonic theatre masks with the glassy eyes of hatred and the arched eyebrows and sickening grins of unpunishable cruelty that C had given them. Another month passed before the next horrifying epiphany: C had distributed the masks, but M had designed them, inspired by her idol, Princess Turandot. The theatrical role they so passionately and luridly represented was that of an honest, decent, hard-working, long-suffering and morally outraged person seeking vengeance on a man who had committed a crime so terrible, apparently, that not only the individual, but the whole of humanity was appalled. The desperate resolution to live I had made at Euston Station, built upon the feverish hope that only C had betrayed me and that his sister M, though justly angry at me, did not wish me real harm, at least none more than I deserved, now evaporated like mist in the overwhelming power of the midday sun.
At the end of July, finding myself alone in the world, apart from my dear mother and father, with whom I had been mercifully reconciled in the meantime, but whom I feared I would end up harming as a result of my former fatuous loyalty to M and C, yet somehow never alone and ceaselessly tormented by an army of shrieking, cackling demons, I tried to take my own life. I failed, waking in a hospital with M standing over me, grinning, joking, happier than I had ever known her. “Look, blood!” she commented blithely on the red stain on my sheet caused by the poorly applied needle piercing my arm. Some time later, at M’s behest (she was by then my registered ‘carer’), I was whisked thence to the madhouse and locked inside it with a new cohort of lusty fiends, hungry for sport and with plenty of time on their hands. Over the next six weeks, in the very few moments I could steal away from their joyously nimble claws, teeth and tongues, I planned a death that would not fail a second time. I would travel north to say goodbye to my parents, then climb a nearby mountain, Sgurr Uran, and go to sleep on its hopefully by then snowy peak.
Then, very suddenly, it was over. The doctors let me out of the hospital for an hour a day, and I spent it pacing around the bird-crowded lake near the ruins of Vervlamivm, Britannia’s third most important city. Shortly afterwards I was sent back home to my icy little flat, terrified and flinching at every encounter with people on the way, or even at their words and gestures, yet somehow free, happy, reborn.
***
There was no time to prepare for the journey. Newly free after two months in the madhouse and nine in the ninth circle of Hell, I was champing at the bit to celebrate my unexpected rebirth on my beloved ancient roads. Again I had considered walking the Pilgrims’ Road the three hundred miles from Dover to Weston, but that was sheer fantasy. I wouldn’t have lasted a day in my ravaged state. No, it didn’t take long to fix upon the Vallvm Antonini: to paraphrase Gershovitz, the demons would not take that away from me. Only over my cold, dead body.
Just a week later I am boarding the ‘Caledonian Sleeper’ at Euston Railway Station in Londinivm and finding my way to my little cabin, barely able to breathe for excitement, recalling the journey I had made on this train in 2735 (1982). It had been in the other direction then, from Inverness to London, on a school trip to Germany, and I was thrilled at being in the tiny, moving hotel room with its bunk beds and ancient wash stand. This time round I drop my hastily packed rucksack on the top bunk and head for the dining car, where my dreadful, microwave-oven-cooked cena, heedless of whether it is tainted, is an indescribable luxury worth its weight in gold. I take my little plastic bottle of wine to the adjacent lounge and read, feeling like a king travelling in his private car. An attractive young lady sitting opposite keeps glancing at me curiously, but seemingly without fear or malice. I smile at her gratefully and she returns the gesture. I am barely out of Londinivm, but this already feels like the journey of a lifetime.
I retire early to my still empty cabin, deliciously drowsy, climb up to the top bunk and sleep the deep, restorative sleep of an infant. In the morning the guard knocks on the door, opens it and hands me a paper bag containing a cup of tea and a tiny ientacvlvm, to match the tiny cabin. I finally meet my room mate, a Czech tourist who came in so quietly last night that I did not wake. I apologise in case my world-famous snoring deprived him of sleep, which I cannot doubt it did, but he is too generous and polite to complain. We chat for the last half an hour of the journey, though I am too perplexed by and grateful for the strange, almost forgotten notion of ‘friendly conversation’ to take in much of what is said.
We arrive in Edinburgh this chilly October morning, the grand and beautiful ‘Athens of the North’ — once more capital of the nation that the emperor Hadrian unintentionally created with his wall. I leave my rucksack at the station, take a second, more substantial ientacvlvm on magnificent Princes Street, with the ancient volcanic stump called the Mound towering over me and board a dark red omnibus in the direction of Rvmabo (Cramond). I realize that my pre-purchased ‘bus ticket’ has the wrong date, due to the overnight train arriving the day following its departure, but the friendly driver waves my apology away. I love the world again, and it seems to love me in return.
We trundle westwards, through Edinburgh’s old grey granite and towards the village-like suburb on the shores of the Firth of Forth, and after half an hour, the omnibus stops in a quiet country lane. I get off and search confusedly for the missing village, but it is nowhere to be found. After twenty minutes of scampering in vain up and down rural roads, I finally come across a building site with a large billboard advertising a new housing estate to be built there, called ‘Caer Amon’. This can only be the original Welsh name of the village that was later to become Cramond, the ‘caer’ testifying to the presence of a Roman fort, as it so often does in the western regions of this island, and sometimes even, as here, in the eastern. Now I know that I have arrived and that my journey can begin.
Deptford, 10th October, 2014
Dies primvs: Rvmabo to Volitanio
Via the forts at Velvnia and Inveravon and along the eastern end of the Antonine Wall, being the fourteenth day before the Calends of November, 2764
Just like Arbeia in South Shields, Rvmabo, at the mouth of the River Almond, seems to have been built to guard the approach to the eastern end of the Wall. Men of the Tungri, a German tribe from modern Belgium, were stationed here, and they left behind an intriguing altar dedicated to
MATRES ALATERVAE ET MATRES CAMPESTRES
meaning ‘to the Alatervan mothers and the mothers of the parade ground’. Who were these mysterious mothers and why did the Tungrian soldiers honour them so conspicuously? I think of my own mother and the answer comes swiftly. Cold and distant and speaking a strange language I did not understand for most of the time I was growing up, I nonetheless recall how gentle and soothing her voice and movements became when I was sick. I was twenty-two when diagnosed with a congenitally faulty oesophagus, but as a child I could not know this. All I knew was that I would often wake in the night with strange synaesthetic hallucinations: loud became rough and quiet smooth (my parents were probably fighting intermittently, as they often did then). Proportions grew distorted too, and I watched in horrified fascination as my feet, and beyond them my bedroom window, receded and receded until they were miles away. Then came a powerful nausea that, oddly, because it was so frequent, I always failed to recognise for what it was, namely that I would soon throw up and that all would be well again. Instead, I was sure I was going to die, and therefore began to whimper for my mother. Eventually she would hear me and come, leading me to the bathroom and holding my head over the sink and soothing me as my leaden, starchy, acidic cena was expelled, to my unutterable relief. When my family moved to the Highlands thirty years ago, I was immediately knocked out by a mysterious fever that kept me bedridden for a week or two. Day merged with night and I was visited by snuff-reeking doctors and yet more febrile visions. Again my mother was there, mopping my brow and whispering in the gentle voice I never heard at other times. Six months ago I got sick again, this time in my head, and once more I heard that voice, now disembodied and five hundred miles away, but still soft and consoling, only growing a little louder to assert itself when I sank into silent despair: “I’m losing you, Guy. Talk to me!” In the preceding years M had tried to turn me against my mother, calling her ‘joyless, controlling, paranoid, toxic’, and a good many other skillfully projected epithets best applied to herself, and I’m sorry to say that I believed her…
But none of that matters now. We are all imperfect creatures, bedazzled by poetry and the actor’s mask, even, sadly, when these are not where they belong, on the scaena. All that matters is that we find our way to the truth eventually, even if that truth is not found until the moment of our deaths. The truth, in this case, is that it sometimes takes a crisis to find out who your real friends are. The dea nvtrix, or the ‘nursing goddess’ worshipped by the Romans, seems to have been of Celtic origin, and many statues to her have been found in Britannia. Perhaps it is their very coldness and remoteness that makes us worship them. After all, gods and goddesses are, by their divine nature, indifferent and aloof. Here at Rvmabo, I realise how lucky I am that my own icy dea nvtrix came down from the ethereal heights to rescue me in my hour of desperate need.
