Introduction
On Romans, frontiers and roads
The Romans were a hard-headed, brutal, pragmatic but oddly humble people. They conquered the Greeks, yet stood in awe of their achievements and their wisdom. They persecuted the Christians, perceiving the threat they posed to their authority, then adopted their beliefs. In Britain, they destroyed the druidic cult, probably fearing the same threat as from the Christians, yet left their monuments standing and the people free to worship the same old gods, even raising golden statues to them. There were only two conditions to the humility of the Romans: pay them tax and acknowledge them as masters.
With their superior technology and iron discipline, they were also fearless soldiers who found attack the best form of defence. For this reason, they saw no reason to fortify their boundaries: if threatened, they would march out to meet the enemy, rather than crouch behind walls. The Latin for ‘frontier’ was limes, from which the English word ‘limit’ comes, and it meant something like ‘frontier road’, because that’s what their borders were for the most part: just roads. The original border of Roman territory in Britain was the Stanegate, the road running east from Corbridge to Carlisle. These roads, plus a few forts and rivers, were adequate deterrents in most provinces, but in Britain the Romans found a determined reluctance to be civilised, whatever that entails, that perhaps more than anything else characterises the island folk that would one day trample over half the world, though our hypocrisy, another indelible tattoo, will never let us admit it.
Already during Agricola’s campaign in the year 79, it seems that a turf wall went up in Scotland, the Gask Ridge, but it was the emperor Hadrian who saw the need for something better placed and more permanent in 122. Under Trajan he had seen the Empire stretched to breaking point in modern Romania and Iraq, and he probably thought the time had come to start consolidating what had been so hardly won. With his flamboyance and passion for architecture, a great wall was begun, sixteen feet high, ten feet thick and seventy-three miles long ‘to separate the Romans from the barbarians’, as one Roman commentator put it. The massive structure snaked over every hill it could find, heedless of cliffs and rivers, punctuated by three major bridges, sixteen large forts, seventy-nine small ones and around 150 turrets. And if this weren’t enough, deep ditches, fortifications in their own right, were dug enclosing the wall zone to both north and south, and a road built to facilitate communication along its entire length. When the wall ended on the Solway Firth in the wild West of the island, Hadrian was still dissatisfied: another string of ‘fortlets’, one Roman mile apart, was constructed along the Cumbrian coast to watch for attacks from the ‘Irish’ and ‘Scots’. A network of roads criss-crossed the mountains in the interior, with yet more forts to guard them, supplying the whole militarised zone with goods shipped in to the safer ports further south. The scale of the enterprise beggars belief, but perhaps more surprising is that, with interruptions, the structure was occupied until the Western Empire itself began to crumble nearly three hundred years later. Remembering that the Berlin Wall was in use for about thirty years puts this into perspective.
In 1801, at the age of seventy-eight, an amiable old gentleman called William Hutton walked from Birmingham to Carlisle, along the length of the wall and back again, a journey of six hundred miles. His hugely entertaining account accompanied me on my own by comparison brief stroll, often refreshing, goading and humbling me. Striding along the ridge at Walltown Crags in the footsteps of the tough old antiquarian and looking northwards to the ‘barbarian lands’, it is awe-inspiring to imagine yourself at one extremity of a unified state that once stretched from Scotland to the Persian Gulf, from Morocco to the Ukraine. How the Romans held those thousand peoples, languages, cultures and religions together for five or six hundred years, and in some places even longer, will always be something of a puzzle, and therein lies part of the appeal of this extraordinary frontier: awe and mystery makes the road from South Shields to Ravenglass, or from Arbeia to Glannoventa, as the Romans may have called them, worth walking and contemplating again and again.
Berkhamsted, 10th June, 2010
Dies nvllvs: to Arbeia
From Berkhamsted, via Londinivm and Pons Aelivs, being the second day before the Ides of May, in the 2,763rdyear after the founding of Rome, during the third consulship of Silvio Berlusconi (Friday, 14thMay, 2010)
No sooner was I back from the Chalk Road than my feet grew itchy again. I began to form a vague plan of walking the ancient Pilgrims’ Road the next summer, but I lacked focus and couldn’t settle on a route. I was restless in other ways too. After three years separated from M, reunion seemed ever less likely, and yet I couldn’t bring myself either to initiate a divorce or to reunite with her, and neither, it seemed, could she. We spent as much time together as ever, possibly even more, but we rarely fought, and our conversations, though lengthy, wide-ranging and punctuated by much laughter, never scratched more than the surface of our emotional soil. To this end, rather, I spent more and more time in London with friends or at sundry entertainments, particularly at a poetry reading group I chaired in the upstairs room of a tavern opposite Bunhill Fields Cemetery, where the mystic poet William Blake lies buried. It was there I met Miss T, an exuberant, witty, pretty Englishwoman of about my own age with a deep, poetic, melancholy streak. She had recently lost her father to a revolting disease and her lover to the winds, and she seemed in some ways to be as lost as me. The Pilgrim’s Road had to wait while we frolicked and cavorted our way through the summer and autumn of 2009. Barely a fortnight into our affair, however, she began to press me for ‘commitment’ of some kind — marriage, children, house, cat, anything — subtly at first, but towards the end of that sad season this pressing grew desperate, and she started to demand one or all of these things more forcefully. Increasingly resentful of her bullying and ‘emotional blackmail’, but also still unaccountably loyal to M, I refused, and she was distraught. At a friend’s wedding she got more than usually drunk, abused me roundly, then demanded that I reciprocate her abuse, a demand I obeyed full of shameful pleasure and self-loathing afterwards. Then on Burns Night, 2010, after a fine supper and some recitals from the ‘makar’, she announced that she was withdrawing from me indefinitely “to think”, she said. I was both aggrieved and relieved, and also annoyed at her ingratitude at dropping this ‘bombshell’ on me after entertaining her so lavishly.