Hardly anything of Rvmabo remains these days. It is mostly just the usual outlines of granaries and praetorivm in a pleasant, leafy parkland setting. Outside the fort, more substantial bath house remains were found, but then reburied for their protection. I wander down to the shore and stare wistfully at the tidal causeway to Cramond Island. I first moved to Edinburgh in 2741 and lived there on and off for five years, always meaning to walk over to the island, but I never did. Neither will it happen today, for lack of time, though the tide is out and I have a strong urge to do so. Some things, as they say, are clearly not meant to be. Here it was that David Balfour met his sinister uncle Ebenezer in Robert Louis Stevenson’s immortal tale, ‘Kidnapped’. No one who has read the nightmarish scene with David on the dark, ruinous staircase, sent up by his uncle without a lamp, can forget that brush with death and the attendant chilling realisation of a betrayal that can no longer be denied. At least, I can’t.
There is another colourful character associated with Rvmabo, this time a real one. Born here in 2424 (1671), young John Law developed a passion for mathematics and a weakness for gambling. At the age of twenty-three he fought a duel over the affections of a young lady, killed his opponent and was sentenced to death for the murder. The sentence was commuted and changed again to imprisonment, but the resourceful Law managed to escape to the Netherlands. After many adventures in high finance, he ended up as France’s ‘Controller General of Finances’ under King Louis XIV, in which capacity he set up the nation’s first central bank. After initial success in pulling France back from near bankruptcy, Law inflated the so-called ‘Mississippi Bubble’, leading to the coining of the term ‘millionaire’, only to see the bubble burst, with France pushed to the brink of ruin again. He was fired in 2473 (1720) and died a poor man in Venetiae, on the shore of Hadrian’s sea, nine years later.
I stride back up the hill and catch the omnibus back into town. I had meant to continue westwards along the Firth of Forth to Velvnia, but the public transport is poor in that direction, and anyway, I’d like to see the fine Roman collection at the Museum of Scotland again before I start walking the Wall.
Back in town, I make my way up and over ‘The Mound’ and to Chambers Street where the huge new museum floats like a space station among the solid, neo-classical architecture surrounding it. To those used to the fine Roman artwork on display in the southern countries, this collection must seem poor and primitive, but is that not as it should be? These are finds from the wild frontier lands; life would have been simple here and salaria meager. The statues are small and the monumental reliefs unpretentious, but beautiful all the same. The pride of the collection is the so-called Cramond Lion, found by a fisherman near Rvmabo. Much eroded, the six-foot-long statue depicts a man being devoured, head-first, by a lion. The nightmarish scene is believed to have been part of a pair decorating the tomb, perhaps of a legate.
I take my prandivm in the bright mezzanine cafeteria overlooking the huge astronomical clock in the lobby. It is hard to describe the intense joy I feel at indulging this simple pleasure: wine, a good book and a good sandwich in beautiful surroundings. One needs to have just emerged from hell to fully appreciate such a tiny piece of heaven.
Another bus takes me back down the Mound to Waverley Station, the only such building, to my knowledge, named after a novel. A locomotive takes me though a tunnel in the Castle Rock and Edinburgh’s western suburbs to Linlithgow, pulling up just short of the ruined palace where the now headless Queen Mary was born. I had planned to walk the remaining miles to Velvnia, but it is approaching two o’ clock and my mistress Time is nagging, so I summon a motorised Hackney carriage by portable telephone. The driver, as expected, has a keener sense of history than his average English counterpart and is fully aware of the existence of the Antonine Wall. In fact, he proudly swears that it goes right through his daughter’s back garden. “Anywise,” he qualifies, “it’s where the Wa’ should be, and it’s a bloody strange place to find a ditch.” It’s good to be home.
There follows some discussion as to where I should start, but the logical place must surely be on the shores of the Forth. Added to this is what I have gleaned from my researches on the so-called ‘worldwide web’ (a kind of global electronic library), which informed me that a replica of the first ‘distance slab’ has been set up at the point where the Wall began. The fifteen or so richly engraved distance slabs are the great treasure of this frontier. They record, unsurprisingly, the distance reached by the wall builders and their identity. But the most remarkable thing about these documents is that they were deliberately buried when the Wall was abandoned, some twenty years after it was begun. Ever conscious of their own mortality, the Romans often worked hard to secure the immortality of their deeds, and perhaps they were never more careful about this than along the new ultimate frontier. “We were here; do not forget us,” whisper the stones on the millennial tides. And I, for one, will not forget. The slabs are now housed in the newly redesigned Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, and I am saving them for the grand finale of my journey.
I pace up and down Harbour Road for twenty minutes in vain: the replica of the first distance slab will not, as it turns out, be erected for another three years, but I cannot, as the Americans say, give a tiny rat’s ass: nothing will cloud my joy on this great adventure. The fort of Velvnia, once guarding the eastern end of the Wall, lies a mile or so east of here, but it only survives in the stones of Carriden House and in the first syllable of that name, so I stride uphill and turn westwards, setting the course for the next three days. Almost immediately I strike ‘Grahamsdyke Lane’, which informs me most gratifyingly that I am on the right track. The Germanic settlers in these parts during the Dark Age could only imagine that such a magnificent wall (or dyke) had been built by Grímr (or Graham, or Oðinn), the greatest god of them all. Further up the hill is another signpost: a grand old house called Graemesdyke, demonstrating an alternative spelling. The Wall is now under the busy motor highway, the A993, and after a mile I stop to rest on a bench overlooking a large cemetery, with the Forth and the mountains of the interior beyond it. It wasn’t many weeks ago that I believed I would soon be lying underground in such a place. I remember this and taste the sweetly rotten autumnal air gratefully.
Soon I am outside the town of Bo’ness and at the gates of Kinneil House. A grand avenue leads up to the austere edifice, beside which a tiny but rich museum houses some Roman artifacts found in the area. Well-preserved sandals, tools, oil lamps and even a fine altar stone all tell the familiar story of the Mediterranean invaders and settlers. I purchase some much needed hot chocolate from an automaton and chat a little while with the museum’s friendly curator, a wildly enthusiastic lady sorely in need of more visitors to this marvelous place with whom to quench her didactic fire.
I leave the museum and enter a wood where stands a ruined cottage that was once both home and workshop to James Watt, whose name we remember every time we screw in a light bulb. It was in this humble dwelling in 2523 (1770) that Watt perfected the ‘steam engine’ that would drive industry for the next century and a half. The shell of one of his prototype engines still stands next to the cottage. It is a curious symmetry that another father of the Industrial Revolution, George Stephenson, is associated with the eastern end of the other Roman frontier. Could it be that the Roman spirit of engineering, as manifested by the ghosts of these two enormous projects, possessed these men, one as he watched the horses struggling on the rail track, the other as he toiled in this little cottage by lamplight? Delicious, but doubtfully useful speculation, as usual.
Further on there is a clearing in the woods, and here I see the first palpable evidence of the Antonine Wall: the outline, foundations and post-holes of a so-called ‘fortlet’. Like the big wall it guarded, the fortlet’s walls were also built of turf on a stone foundation, and like its big brothers on Hadrian’s Wall, this one also watched over the space between the major forts to the right and left. The sandals in the museum were found here, as was a single Roman coin from the reign of Hadrian’s adopted father, Trajan, dating from at least twenty-five years before the Wall was built.
The light is already fading as I follow the line of the vanished Wall out of the grounds of Kinneil House and onto a minor road climbing a hill. As it often did in Northumberland, the road follows the line of the Wall exactly, and probably makes use of its sturdy foundations. An extraordinary sight greets me at the top of the hill: like a prospect of hell, the vast steel and concrete city of the Grangemouth Oil Refinery belches fire and smoke into the dusk sky, and yet this monstrous child of James Watt’s grimy dream is strangely beautiful in the ephemeral light. Though still working, the eighty-seven-year-old refinery is already a venerable relic of industrial history. Nearby Bathgate claims the world’s first ‘oil works’, founded in 2604 (1851). There is no denying it: the technologically backward land the Romans conquered truly became ‘the workshop of the world’ fourteen centuries after they had abandoned it.
The road now continues downhill, still on the line of the Wall, but deviates from it at the bottom to join a busy road for a while, before turning left to cross the River Avon. This is yet another reminder that the people the Romans encountered here spoke Welsh. As in several other places in Britain, the later Germanic settlers in these parts sometimes misunderstood the local generic toponyms and took them for specific ones, thereby unwittingly calling this watercourse the River River. Having crossed the River River, I turn back along it a little way until a marvellous sight meets my eyes: though very overgrown, the ditch of the Antonine Wall, the first of it I have yet seen, climbs steeply and fairly obviously up Polmont Hill next to an incongruous, so-called ‘dry ski slope’, used to facilitate the simulation of the Lappish art of sliding over the snow on long wooden runners attached to the feet. I linger a while to admire the skill of the ‘skiers’ as they weave and betimes plummet down the hill. A man eyes me suspiciously while I am thus occupied, though what mischief he expects me to perform is a mystery to me. But it is ever thus: always alert, always watchful, it is nigh impossible for the paranoid Britons to imagine a solitary man without bad intentions. I shrug and retrace my steps to the north side of the hill, and after a short while begin to climb it. The path is muddy and overgrown with brambles, and when not sliding about in the mud, I am forced to clamber over barbed wire fences. Before long my ancient hiking trousers are filthy and torn, but I suffer these trials stoically and in true pioneering spirit. At the top of the hill the undergrowth thins out to afford me a pleasant woodland walk back to the bottom again, with the Antonine Wall tantalizingly in evidence here and there. I feel as though I am discovering a secret place, forgotten for thousands of years, and it is well worth the small price of a pair of old trousers that I shall be throwing away as soon as I get home.
At the foot of the hill I turn southwards down a minor road that passes over a roaring motor carriageway. The so-called ‘motorway’ was built right on top of the Wall, and so I have no mind to follow it now. Instead I turn right through Falkirk’s eastern suburbs in the last light of day. After half a mile I turn right again, off the motor road and into a surprising little wilderness in this otherwise densely populated area. It is only now that, after the excitement of today and nearing my destination, I begin to feel how exhausted I am, and not merely in the usual sense of ‘very tired’, but at that point where both my physical and mental faculties are starting to shut down of their own accord. For the last five months my body has known very little movement or restorative sleep, and so my muscles have atrophied somewhat. Moreover, I have intermittently starved, and for a while I was forced to take powerful antipsychotic drugs that made me drool and reduced my gait to a dotard’s shuffle. On top of all these physical ravages, my mind has been dangerously overstrained with the stress of being in ‘fight or flight’ mode every waking and sleeping moment for as long as I can remember. You know how, sometimes, recovering from a particularly evil headache with the help of the miracle drugs paracetomol or ibuprofen, the first thing your grateful, pain-liberated mind wants to do is sleep? This is what I experience now, cured suddenly and unexpectedly of an eight-month-long migraine.
It is with some difficulty that I find my lodgings, a quarter of a mile short of the fort of Volitanio, but back more or less exactly on the line of the Wall, among the many so-called ‘motels’ (‘motor hotels’) clinging symbiotically to the wretched motor carriageway. There are several restaurants nearby to service the motorists, and the one I choose turns out to have good, cheap cenas and friendly staff. It is only eight o’ clock and I have barely walked ten miles today on flattish terrain, but I nonetheless feel myself periodically ‘blacking out’, and my head is in danger of falling into the chocolate cake and custard I ordered for secvndae mensae, so called because the Roman slaves would bring the desserts into the triclinivm already laid out on a ‘second table’. This is the inevitable end to a perfect day from which not a single drop of life more can be squeezed.
Deptford, 17th October, 2014
Dies secvndvs: Volitanio to Pexa
Via the forts at Falkirk and Rough Castle and along the Antonine Wall, being the thirteenth day before the Calends of November, 2764
I wake at noon, having slept like a baby for fourteen or fifteen hours. This late rising means I will probably have to pay an extra night for the hotel, but I don’t care much. My crisis has been slowly bankrupting me for months anyway, so what difference will another thirty pounds make? Back in June, after three or four weeks’ absence from work, my dear employers of seven years docked my salarivm to about four hundred pounds sterling — not enough to cover the rent, let alone my salt allowance, and the day after I tried to take my own life and was incarcerated in the psychiatric hospital, they advertised that my position was free. Luckily for me, perhaps, no one took it.
I shuffle along the corridor to the hotel’s balnevm, where a wonderful surprise awaits me: they have provided a so-called ‘power shower’ for my use. I undress, step into the large cubicle, turn on the tap and a powerful jet of hot water bursts from above. It is like standing under a warm waterfall, and the pleasure this gives me as the tumultuous waters batter my aching shoulder and neck muscles is indescribable. Though this is shamefully wasteful, I reflect that because I have bathed very little over the last four months, my aquatic account is hugely in credit, and so I linger under these man-made Falls of Glomach for the better part of half an hour, moaning, betimes singing joyfully, both body and conscience clean. The Romans would have loved this. Mens sana in corpore sano, as they used to say: a clean mind in a clean body — the latter part now true beyond doubt, though the first part is still questionable in my case: I flushed my powerful anti-psychotic drugs down the lavatory bowl as soon as I got out of hospital.
Afterwards I pack up, hand in my key and fawn with the receptionist, but she is having none of it, and so I must cough up another night’s rent. The tiny smirk she fails to suppress is wasted on me: you can’t bring a man down who is glad to be merely alive. Or perhaps you can, but you must work very hard to effect this.
Another incongruous country lane next to the roaring motor carriageway brings me once more to the line of the Wall and the fort of Volitanio, believed to have been the largest on the Wall, at six and a half acres. Nothing remains of the fort today, but three interesting inscriptions were excavated here:
HERCVLI MAGVSAN SACRVM VAL NIGRINVS DVPLI ALAE TVNGRORVM
To holy Hercvles-Magusan, Valerivs Nigrinvs,
dvplicarivs of the [First] Tungrian Wing [dedicates this]
So, Valerie Negrin, a Belgian dvplicarivs (or ‘doubler’, a long-serving soldier on double pay) dedicated the altar stone to a syncretic god — a merging of the well-known Hercules with the now unknown, possibly Gaulish god Magusan.