On the other hand, being suddenly and unexpectedly free, in a sense at least, I began to contemplate the ancient roads again, though for reasons unknown to me, not that of the pilgrims. Since childhood I had been drawn to the ancient frontier roads, particularly the father of them all, Hadrian’s Wall. I had made an abortive attempt to travel it three years earlier, camping along the way, but I lacked the strength and got exhausted and sick. Now, after Miss T’s announcement, I tested the water and travelled north to see a special event on that unique monument: every hundred yards or so was to be lit up by torchlight at dusk. The result was eerily atmospheric: the crumbling wall suddenly grew tall in the augmented twilight and was recommissioned after sixteen centuries, Roman soldiers being posted along the way, holding their pila upright and staring stonily northwards towards the barbarian lands (the Britons only ever able to feel comfortable and at peace behind a mask). My appetite had already been whetted, but now it was sharp as a razor and at the other end of my body my feet burned. I planned a route to follow the entire length of the Wall, and then extending it to link up some of the Roman roads and forts that formed the Empire’s northwestern frontier system between the North Sea at South Shields and the Irish Sea at Ravensglass, South Cumbria. I set a date for around the Ides of May, close to my birthday. Then, a week before my departure, Miss T contacted me unexpectedly, and after describing my plans to her, announced that she might accompany me for a stretch. Grateful as ever, I rebooked my lodgings along the route for two.
***
My dread of oversleeping the five o’ clock locomotive to Londinivm, and thereby the six fifteen to Pons Aelivs (Newcastle), and thereby the whole expedition, proves unfounded, and I arrive at the grand Central Station at half past nine, bleary-eyed, but happy. Unlike Hutton, who for his six-week journey carried only Camden’s ‘Britannia’, maps, paper, ink and an umbrella, I am overburdened with clothes, medicine, toiletries, food, wine and even the old boy’s book, which, being out of print, was only available as a heavy, bound facsimile.
I take the metropolitan railway to the hostel in Jesmond, drop off my rucksack, put map and lunch into a shoulder bag and set out for the nearby Hancock Museum. I find it quickly enough, a fact which I read as an ill omen. In my experience, long journeys never begin this easily, but, for the time being at least, all is well. The museum, having recently consolidated Pons Aelivs’s major collections, is a delight. A special treat for me is the fifty-foot-long model of Hadrian’s Wall, with every fort, milecastle, turret, bridge, hill and river represented in miniature. I pace along it fascinated, imagining a tiny model of myself struggling up hill and down dale at six inches an hour.
The permanent exhibition contains many of the most important finds from the Wall and the northern forts. The tombstones and altars, the treasured memorials of provincial soldiers and officials, are touching in their simplicity, but also dramatic and striking. No pretensions of urban sophistication here: their devotions to wives, daughters and gods come from the heart. The large altar of Mithras from Vercovicivm bursts with action and energy, the head of the god Antenociticvs glares mysteriously and an official’s wife still stands proudly on her gravestone in her humble provincial dress after eighteen centuries. The loss of their brightly coloured paint, in my opinion, only increases their dignity.
A short walk takes me to the metropolitan railway station in Haymarket, where I board the locomotive for Arbeia (South Shields). Over the River Tyne and along its south bank, the modern urban transport glides, a synthetic voice announcing ‘doors closing’ at each station. We pass through Jarrow and a station called ‘Bede’, named to honour the venerable old monk who was born ‘ad murum’ (in no village in particular, but simply ‘by the Wall’) in around 1426 (673) and who kept the embers of civilisation glowing in the Dark Ages, while the rest of the island thought about nothing but its next meal. He gave us in his histories our second native (the first being from another monk, Gildas), but first reasonably objective account of Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve planned a brief stop later at the nearby monastery, St. Paul’s, where he lived and worked, and where the church’s dedication slab from the year 1438 (685) still bears its inscription in Latin. Interesting how quick the Anglian immigrants to these parts were to adopt those aspects of the language and culture of their predecessors which suited their purposes.