CASSIVS SIGN MATRIBVS
Cassivs [dedicates this altar stone] to the Standards and the mother goddesses
There’s those mogoes again… Lastly, the reconstructed inscription of a tombstone reads:
DIS MANIBVS NECTOVELIVS FILIVS VINDICIS
ANNORVM IXXX STIPENDIORVM VIII NATIONIS BRIGANS
MILITAVIT IN COHORS II THRACVM
To the spirits of the departed: Nectowelo, son of Gwindix,
twenty-nine years old and nine years in service,
of the Brigantian Nation and serving in the Second Cohort of Thracians
So Nectowelo was a local boy, more or less, serving alongside men from the other side of Europe and cut off in his prime. A skeleton of a wolf was also found here in this wild frontier fortress. I look up and around me to see a quiet, affluent suburb of the city of Falkirk and hear motor cars roaring a few hundred yards away, where once illiterate warriors fought and died for an alien civilisation and wolves howled at the moon.
I continue up Grahamsdyke Street, needless to say directly on the line of the Wall. It is now one o’ clock and, maddened by hunger after a seventeen-hour fast, I am about to snatch up and devour a stray lapdog that waddles trustingly past me. Thankfully, I need go to no such extremes, as a so-called ‘snack bar’ appears where once a ten-foot-high earthen wall stood. I enter it and procure a plastic cup of tea and a bread roll filled with salty bacon, which I proceed to cram into my mouth en route. It is quite possibly the best breakfast I have ever had.
I pass under a railway line, and immediately the Wall rears up to my left. Here are a school and a modern ‘business park’ named Hadrian House and Graeme High School, reflecting both the old and the new view of the origins of the Wall. Soon I can leave the busy road, enter Callendar Park and have the pleasure of walking beside the Wall itself, or in the Ditch, according to my whim. The grand façade of Callendar House now appears to the south, prettier and more fairytale-castle-like than its Antonine cousin at Kinneil. There is a museum inside, and so I go in for a look. There are a few Roman finds here, including a badly eroded altar stone, and a good section explaining the construction of the frontier system, in particular the fifteen-foot-wide turf wall, which is apparently much stronger and more durable than it sounds. The individual turves fuse together like organic bricks and the cobblestone base allowed the copious rainwater in these parts to drain away. As ever, what the Romans built could last millennia; if there is little left, it’s because it was deliberately destroyed as soon as their well-armoured backs were turned.
On the way out of the house (as in England, but more categorically so here, puritanical thinking does not allow a palace to be called a palace, preferring instead the hypocritically humble or functional ‘house’ or ‘castle’) I stop to buy a souvenir — a little picture book about the Antonine Wall for children. Behind the stiff and rather nervous young lady who sells me the book stands a tall, severe looking gentleman directing her every move and word: “Put the book in one of the medium-sized paper bags; the bags are under the counter; press such-and-such a key on the till…” etc., etc. I sympathise with this girl, without a will or her own, helpless in the hands of the stern puppeteer. I wonder if one day she will break her chains and run away to the freedom of Glasgow or Edinburgh. Perhaps she will begin a new life there as a glamorous sales assistant in the Jenners department store on Princes Street and do puppet shows in a night club in the evenings, reenacting the story of her escape from Falkirk and the evil puppet master…
Anyway, I leave Callendar house and return to the Wall. It was south of here, beyond Callendar Wood in 2051 (1298), that a Scottish army under William Wallace was beaten by the English under King Edward I, whose traces I encountered at Burgh by Sands on the last frontier road. This was a major defeat for Scotland in its war for independence from England, and victory at Bannockburn would be another sixteen years in coming. He was a brave man, that Wallace, and I admire the way he stood up to the bully ‘Edward Longshanks’ (who had forced his puppet king John Balliol to kneel before him at court as a ‘common plaintiff’) after he was betrayed, captured and put on trial. How the English king’s blood must have boiled when Wallace answered the charge of treason with “I could not be a traitor to Edward, for I was never his subject.” Never in history did a man so casually spit in a tyrant’s face. They dragged him though the streets of Londinivm for that, of course, sliced off his cock and balls, then cut out his intestines and burned them before his dying eyes.
Though only half a mile or so, Callendar Park is a fine stretch of the Frontier Road. Walking westwards along the south side, roughly where the military road was, the Ditch plunges down to your right, while on your left ‘high rises’ shoot upwards — ancient and modern cohabiting in perfect harmony, like in that song — you know, the one by Stephen Wonder and the fellow from the Beatles.
Gradually the Ditch gets shallower and disappears altogether as I approach Falkirk city centre. Thanks to the ordnance survey map, I am still able to follow the course of the Wall through the rainy, windy city streets, which are surprising lively for a Thursday afternoon in such dreary weather. An old man wearing a traditional ‘bunnet’ with its characteristic red bobble on the top, on seeing the hood of my raincoat down, asks with great concern in his voice: “Huv ye nothin for yir heid?” As usual I am lost in my own thoughts and only hear his words as an echo through my mind. “Sorry?” I say absently. “HAVE YOU NOTHING FOR YOUR HEAD?” the old Falkirker translates his last question as though I am a deaf foreigner. “YES!” I reply, pulling up my hood, and the venerable gentleman nods in satisfaction.
There was a Roman fort here, but Falkirk has obliterated it utterly. Or has it? A single piece of stone was unearthed here, inscribed FECIT, meaning ‘made’. Where once a Roman city stood, now only a word remains. In the beginning was the word, and in the end also.
I wind my way through the streets and along an imaginary wall, but in the suburb of Bantaskin, the real one pops up again. Tucked in between rows of terraced houses is a little park with trees and a few hundred yards of the Ditch, deep and clearly defined. There is no UNESCO plaque here, and so once again a thrill runs up and down my spine at the ‘discovery’ of this special, secret place.
A short walk takes me to the Forth and Clyde Canal that links the Mare Germanicvm and the Mare Hibernicvm, opened in 2543 (1790). From here I would have liked to walk the mile north of the Wall to Camelon, where the Romans built a fort during their first invasion of Scotland in 833 (80), but my marathon sleep this morning means I lack the time. Had I come three hundred years earlier and walked another mile further north, I could have witnessed something remarkable and unique: a small, round, perfectly preserved Roman temple, called by the locals Arthur’s O’on (King Arthur’s Oven), but it was demolished by the landowner in 2496 (1743) to build a fucking dam for his stupid fucking mill.
No, that miraculous little survivor of millennia will never be seen again, so I must continue westwards, sulking, for a few hundred yards until I encounter the Wall once more at Watling Lodge. My bitterness over the temple is sweetened by the sight: never until now have I seen the Ditch so deep and well defined. I climb down the bank and stand at the bottom, feeling very small. How the local tribesmen must have hated the Romans and the ogrish footprints they left behind. But then again, maybe they admired them. Maybe both.