I sit at the back of the train, looking straight down the tracks as we trundle into Arbeia. There’s another half a mile or so on foot through the little Geordie holiday resort and over a hill looking out across the harbour and what Hutton called the ‘German Ocean’ and the Romans Oceanvs Germanvs. All journeys begin and end with the sea, so let mine begin here at Arbeia, the ‘fort of the Arabs’, probably named after the ‘Tigris boatmen’ stationed here on the edge of the vast Roman world, two thousand miles from home, seventeen centuries ago.
Newcastle, 14th May, Berkhamsted, 16th June, 2010 and Deptford, 14th May, 2017
Dies primvs: Arbeia to Pons Aelivs
Under and along the River Tyne and via the fort at Segedvnvm and the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall, still being the second day before the Ides of May, 2763
Arbeia guarded the mouth of the River Tyne and seems to have acted as a supply base for Hadrian’s Wall and for military campaigns in the North in general. For an urban site it has survived remarkably well: still visible are the foundations of some of the perimeter wall, two gates, granaries and the commanding officer’s house, two of whose columns have been re-erected where they fell, offering a tantalizing gateway to the past. The small site museum has yet another wealth of Roman tools, trinkets and tombstones, but the most fascinating thing about Arbeia for picnicker and antiquarian alike are the reconstructions. The child in me is thrilled by these palpable manifestations of ancient history, where otherwise the imagination has such spinal-cord-breaking work. The fort’s West Gate and adjoining walls have been entirely rebuilt in situ, according to the model given by surviving gates elsewhere, the depictions on Trajan’s Column, etc. On the south side are the reconstructed barracks and commanding officer’s house, wonderfully contrasting the universal, timeless simplicity of the common soldiers’ quarters with the particular and fixed-in-time Mediterranean opulence of the praetor’s. Here is a sunny colonnaded courtyard, dining room, study and bedrooms, all beautifully painted according to known period styles. Fragments of painted plaster survive and are on display.
An idea which has been incubating in me for some time suddenly hatches. I imagine the commanding officer in his private bath house in conversation with his slave, a britunculus (‘miserable little Briton’), sometime in the late fourth century, in the fetid atmosphere of the End of Empire. It goes something like this:
Praetor: Scrape my back.
The slave obeys, but as he sets to work with the strigil, his master cannot see the resentment written on his face.
Praetor: You’re a Christian, aren’t you, slave?
Slave: Yes, master.
Praetor: Why?
The slave hesitates, afraid that he is being tested and risks punishment if he answers wrongly.
Praetor: You can speak freely. I won’t beat you.
Slave: (relieved) Because my god is good to slaves, master.
Praetor: So I hear. But why should he be good to slaves?
Slave: (pausing, never having thought about it) He loves us all, master.
Praetor: Even me? Does he love those who beat his worshippers?
Slave: (diplomatically) Even, them, master.
Praetor: I don’t believe you. Come now, tell the truth! I said I wouldn’t punish you.
Slave: (after a long pause) Only if they regret, master.
Praetor: Regret what? Beating you?
Slave: Yes, master.
Praetor: So if I beat you to death, then regret it, your slave-god will love me?
Slave: (dimly realizing that his master’s logic, more than his duty to him, compels him to agree to this uncomfortable truth) Er… yes, master.
Praetor: Then your god is a fool, and you are a fool for worshipping him.
Slave: Yes, master.
Praetor: Do you know, slave, which god I worship above all others?
He waits for an answer, but doesn’t see that the slave is holding the strigil over him as though it were a knife.
Praetor: No, of course you don’t. How could you? I worship the undefeated Mithras, who shed the blood of the bull in the cave to give life to the world. Unlike your fool-god that loves those who kill his servants, Mithras protects those who reciprocate his sacrifice. Do you think Mithras would love you for killing me?
The slave stares blankly at the strigil without responding.
Praetor: (angry) Well? Answer me!
Slave: (absently) No, master.
Praetor: Quite right he wouldn’t. He would torment your soul in the underworld.
The praetor’s anger turns suddenly to fear and he is perplexed by these rapidly changing emotions.
Praetor: Why have you stopped scraping my back? Damn your insolence! I think I’ll beat you after all, as soon as you’ve finished.
The slave continues scraping, free to express his hatred on his face, though his voice, through long experience and training, remains subservient, or inscrutable at least.
Slave: As you wish, master.
***
Or something to that effect. Musing thus, I take my lunch, a delicious steak with mushrooms and a pepper sauce that M made on the occasion of my birthday. A rich Spanish wine completes the picture (drunk in honour of Hadrian, who had links with Italica, near Seville), and I’m so caught up in the meal and the reverie of my Praetor of Arbeia and his slave that I forget both the time and the bellowing, screeching party of schoolchildren visiting the fort. Municipal archaeologists are also at work nearby. I take my reluctant leave of this miraculous site, but can’t resist a detour to a green at the top of the hill to see the sea, the river mouth, its castle and ruined abbey and a huge warship sailing into the harbour. Something of the kind must have also happened eighteen centuries ago when Arbeia was built.