This pleasantly wooded, secluded stretch of the Frontier Road seems very far from the city, but soon a small brick house appears right in the middle of the Ditch, and I am forced back onto the tarred road. However, before long I’m able to reenter the woodland, and after half a mile or so a curious sight greets me: a branch of the Forth and Clyde Canal turns northwards, runs over the steep hillside, but then stops in mid air — an aqueduct to nowhere. This is the so-called ‘Falkirk Wheel’ that lifts boats between the two canals at the top and bottom of the hill using the Archimedes Principle of water displacement. So efficient is this water engine that a mere kilowatt and a half of extra power, less than the average electric kettle, (as calibrated by Mr Watt, perhaps when he was at Kinneil House) is needed to drive it. I am tempted to linger and witness this little engineering miracle, but as already mentioned, time, my old enemy, is pressing hard today. I have only three hours of daylight left, and my original goal of Twechar, near the fort of Begesse, is still twelve or thirteen miles away. Though my strength has increased fractionally since yesterday, at my current shuffling pace I won’t arrive until nearly midnight. I couldn’t give a flying fuck, as my countrymen say: I am enjoying this moment far too much to worry about the next. My recklessness with this newly regained life will cost me dear over the next few months, but in the meantime I let discretion be the better part of valour and shuffle on through the pleasant woodland on the edge of the low ridge of which the Antonine Wall took advantage.
The woods begin to clear and a complex series of earthworks emerges. Though one of the smallest forts on the Wall and with no masonry left (the Lowland Scots were even bigger stone thieves than the English, it seems), Rough Castle (its original name is lost) is still an impressive sight, and its outline can be traced on all sides. On the western side, the plateau on which the fort stood falls away, and looking up from the bottom, the landscape compensates for what men have taken away: a towering green castle covered in grass. An interesting survivor lies to the north of the fort: defensive pits, called lilia, probably once containing spikes, wait patiently to impale the poor, brave, unsuspecting tribesman as he rushes the fort, yelling and screaming.
I continue westwards along what is perhaps the best stretch of the entire Wall. Here the Ditch, the ‘upcast mound’ to the north and the low mound of the Wall itself are all visible. Even the agger of the military road is visible in places, but time I do not possess is needed to sniff out these ephemeral relics. As reckless and daring as I might be, having only very recently escaped from being hunted by a savage, vengeful lynch mob led and sicked on by M and her brother (at least, according to the diagnosis of my persecution delusions, for which I am supposed to be taking heavy medication), I have no desire to spend a night under the Scottish stars, though neither do I feel the need to make haste. No, I still amble and enjoy this fine, peaceful stretch of the ancient Frontier Road.
After a pleasant half-mile, the Wall meets a minor road and continues westwards through private land, and so I must take the tarred road across a railway line and into the village of Bonnybridge, where I meet the Forth and Clyde Canal again. I pass a rather grimy, run-down industrial estate where an incongruous notice advertises the cutting, washing and general styling of hair. It is after four o’ clock and I hardly have the time for such extravagances, but I am very tempted. When my crisis abruptly ended six or seven weeks ago, when the demons grew suddenly placid and started letting me out of the hospital for an hour at a time, the first thing I did was to wash, cut my talon-like nails (after getting the necessary approval to retrieve my clippers, correctly regarded as a potential suicide weapon), shave (removing two months of beard with a small, blunt, disposable razor took three hours) and go and get my hair cut. The feeling of purification and renewal was frankly indescribable, and since then I have associated grooming with no less a concept than spiritual or perhaps even corporeal rebirth.
Having decided to put my faith in Providence to give me a warm place to stay for the night, I go inside. Not surprisingly, I see a clean, tidy ‘salon’ and three expensively dressed, liberally painted, broadly smiling young ladies with voluminous hair and vaguely orange skin. I am the only customer. With my shaggy hair, three-day beard, torn trousers and muddy boots, I must look out of place in this tropical aviary, but the birds of paradise seem either not to care or not to mind as they beckon me to sit in the big dentist’s chair and ask me my desire. “Number three back and sides and a trim on the top, please,” I answer, according to the peculiar syntax expected in such establishments. As the lady, a tall, pretty brunette, goes to work on my head with motorised shears, she enquires about the meaning of my strange attire. Expecting the usual blank response, I reply somewhat hesitantly that I am walking the Antonine Wall, but she nods enthusiastically and says that she knows it well. Encouraged, I tell her that the Wall seems to have gone right through her shop, or very close, which is the truth. “Really?” she says, and her orange skin flushes with pride. Ordinary people are not just aware of their history here, but genuinely proud of it. By now I am getting carried away and start babbling about the Roman passion for beautiful hair, and to my surprise she says:
“I’d love to do those Roman hairstyles…”
I consider asking her to marry me. We could buy a house here in Bonnybridge, near the Antonine Wall. She would run a Roman hairdressing salon from the kitchen and I would bring the customers spiced wine and sweep up their unwanted hair. We’ll have two children called Agrippina and Hadrianvs, and we’ll be the laughing stock of the village, but we won’t care…
“Do you want the razor on your neck?”
“I’m sorry?”
“The razor on your neck?”
I wake from my reverie, realising that the dreaded moment has arrived. Even though I like the result of this delicate operation, a shiver always runs down my spine every time they bring out that murder weapon and press it against my tender flesh.
“Oh yes, please,” I reply, swallowing my terror, “and could you trim my eyebrows as well?”
Afterwards, I pay the lady seven pounds, half what it would cost in the South of England, and the assembled smiling ladies all wish me farewell and a pleasant journey. Dear God, I miss this country.
I continue through Bonnybridge along the south side of the canal, and after half a mile or so arrive at Seabegs Wood, where a fine stretch of the Wall survives, although, as often elsewhere, it is mostly the Ditch and northern mound that has fared best. It is obviously easier to knock down a wall than to fill in a trench. Also faintly discernable here is the military road, along which I now gladly walk in the fading light and the thickening drizzle. While thus employed, I receive notification of an incoming call on my new portable telephone. I retrieve the palm-sized machine from my rucksack, complete with its own tiny keyboard, and push the button signifying my wish to accept the call. I then hear the disembodied voice, which the clever device informs me belongs to J3, a friend from the psychiatric clinic, before I have even heard it. As I once did, J3 also sufferers terribly in the belief that he is being persecuted, but unlike me, only by certain people and by the Devil himself. In the hospital he told me how the evil nurses had physically restrained him in order to give him his regular, unwanted injection of an antipsychotic drug, but instead of this had said, “And now bring out the HIV,” meaning a solution containing the appalling virus that destroys the immune system and eventually leaves one utterly defenseless against even the most formerly harmless of diseases. In his better moments, and again unlike me, he believes he has gone through a celestial ‘portal’ and been given instructions by God to save humanity from itself. He is feeling better at the moment, hence the telephone call, perhaps because he has the pleasure of the company of A, a French lady of African or Caribbean ancestry and also a former inmate of the hospital in Vervlamivm, who can only eat and drink, if at all, far from the prying eyes of others. Both were kind to me after the crisis, as indeed was everyone, even M herself, but I am fond only of J3, because he only arrived at the hospital once my crisis was over, and so in contrast to everyone else I knew from before (or indeed didn’t know at all), apart from my parents, I have no memory either of his cruelty, mockery or his abandonment of me.
Having consumed a quantity of hashish, J3 and A are in good spirits and we take turns to exchange pleasantries and jokes through that, for me, formerly nightmarish, now miraculous device, the portable telephone. By the time the conversation is over, I have reached the end of the archaeological site and must walk back the way I came. I have a sudden urge to communicate with Miss T. I know she won’t reply, but oddly, I find myself unconcerned by this melancholy prospect. Although I had not seen her since the fracas on London Bridge in July last year, communication continued intermittently until just before the real crisis started, and when, in desperation, I contacted her and begged for help, as a friend, she ignored me. After the crisis had ended, I wrote to her from the hospital, but she didn’t reply to that either.
I leave Seabegs Wood and pass through a tunnel under the canal leading to its north side. I continue along the canal for another mile or two, stopping to rest at a conveniently placed public house, the rain and the fatigue having given me a mighty ale thirst, which is subsequently quenched by some distinctively gypsum-rich Edinburgh cervisia. At the village of Castlecary, having negotiated the murderous motor carriageway, divine Providence places a hotel with a free room in my path, which, at a rate of fifty pounds Sterling a night, is not excessive these days, and is clean and homely to boot. I throw down my rucksack and go outside again, eager as ever not to waste a single moment of the blessed daylight. I misread the map and veer half a mile off course, and by the time I find the scant remains of the fort of Pexa, it is already pitch dark. I make my way back to the hotel, where I take a pleasant cena and then return to my room. I immediately switch on that other sometimes nightmarish, sometimes miraculous device, the television set. Fortunately for my vulnerable condition, I miss the news that the tyrant of Libya these last forty-two years, Muammar al-Gadaffi, was today beaten to death by vengeful mutineers. Instead, to my unutterable delight, a documentary-cum-travelogue about the Romans in Scotland is being broadcast. It is another perfect end to another perfect day. I know this intense joy cannot last forever, but it doesn’t matter — nothing lasts or matters anyway. Only ‘now’ exists, and it has no importance: the past and the future are as ephemeral and substanceless as dreams and nightmares.
Deptford and Lochcarron, 2nd November, 2014
Dies tertivs: Pexa to Medionemeton
Via the forts at Westerwood, Croy Hill, Begesse, Colicana and Kirkintilloch, and along the Antonine Wall, being the twelfth day before the Calends of November, 2764
I must be getting stronger, because I waken at eight o’clock, in time for ientacvlvm, which I duly devour. Before ‘checking out’ of the hotel, as the process of settling the bill and handing in the keys is called, I make my way over to the fort of Pexa again, originally built during Agricola’s campaign in 833 (80). Almost nothing remains of the fort now but some bumps in the grass where the internal buildings once stood and a few bits of masonry strewn hither and thither, this being one of the few Antonine forts originally built of stone. A cohort of Vardvli from the modern day Basque country was stationed here, and its soldiers left an altar stone:
DEO NEPTVNO COHORS I FID VARDVL
C R EQ M CVI PRAEST TREBIVS VERVS PRAEF
The irritatingly heavy abbreviation may be expanded and translated thus:
To the god Neptune, the First Cohort of Vardvli, citizens of Rome, part mounted,
one thousand strong, under the command of the prefect Trebio Vero
I return to the hotel, collect my rucksack and saunter to the back of the building. Here a surprise awaits me: beside the gate to the field behind the hotel stand two ornately wrought iron legionaries guarding this gateway to the past. I pass through and cross the field, and immediately the Ditch reappears, for the first time since Seabegs Wood, though quite shallow here. At nearby Garnhall, however, it deepens, and for the next two miles from here the visible frontier is almost uninterrupted. The view to the North Country opens out too, though much obscured by a heavy grey sky that seems almost to touch the ground. To the south lies the small Cumbernauld Airport — again oddly mirroring Hadrian’s Wall, which also straddled a small airport on its western side. A little further on, at Westerwood, the still discernible earthworks of a Roman fort are unfortunately hidden from view by the farm buildings that sit squarely in the middle of it, but an unusual altar stone was found bearing the inscription:
SILVANIS ET QVADRVIS CAELESTIB SACR VIBIA PACATA FL VERECVNDI
LEG VI VIC CVM SVIS VSLM
To holy Silvanis and the four corners of the heavens,
Vibia Pacata and the centurion Flavio Verecundo of the Sixth Victorious Legion,
for the sake of their family, willingly and deservedly fulfil their vow
So who was this mysterious Vibia Pacata, and why did he join with the centurion Flavio to make such an unusual votive offering to both the gods of the forest and the heavens themselves? Did they fear, as I do today, that the forest would swallow them and the low, heavy, Caledonian sky would fall on their heads? It is not hard to imagine the atmosphere of threat and menace that must have lurked beyond the Ditch to the north of this place. The immensity and pitilessness of the barbarian lands must have weighed heavily on the soldiers stationed here at the edge of the civilized world.
Half a mile further on, at Dullatur, the Ditch deepens considerably amid woodlands. I pass some of the meanest looking rams, with the largest testicles, that I have ever encountered. With their lumpy, muscly heads, they more resemble retired boxers than placid ruminants and one of them successfully stares me down. I quicken my pace, glad of the fence separating us, though he would doubtlessly be capable of battering it down with his thick skull, should the whim come over him.
The tarred road takes me briefly northwards away from the Wall and past some paddocks with smartly dressed horses, who are as curious about me as the rams were, as though they have never seen a biped before. I turn back southwards on a track and soon meet the Wall again, climbing up over rough, heather-clad moorland to Croy Hill. Once again I have the feeling of being on Hadrian’s Wall in miniature, because I am now entering the wild, central section of the frontier, but instead of twenty miles of this landscape, there are only three or four here.
The rain and wind that have been intermittent all day now intensify, but no clouds can cloud my mood today. I feel hot blood coursing through my veins, cold damp air streaming through my lungs and tingling electricity flashing through my brain. I have never been so aware of this hot, humid, charged life in the middle of the cold, dry, neutral universe before, and my tumultuous emotions struggle to find expression. To remedy this, I do what our kind has done since time immemorial: I start to sing. I begin with my favourite bagpipe tune — you know, that rousing one that goes:
HEE durum HO durum, HEE durum HO durum…
After I’ve sung that a few dozen times, getting ever louder, I move on to a hummed medley of Beethoven’s sixth symphony, his overture to Fidelio and the Kreutzer Sonata, but as powerful as they are, I need some words to give full voice to my overflowing feelings of joy and gratitude at being alive, so I break into Laura Nyro’s ‘And When I Die’ in the style immortalized by the divine orchestra, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’:
I’m not scared of dying, and I don’t really care.
If it’s peace you find in dying, then let the time be near.
If it’s peace you find in dying, and if dying time is near,
Bundle up my coffin, ‘cause it’s cold way down there,
Cold way down there,
Crazy cold way down there.
And when I die, when I’m gone,
There’ll be one child left in this world to carry on.Now, troubles are many; they’re as deep as a well.
I could swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell.
Swear there ain’t no heaven, but I pray there ain’t no hell.
I’ll never know by living; only my dying will tell,
Dying will tell,
Only my dying will tell.
And when I die, when I’m gone,
There’ll be one child left in this world to carry on.Give me my freedom for as long as I be.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me.
All I ask of living is to have no chains on me,
And all I ask of dying is to go naturally,
Go naturally,
Only to go naturally.
There was once a fort at the top of Croy Hill. As usual, nothing now remains, and even the Ditch disappears here, as at Limestone Corner on Hadrian’s Wall, because the stone beneath the topsoil was too hard to cut through. However, an altar stone was found here, dedicated to the nymphs (you had to worship them all, it seems) and paid for by some soldiers under the dashingly named tribune, Fabio Liberali. Partly expanded, it reads:
NYMPHIS VEXILLATIO LEGIO VI VICTRIX PIA FIDELIS
SVB FABIO LIBERALI TRIB MIL VSLM
For the nymphs: a detachment of the Sixth Victorious Legion Loyal and Faithful
under the tribune Fabio Liberali willingly and deservedly fulfill their vow
Still singing, still ecstatic, I descend Croy Hill, and at the bottom, I almost immediately begin ascending Bar Hill. Here the landscape changes from blasted moorland to thick forest, and soon the Ditch appears again, cutting an impressive scar straight up the hillside. The fort of Begesse bestrides the summit, and here at last, though meager, are some more masonry remains, the first since Rvmabo. The foundations of some internal buildings are visible, as well as a well and the floor of the bath house, where I sit down to take my prandivm with a small bottle of Italian wine, shivering with delight in the chill, damp autumn air.