Back at South Shields Metropolitan Railway Station, I have a grim presentiment of doom at the sight of a large group of people waiting impatiently on the platform and staring anxiously at the departures board promising the next train in five minutes. A quarter of an hour passes before a voice announces that trains back to Newcastle have been suspended, due to ‘power failure’. Disaster! I haven’t enough time to walk to Jarrow and taxis seem scarce here. I run down to the street and up to a stationary taxi and ask the driver if he’s free. He shakes his round head in reply, too lazy to open his mouth, but in the same moment I catch sight of a bus labelled ‘Jarrow’. I decide to jump on, guessing it will only take fifteen or twenty minutes. It takes nearly an hour, turning maddeningly down every residential street, by the most circuitous route imaginable, during which I get overheated, dehydrated and car-sick trying to read my maps and work out where we are. When I finally get off at Jarrow metro station, I realize I’ll have no time to pay my respects to Bede. It would have fit the theme of the walk so well to see a little of the world of a man born in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall and who was perhaps precisely therefore to become England’s first great historian, but it’s not to be today, thanks to the sudden collapse of Tyneside’s infrastructure.
A taxi miraculously appears and I jump in, asking him to take me to the ‘Roman fort’ at Wallsend. After a pause he sheepishly asks me if I know the postcode. I’m fuming: how am I, obviously a tourist, to know what the postcode is? What I do know is how often I’ve been let down by British taxi drivers paid to operate gear sticks, read road signs and know their own back yards. I tell him it’s right beside Wallsend metro station and he babbles for a while in reply, probably expecting me to excuse his ignorance, but I will not oblige. I’m paying dearly enough already to worry about hurting his feelings as well.
The Friday rush hour is in full swing and the queue to get into the Tyne Tunnel frustratingly slow. The driver informs me that the council is currently building a second tunnel, which slows us even more. In true English style he apologizes for the traffic, which he has no power to change, but fails to apologize for his ignorance of his local geography, which he has every power to change. He even asks me to spell the name of the fort, which he proceeds to punch into his navigation system, although I’ve already given him an alternative destination that he knows. This land is ripe for conquest, I speculate.
I had intended to cross the river via the pedestrian tunnel and then take the metro a few stops to the magically named ‘Wallsend’, where the signs are bilingual in English and Latin, but fate had other plans for me today. There are another few miles in the taxi before we encounter an archway over a tarred path on which is written, absurdly, ‘Hadrian’s Cycleway’.
“Is this it?” the driver asks. “Shall I stop here?”
I acknowledge that he’s trying to be helpful and to extrapolate my goal based on something he recognizes as ‘Roman’, but it’s not helpful and I’m desperate to get out of the hated automobile, so I say, “This will do.”
I pay nearly sixteen pounds, including the toll for the tunnel, but withhold the tip and get out at last. I alighted here because I recognized the large cranes from my last visit, but the perspective has tricked me and it turns out I have another half a mile to walk. I curse myself for not listening to my better judgment and arrive at Segedvnvm, the fort guarding the beginning (or the end) of Hadrian’s Wall at twenty minutes past four.
More disappointment awaits when I get to the site. The attendant is reluctant to let me in, even though there are forty minutes left until it closes, and recommends that I go up the observation tower. I ignore her, hand over the money and make for the reconstructed bath house. I get confused by the signs and the hand of fate sends me up the space-age viewing platform after all. Here I dawdle for a few minutes, transfixed by the classic ‘playing card’ outline of the fort, the obvious bend in the Tyne that it guarded, the huge cranes by the river and the five-minute time-lapse video reconstruction of the history of Segedvnvm. During the display, from the corner of my eye, I see people leaving the bath house watched by a vulturous attendant who closes the door behind each one. I realize that I’ve missed my chance. The attendant who took my money cheated me out of the delight of walking through a lovingly archaeologically correct reconstruction of a Roman military balneum because all she cares about is clearing out the punters and closing up at five on the dot. I storm downstairs and tell her how little it would have cost her to let me quickly see the bath house.
“It used to be open later, but it’s run by a big corporation now,” she whines. “I’m just a wage slave…”
“Aren’t we all,” I reply, as the scene I had imagined at Arbeia echoes across my mind.
I console myself with pacing the site itself, of which precious little remains, having been buried under a slum for decades. As usual, the foundations of the granaries and the strong room beneath the regimental shrine are visible, but barely. I had also been looking forward to seeing the stretch of wall foundations, the very first on my journey, and a little reconstruction of the wall itself, but in their infinite miserliness, the managers of Segedunum have locked that up too and I’m forced to view it through chicken wire.
Hutton was still able to trace the line of the Wall the four miles from here into Newcastle. Where the rubble of the wall disappeared, he could at least follow the Vallum (the deep, ramparted trench to the south of the wall) which, he observes, the local householders were given incentives to fill in and plant with vegetables. Nothing survives today. The destruction of historic monuments has often been excused in the past on economic grounds, but I’m not convinced: the area around the eastern third of the Wall was hardly short of cultivable land in 2554 (1801), and the acreage gained from filling in the Vallum would have been negligible, especially given the enormous effort it must have cost to effect this.
After today’s disappointments, I don’t feel like trudging beside an invisible wall through housing estates, so I take the National Trail instead on a disused railway line that meanders alongside the Tyne into Newcastle. The river comes into view after a mile or so of the quiet wooded lane and soon drops down to it. So close to Newcastle, this former epicentre of the Industrial Revolution, the river is now a rural Arcadia with gentlemen anglers fishing in silence with their sons. The sight of this takes me back to the mid seventies, standing with my father on a pitch-dark, freezing cold pebble beach on the Suffolk coast, swaddled in oilskins, holding a rod too big for me and with no idea what I was doing. Given the choice, I would have been inside the mysterious old martello tower nearby, but I was glad to be there all the same, participating in a bonding ritual probably a hundred thousand years old. I remember asking him anxiously if fish could feel pain. “No,” he replied, probably deluding himself as much as me, “they don’t have nerves.” I think such moments, however much nonsense they represent in the analysis, are vital threads of communication between father and son — the continuity of an ancient culture.
The route winds pleasantly along with the river, then cuts briefly through the town before returning to the Tyne, just as Gateshead’s futuristic opera house comes into view. A gleaming palace of mirrors towering over the Tyne bridges, the monument to culture contrasts oddly with the street life below. I pass a score of women, over-dressed or under-dressed, according to your point of view, as though for a wedding, but the bride never appears. Of course there is no wedding; this is just Newcastle on a Friday night. Gel-headed dandies saunter towards them, clearly impressed by the ‘talent’, but at the moment they pass, they look away disdainfully, suddenly unimpressed. Such is the Anglo-Saxon, such the britunculus. The Roman soldiers garrisoned here at Pons Aelivs (Hadrian’s Bridge) would doubtlessly have expressed their approval of the local ladies unequivocally and without such hypocrisy.
Winding back up the hillside to the ridge (which of course the Wall never left), I approach the castle keep, where a little hunting reveals the scant remains of the Roman fort under the railway bridge. The great metropolis of the Tyne was probably just a tiny garrison town nineteen centuries ago, no bigger than Vindobala ten miles away, where now only a farmstead stands; such are the unpredictable twists and turns of fate. The Normans built the mediaeval castle squarely on top of the fort, reusing its masonry, as they invariably did, in the knowledge that Roman foundations were the strongest and their building materials the cheapest.
From here I take the metro train back to the hostel in Jesmond, in the vicinity of which the helpful warden tells me there’s a ‘cheap and cheerful’ Italian restaurant. This I can’t resist. It’s the perfect way to end my first day along the Roman frontier road, so I quickly wash and change into my gym shoes and ‘evening shirt’ before heading out.
I am welcomed into the impossibly loud, gaudy and full restaurant by a friendly Italian reluctant to speak English. There’s already a queue of people waiting and not a free table in sight, but the waiter, in typically chaotic, yet oddly efficient Latin style, runs around reassuring everyone they will soon be seated. Within fifteen minutes, by what sorcery I know not, we all are.
Ideally, I would have liked some ancient Mediterranean dish, but I have a hankering for pizza and red wine, which turn out to be as excellent and cheap as promised. In asking if I want dessert and coffee, and in bringing the bill, the waiter gives up speaking English altogether, even though I’ve given no indication of being able to speak Italian. As I’ve seen so often before, the merest hint that you understand what they’re saying is enough. A few foundation stones and some rubble are all that’s left of the Empire’s northern frontier between Arbeia and Pons Aelivs, but the Romans themselves, it transpires, never really left.
Newcastle, 14th May and Berkhamsted, 11th August, 2010
Dies secvndvs: Pons Aelivs to Vindobala
Via the temple and fort at Condercvm, and along Hadrian’s Wall, being the Ides of May, 2763
Today is my fortieth birthday and I’m in need of a little extra treat before the walk, so I head back to the Hancock Museum after ientacvlvm (breakfast), pace up and down the model wall again and attend a ritual at the little ‘virtual’ Mithraeum. After this I’m just in time for a show at the museum’s planetarium: ‘Dawn of the Space Age’, an excellent film projected onto a vast dome and portraying the early history of space exploration. This is paradoxically apt: Hadrian’s Wall marked the northern limit of European civilization for three centuries, and in its shadow grew the man who would become ‘the father of the railways’. Moreover, when referring to gas-propelled ‘ballistic’ missiles, we invoke the Latin term ballista, meaning ‘catapult’. The Romans ruled the world with the help of their roads and their ‘engines of war’, and doubtless they would have followed these developments both on Earth and in the heavenly spheres with much interest.