Several altar stones were found here bearing witness to the unusual presence of Syrian archers from the tribe of Hamians:
DEO SILVANO CARISTIANIVS IVSTINIANVS PRAEF COH I HAMIOR VSLLM
To the god Silvanvs, Karistian Yustinian, prefect of the First Cohort of Hamians,
gladly, willingly and deservedly fulfills his vow
DEO MARTI CAMVLO COHORS PRIMAE HAMIORVM [SAGGITARIORVM]
CIV SC … …IVI…
For the god Martivs Camvlvs, the citizen soldiers of the First Cohort of Hamian [Archers]
under the command of …
Strange that these Syrians from the ancient city of Hama should have worshipped Silvanvs, the god of the forest, though less strange, being archers, that they should worship Mars, the Roman god of war. Then again, why would these Levantine people syncretize Mars with Camulos, the corresponding fierce, horned Celtic god of war? But such was the seething flux of the Roman world: we may have riches nowadays that the ancients could only dream of, but our culture is bland and homogenous in comparison.
Much refreshed, I leave Bar Hill on a farm track descending to the village of Twechar. It was here that I had planned to reach last night, hopelessly overestimating my strength, and so before I continue, I have a moral errand to run. I cross the canal and make my way to Twechar Farm, intending to pay for the room I booked last night. My mother used to run a guest house, and so I have always disliked those (and they are not few) who fail to honour their bookings. I grew to appreciate my mother’s guest house greatly as a young lad. Our house on the Kyle of Lochalsh was close to the tiny village hall at a time (the twenties or eighties, depending on your calendar) when we had the world’s best village events and entertainment committee. We were visited by rock bands, travelling theatre troupes, mediaeval puppeteers, acrobats and even opera singers. Whether for popular music, Chaucer, Vanbrugh or Bizet, I was always there in the crowded little hall, gorging my hungry young mind on whatever I could find in the cultural wasteland of the early twenty-eighth (late twentieth) century. And if that were not enough, the performers were often guests at our house. The guests had the privacy of their own sitting room, but my mother was always hospitable and talkative, involving them in our life as much as they cared to be involved. Added to that there was a steady stream of tourists in the summer, on their way to Skye and the Western Isles, and long-term residents working temporarily at the naval base in the winter. Often the civil servants cohabited merrily with the tourists and the artistes, occasionally with scandalous consequences.
Anyway, at the front door of the farmhouse, the farmer’s wife directs me to a barn where her husband is occupied. At said barn I meet the proprietor of the estate, clad in a ‘bunnet’ and inevitably fragrant tweeds and leaning on a gate. I apologize for my failure to show up last night and hand him three ten-pound notes, which he accepts graciously, but thanklessly, no doubt intending to pass them straight to the bookmaker, playing dumb when his good lady enquires the fate of the room fee I brought him. We talk a little business, during which I mostly nod, failing to fully penetrate his rich Dunbartonshire dialect, although I lived for two years in this district as a child. At some point I mention the Antonine Wall (as I must) and the farmer nods in acknowledgement (as a proud Scotsman must). Unlike the barber of Bonnybridge, however, the farmer of Twechar makes no bones about his loathing for UNESCO and Historic Scotland, who have “robbed” him of so much good agricultural land. He claims Barr Hill “belongs” to him and would not hesitate to plough it up, given half the chance. I bite my lip and clench my fists, refraining both from speaking and throttling him. But what are you going to do? It was always like this: for a farmer, land is just a resource to be exploited like any other.
I continue westwards along the canal. The Wall ran along the south bank of the canal for about half a mile, then crossed over to the north side for a mile. The tarred road would keep me closer to the line of the Wall, but the now lush and peaceful Forth and Clyde Canal makes for a much pleasanter route. At Auchendavy, on the outskirts of Kirkintilloch, the Romans built yet another fort, perhaps called Colicana, as if expecting the barbarians to breech the Wall at any unguarded mile. I scramble up a bank by the canal and over some barbed wire fences to see the earthworks I have been promised are still visible here, but I’m only able to discern a flat, empty field between canal and road. Here were found some more altar stones, one to the guardian spirit of Britain:
GENIO TERRAE BRITANNICAE M COCCEI FIRMVS LEG II AVG
For the next mile or so, the town of Kirkintilloch grows ever larger. The name seems obviously English, but it hides the truth, turning out to be an Anglicization of the Welsh Caerpentalloch, meaning ‘fort at the end of the ridge’. I turn right from the canal and head into town to find the tiny museum. It is so small, in fact, that it takes me half an hour to locate it. Just as at Kinneil House, the curator is wildly enthusiastic, showing me where we are on a map and tracing her finger suggestively along the line of the Wall. Here is another one I could ask to marry me, I reflect dreamily. Perhaps I could clasp her hand as it gently strokes the dotted line on the map and tell her that I love her, that I’ve always loved her…
“It’s a very windy wall, you see.”
“I’m sorry?” I say, waking up again.
“It winds from hilltop to hilltop.”
“I see.”
Perhaps it’s too early to be thinking of marriage. Instead, I take a brief tour of the museum, which is just about to close, grateful that I got here on time. There are a few scraps on display, the leather sole of a sandal and the stump of a small column, but their scantiness, as always, makes them seem even more precious. They are survivors against all the odds.
Behind the museum is a park through which the Wall ran. I walk through it, peer at a mound that seems to be a relic of the Wall and continue down a narrow lane back to the canal. As before, the Wall flirts now with the north bank, now with the south, but never strays far from it. This is comforting: though the Antonine Wall has vanished here, and for that matter, for most of the rest of the Frontier Road, the Forth and Clyde canal serves to mark much of its course and to provide a pleasant alternative to walking on the tarred roads. The light fades rapidly over the next two miles, leaving a mutilated tree sadly silhouetted against the evening sky, but at last I reach the fort of Medionemeton, vanished of course, on the south bank of the canal. After another mile I turn southwards into the suburb of Bishopbriggs and catch the train into Glasgow. My lodgings are a cheap but pleasant hostel by the River Clyde. I take my cheap but decent cena in the hostel’s own bar, and when I’ve finished, a young, local-sounding woman asks if she can join me at my table, a request I gladly grant. She is interested to hear all about my journey along the Frontier Road and asks many questions. As soon as she has wished me a pleasant journey and continued on her way, I feel tears welling in my eyes: it is so much easier to cope with people’s cruelty than their kindness.