After tea and cake, I finally get going, and a short ride on the metropolitan railway takes me back to Central Station. I pass a surprisingly intact stretch of the mediaeval city wall — almost certainly built with stone ‘borrowed’ from the Romans. A tramp eyes me warily while I survey the masonry: I’ve often noticed how territorial such men are around ancient monuments, which, having long since passed into public ownership, they regard, quite as a matter of course, as their own.
Just around the corner is Westgate, an unremarkable city street until you realize that Hadrian built its foundations and that you’ve been walking on it seemingly all day and haven’t changed course so much as a fraction of a degree. Immediately it begins to climb out of the town and soon reaches a ridge with occasional panoramas of the Tyne Valley below. Though the wall has disappeared altogether here, its ghost is almost palpable in the street itself, and no better vantage point to watch over the river to the South and the barbarian lands to the North can be imagined. With heavy walking boots on my feet and a large rucksack on my back, I get a few curious stares in this dilapidated commercial district. Some eastern gentlemen call out a friendly, ‘Hey, habibi!’ from their van as they drive by, perhaps descendents of the Tigris boatmen of Arbeia who never made it back to Mesopotamia.
At the highest point of this stretch lies Benwell, from Old English Bynnewalle, or ‘within the wall’. It is the site of the third of the wall’s forts, Condercvm, of which nothing remains but a few curiosities hidden in the housing estate to the South. Tucked away almost in someone’s back garden are the foundations and replica altar stones of the Temple of Antenociticvs. The head and limbs of this probably native British deity (due to the torc around his neck) were found here in 2635 (1862) and are now on display in the Hancock Museum. I offer a libation of wine (a tiny one, so as not to stink up the temple) in honour of this now rather lonely god, and to give thanks for my fortieth birthday. A local man and his young son arrive after me. They are quiet and respectful: the man recounts to his son how his own father brought him here when he was a boy. I am moved by this.
A short walk takes me to another suburban garden and the only surviving ‘Vallum crossing’ on the wall. A six-meter-wide and three-meter-deep ditch with two large banks on either side, the Vallum at its best is almost as impressive as the wall itself, and was probably built to protect the militarized zone in front of it and to deter the thieving Britons from stealing horses. There were many crossing points over this formidable barrier, one every mile originally, but these seem to have been reduced at some point to one for each of the sixteen major forts, such as here at Condercvm.
The site is fenced off and a sign quaintly directs the visitor to an adjacent house for the key. The man and his son arrive soon after me, generously volunteering to do the honours and knock on the door indicated. The portly, bearded guardian presently answers the summons and hands over the key. He remains standing in his doorway, watching over us and answering a great many unasked questions while we look around. A cat is sunning himself on one of the massive stone blocks that remain of the gateway, but slinks down to ingratiate himself with us as we enter the enclosure.
“The road was resurfaced several times,” the Guardian of the Keys announces, repeating what it says on the information plaque next to us. “You can clearly see the different levels,” he adds, as though offering his own learned opinion. The man nods politely, interjecting the occasional ‘really?’, though he obviously already knows. I, however, ignore the guardian and play with the affable cat.
“Oh yes,” the gatekeeper goes on from his pedestal some ten feet above us. “It’s quite unique, you know. This is the only Vallum crossing left and the entrance to the fort ran right through my garden…”
The man and his well-behaved son continue to listen and nod, and so the gatekeeper continues to lecture. I hate being a captive audience and continue trying not to listen to the regurgitated factoids, statements of the obvious and uninvited bragging. The cat takes full advantage of my captivity and flirts shamelessly while I squat down to take pictures.
“I’ve been meaning to excavate my garden for years, but I can’t seem to find the time…”
I’m about to yell at him to be silent, but something in my body language may have already conveyed this and he abruptly breaks off his monologue and slinks back inside. It’s a great relief to chat with the man afterwards, with someone who appreciates this monument with humility and for the right reasons, for the sense of the enormity of history under our feet. He wishes me well with my journey as we part, and the cat returns to his sun bed on the gatehouse until the next visitors arrive.
Back on the line of the Wall, the busy road begins a long slow descent into a valley. At the bottom of Benwell Hill, the Wall suddenly appears: first a few stones poking through the pavement, then a short stretch of little more than foundations, and finally a good hundred feet of it in all its glory, only a few courses high, but at the full width of ten feet. Here too is the first of the surviving ‘turrets’ — square watchtowers positioned at equal distances, two per Roman mile, along the full length of the wall. This one has its ladder platform intact, a stepped base on which to place a ladder for access to the upper floor of the turret, and presumably also, though this is yet, if ever, to be proved, to the wall’s walkway. Hutton mentions Denton as the first substantial stretch of the Wall to be seen, so evidently little has changed since 2554 (1801).