Deptford, 15th November 2014
Dies qvartvs: Medionemeton to Litana
Via the fort at Svbdobiadon and along the Antonine Wall, being the eleventh day before the Calends of November, 2764
Today is already the last day. I pack up and leave my rucksack at the hostel reception, a service worth infinitely more than all the chocolates-on-pillows in the world put together. I stroll through Glasgow, gloriously unburdened, and catch the locomotive train back to Bishopbriggs. I cross the Forth and Clyde Canal for the last time and continue northwards for about half a mile until I meet the line of the vanished Wall at the Wilderness Plantation. It feels as though I have completely left Glasgow behind, and here is only agricultural and forestry land. As the road turns west, I leave it and tramp about some unused land, trying to find some trace of the Wall or Ditch, but it is futile. I return to the tarred road and follow it and the invisible Wall, for a stretch right on top of it, westwards for just over a mile until Balmuildy. Here, where the Wall meets the small River Kelvin, crosses it and turns north for a mile or so, was the fort possibly called Svbdobiadon, if, as ever, the miraculous Ravenna Cosmography, the fifteenth (eighth) century book of all the place names from Ireland to India, is both to be believed and then interpreted correctly. The farm called Easter Balmuildy now sits on the fort, and as a result the masonry has all vanished and the earthworks have been levelled. Once the corpse of a mighty civilization is cold, the vultures waste no time in picking its bones clean. One of the distance slabs commemorating the progress of the Wall was found nearby, as well as some altar stones to Mars and the goddess Luck, because as we all know, luck is a lady who must be nurtured and worshipped.
Rather than follow the Wall closely on the busy road that crosses the Kelvin, I choose the scenic route that meanders a little to the east for a mile or so. This stretch, though peaceful, is dreary and muddy, but as always my elation is imperturbable. I sing and hum and skip over the quagmires, every scintillating step putting more distance between me and the hell I have just escaped from.
Leaving the river, I return to the tarred road and begin climbing Crow Hill, which, needless to say, the Wall has also been making for while I was dicking about by the riverside. The next mile is a merry dance with death, there being room on the road for two motor cars side by side and absolutely nothing else. Just like on the Roman road between Alavna and Derventio on the last jaunt, in order to stay alive, I am forced to press myself tightly against the hedgerow every time a car passes. Pero no hay mal que dure cien años, as the Spaniards say in their colourful Latin. There’s no evil that lasts a hundred years, and thankfully, this one only lasts half an hour until I once again encounter the city at the suburb of Bearsden and the unspeakable bliss of the pavement.
Soon I turn right into a cemetery, and after some searching I find one of the two exposed stretches of the Antonine Wall’s stone foundations. It looks like a cobbled street, giving me a new perspective on the structure, as this is the first time I have had a clear idea of the original width of the Wall, which must once have seemed as impressive as Hadrian’s. I climb further up the hill, which of course the Wall was taking advantage of, but fail to find the second stretch. Instead I am compensated by a fine view to the north and the rugged Campsie Fells, the beginning of the wild country that the Romans, for all their power and wits, could never subdue. A beautiful funerary statue of an angel stands on top of the hill and bears the inscription:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ELIZABETH WILSON COWE
WHO FELL ASLEEP ON 15TH JANUARY 1944
There is, of course, no need to add that she didn’t wake up again. Three months ago I also fell asleep, meaning to die, but unlike Mrs Cowe, I miraculously woke. There will never be a day in the coming three years — I hope for the rest of my life — when I do not remember this and feel gratitude.
I return to the road, and another half a mile through the affluent suburb brings me to a glorious sight: tucked away among modern blocks of flats are the ruins of a Roman bath house, all that is left of the fort of Litana. They are the most substantial Roman ruins in Scotland and, indeed, the most northerly in the world. The knee-high foundations of various hot rooms, cold rooms, bath tubs and a latrine have all been consolidated and restored, so that although hardly the Baths of Caracalla in Roma, which are more like the ruins of a cathedral than a sauna, Litana’s little bath house thrills the imagination with its ability to survive two millennia in this place. How tantalizing indeed to think that this is the last bath house in the world, and how apt that it should be so: is not the technology for piping and heating water, with the hygiene, comfort, pleasure and good health that these imply, the very heart and soul of civilisation itself? In the interminable West Coast drizzle, I stand and admire the vestiges of this ancient dream. It is time to turn south-eastwards and look towards the Persian Gulf, three thousand miles away, and remember that everything between here and there, between Bearsden and Basra, was once a single state, with one set of laws and one emperor, in which, give or take, people were free to speak whichever language and worship whichever gods they pleased, as long as they also understood Latin or Greek and also worshipped the Emperor. Those days are long gone. Something lost, perhaps, but doubtless something gained.
I had planned to continue from here through the suburbs to Castle Hill, where a stretch of the Ditch can still be seen, and thence to the last scant remains of the Wall at Duntocher. There is a nightmarish knot of motor carriageways to be negotiated before Old Kirkpatrick and the banks of the Clyde, where the Antonine Wall ended and where, as a boy of eighteen years, I tragically left my packed lunch on a lorry while hitch-hiking back up to the Highlands, but if I want to see the jewels of Roman Scotland in Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum before it closes, I must stop here. My journey is over and it’s nearly time to go home. It’s a miracle I got this far.
Deptford, 21st November 2014
Afterthought: dies vltimvs again?
Homewards via Glasgow and Londinivm, still being the eleventh day before the Calends of November, 2764
The Hunterian Museum is like a dream: the dim, damp light seeps through the small windows of the old, but modernised building, like in a cathedral or a Mithraic temple, but the artificial light is respectfully dim also, as if from candles. Re-erected and restored Roman columns line the aisles, reinforcing the impression of being in a sacred place. The distance slabs are arranged in a broad horseshoe pattern and show goddesses reclining, wild boars frolicking and soldiers riding roughshod over the cowed, wretched Britons — binding, skewering or beheading them according to their capricious whim. It has been an awfully long time since this hubris-puffed nation has tasted anything like true humility.
I linger in the adjacent art gallery, where there are some fine art deco pieces. This city was a hub of modernity in the early twentieth century and the Glaswegians are justly proud of it. I would have liked to visit the beautiful Charles Rennie Mackintosh House over the road, but it is closed today. I went there back in March, when my mind was falling apart, and the beautiful, bright, airy designs afforded me a few moments of peace and calm from my descent into the maelstrom. No such desperate measures are needed today, however: life tastes sweet again, and I am afraid of nothing. No, instead I head back to the Clyde for a stroll along that fine river and to reassure myself that my shortened journey along the Frontier Road is still ending where it should, at the water’s edge. Then I take a sumptuous hamburger dinner with red wine at an American-themed restaurant, and afterwards catch a film at the cinema. It is the perfect ‘dinner-and-movie-date’ with me — and high time, after forty-one years of neglecting to love myself.
I always feel sad coming out of the ‘little world’ of the cinema or theatre, but tonight it is a good sadness. I walk into the city night and straight into the future, already planning the next journey. I will walk the British Pilgrims’ Road from shrine to shrine, thanking the gods, all of them, for the new life that was unexpectedly and miraculously given to me. But as elated as I am now, I am with hindsight grateful for my ignorance of the adventures, trials and ordeals awaiting me. Indeed, another wretched death, a short season in hell and a somewhat painful rebirth must be undergone before I can be free once again. Maybe this time I will have a true friend to kiss away the pain and ease the transition between worlds. Is there anything greater to be hoped for in this life?
I stride through the permanently damp night air of the raw city towards Buchanan Street Bus Station, where twenty-three years ago I spent a surreal summer night among fellow itinerants of the depressed nineteen eighties. This time, in the considerably spruced-up terminal, I board the overnight omnibus bound for London. After an hour or so of leisurely reading and drinking, I feel my eyelids getting heavy, and so I retire to my ‘cabin’ — a brand-new innovation in British road transport. It is roughly the size of a coffin, and panic seizes me for a moment after I climb into it, but I soon begin to relax — death is no stranger to me now, and I know there is nothing to fear here. In only a few moments I gratefully fall headlong into the heavy, dreamless sleep of the newborn.
Deptford, 23rd November, 2014
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