The wall, of course, continues on the high ground, but these are the last of the visible remains I’ll see until the end of today’s walk, so I turn south into the wooded dell of Denton Burn with the intention of rejoining the official route along the River Tyne. At some point the path beside the burn ends, and I have some difficulty finding my way through the maze of typically identical English residential roads. Eventually though I emerge onto the official Hadrian’s Wall Path, which has kept low since Newcastle and continues along a nondescript disused railway with little in the way of views over the countryside opening out for the next few miles. I find this a rather cowardly decision of the route planners: while there’s so much to see up on the ridge, those sites are in a fairly run-down area of Newcastle and along a busy road. For my part I would rather risk being mugged and run over than traipse through a faux-rural, post-industrial cityscape, if the reward is to experience the topography and relics of one of the world’s surviving ancient frontier systems.
However, the dreary part is over soon enough and the path emerges onto the north bank of the Tyne. River rambles are always restful, and today’s is sorely needed, for although I haven’t walked far, there was much dawdling, and dawdling is tiring. The view opens out onto the pleasant wooded banks and, as with yesterday’s walk, it’s hard to believe one of Britain’s largest conurbations is so close. I pass Newburn Ford, site of a battle between Scottish Covenanters and English Royalists in 1640 that some say precipitated the civil wars. The Covenanters, vexed at being forced to accept a new prayer book, marched here, beat the Cavaliers and occupied Newcastle. No doubt Cromwell got ideas into his head when he heard how this band of zealous commoners challenged the might of the crown and won.
The path continues by the riverside a few more miles and then enters a wood. I am now on the ‘Wylam Waggonway’, a railway line built in 2501 (1748) for horse-drawn trains. My route eventually turns up the hillside towards Heddon, but I walk a little further to see the birthplace of George Stephenson, ‘the father of railways’. It fascinates me to think of him, born in this little cottage in 2534 (1781), watching the poor horses pull the wagons along the track, right beside his front door, and dreaming perhaps of better things. Thanks to his work, in his lifetime he would see that little track begin to stretch across continents. Another two hundred years and it would run under the English Channel, and lately there has been talk of a railway line across the Bering Straits to Alaska. How glorious it would be, if one day you could get on a train in New York and travel around the world, without ever leaving the track, to this little cottage where the idea, whose manifestation you are sitting on, was first born.
Though there are twenty minutes until the small museum’s closing time, the National Trust employees have already fled. This dereliction of duty is becoming tediously predictable.
I have an early supper by the river, the last of M’s steak and mushrooms and the Spanish wine, before turning north across a golf course and up the steep hillside towards Heddon-on-the-Wall. My ‘official’ destination, the fort of Vindobala, is a mile further on, but offered no accommodation, so my lodgings for the night are the bunkhouse in Houghton North Farm. The light is fading by the time I’ve thrown my bag down and washed, so I head out to see the stretch of the monument that survives within the village. On my way out, the landlady’s daughter wanders into the lounge clutching a lamb to her chest.
At Heddon the wall is three hundred feet long and the full ten feet thick. It also seems to have grown since Newcastle — tapering downhill impressively in the dusk light. The first time I walked this way in 2760, I took the bus back to my lodgings one evening and overheard two Southern professional men complaining bitterly of how little of the wall was actually visible and how they felt they’d been cheated by the brochures. What fools these consumers of history are, I thought, suckered by the marketing they probably helped to create. The chief delight of this remarkable monument is watching as, little by little, it rises out of the ground in Newcastle’s suburbs, grows to magnificence on the wild Northumbrian moors and then slowly fizzles out again in Cumbria. The Theodosian Wall in Istanbul is immeasurably grander and more imposing, but city walls tend to blend in with their surroundings; they don’t clash intriguingly with them, haunting wildernesses and back gardens alike, as Hadrian’s does.
Berkhamsted, 7th December, 2010
Dies tertivs: Vindobala to Cilvrnvm
Via the City of Coria and the fort at Onnvm, and along Hadrian’s Wall, being the seventeenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
Ientacvlvm in the bunkhouse is rustic: a mountain of bread and a giant tray of eggs laid on the farm, from which I choose a huge, double-yolked one, the biggest I’ve ever seen. Afterwards we are invited to feed the lambs, which I immediately succeed in letting escape. Our host, the farmer’s wife, is quite the comedienne, telling me not to feel bad about this ‘desperate bid for freedom’ that I have facilitated. When the lambs are recovered, I feed one its milk formula. It gulps down nearly a pint inside a minute, as greedy as I was with my double egg. Our host tells us that the Wool Marketing Board sets the price of a fleece at fourteen pence, but that the seasonal labour to shear it costs a pound fifty. You don’t need a degree from the Londinivm School of Economics to perceive the absurdity of an agricultural economy dependent on subsidies and tourism. The Romans weren’t averse to planning and controlling the economy, but I wonder what they would have made of this.
Afterwards, a sprint north along a green lane and then a short cut down another, overgrown and blocked with a mountain of tires (according to the rural custom), gives me my first glimpse of the unexcavated Vallum, visible as a deep depression in the field to my left. A dash across the ferocious A69 and I’m back on the official route for a short while before arriving at Rudchester Farm, where Hutton rummaged in the barns for Roman walls in 1801. Here the fort of Vindobala is visible only as a grassy platform, but the real treat for me lies in the adjacent woods. A little foraging and fence-hopping reveals a large stone basin hidden in the undergrowth — a Roman cistern that once supplied the fort with water. For me, such banal little domestic relics of life eighteen centuries ago are just as interesting as the big monumental ones, especially when you have to hunt for them in the woods.
The next couple of miles are a long, slow ascent beside the ‘Military Road’ to Harlow Hill. The walk through undulating farmland is pleasant enough, but somewhat soured by the knowledge of the destruction of the Wall done by General Wade. In the wake of the Jacobite uprisings in the eighteenth century, he commissioned the building of roads throughout Northern Britain to facilitate the movement of troops. The road from Carlisle to Newcastle made infamous use of the convenient foundations and building materials offered by Hadrian’s Wall. I’ve always suspected there was something more to Wade’s demolition than military expediency alone. There were roads enough in the area affording quicker and easier improvement. Consider, though, the part that Hadrian’s Wall must have played in the development of Scotland’s nationhood: well into Anglo-Saxon times, there was a cultural and linguistic continuum, with no abrupt geographical boundaries, from the English Channel to the Highland Line. The Romans’ arbitrary placement of the empire’s boundary between the Tyne and the Solway changed that forever: thenceforward a person was born either north or south of it, and conflict between Northerner and Southerner was continuous for seven centuries. The Irishman Wade was one of the midwives at the United Kingdom’s painful birth between 1707 and 1746. Was his demolition of Hadrian’s Wall a symbolic destruction of the divide between the two kingdoms? The removal of a mental as well as a physical barrier? A case of ‘Mr. Hadrian, tear down this wall!’?
There’s a fine panorama at the top of Harlow Hill, but the sky is darkening. I descend to a group of reservoirs and it starts to rain. For the next few miles the path climbs slowly again towards Carr Hill and the rain gets heavier. The Vallum is more in evidence now, but only as more frequent dips in the fields. At the top of Down Hill the sun peeps out, though it’s still chilly. A snack wagon miraculously appears, and my gratitude knows no bounds at receipt of a mug of tea and a bacon roll. The proprietress tells me a sorry tale, all too familiar, of local council bullying. She has provided this inestimable service to walkers for years, but for almost as long, the authorities have demanded that she apply for ‘planning permission’, as, absurdly, they judge the wagon to be a ‘permanent structure’. The application is, as usual, costly and almost certain to fail. The good lady is seventeen centuries late with her small business venture: the frozen soldiers stationed on the wall, though surely taking a cut of her takings for ‘protection’, would have been as glad as me for a cup of hot wine and water and some cured pork on a day like this.
I cross the road into the field and suddenly the Vallum plunges almost to its original depth. Sheep intermittently disappear without trace into the deep ditch, and the mounds on either side are clearly defined. Considering the food, wine, horses, cattle, carts, tools and wages of thousands of soldiers that must have accumulated along the frontier, it’s hardly surprising the Romans saw the need for an extra fortification as deep as the wall was tall. The Vallum must have been a bitch for making off with stolen goods, but generations of Brigantes, the local tribe, no doubt died trying.
Here I make a detour back down to the Tyne Valley and the pre-Hadrianic frontier. After a mile and a half I arrive at Aydon Castle, a mediaeval fortified manor house perched romantically above a ravine. It’s past two o’ clock and time is pressing, but I can’t resist a look around. The castle is solid, grey and gaunt — typical for this ‘border reiver’ country. With the gradual establishment of the national border beginning in the tenth century, these parts were rife with bandits and feuding clans fleeing the law on both sides. Walls had to be thick and windows small.
I drop down into the ravine that the castle overlooks, then emerge to go over a hill for the descent into Coria or Corstopitum (Corbridge). This was a frontier town before the Wall, and the road which ran from here to Lugvvalivm, the Stanegate, was the original border, considerably less fortified. Coria also lay on the course of Dere Street, the road from York, which in time would pass through the Wall on its way to Edinburgh and further to the smaller and shorter-lived northern frontier, the Antonine Wall. Dere Street crossed the River Tyne to get to Coria and the massive stones of the bridge’s ramp can still be seen on the south bank, but unfortunately I haven’t time to make that excursion today.
A dash across the murderous A69 (again) and a trot through Coria’s northern suburbs brings me to the ancient site — small and quaint now, but what a swinging city it must have seemed, back in 950 or thereabouts, to the soldiers on leave from the Wall and in need of a little action! As usual in Britannia, the ruins are at most chest-high, but seem well preserved and integrated here. The Stanegate runs very obviously through the centre of the town, and beside it are the intriguing remains of a colonnade, which today sit well below street level, due to repeated resurfacing of the road. Also in clear view are the massive foundations and complex ventilation system of the granaries, a municipal fountain and a network of dubious alleys between the buildings. The museum, though small, is crammed with statuary, tombstones, plaques and domestic objects.
As I leave Coria, I notice an overgrown green lane heading north, back towards the Wall, and which in a few hundred yards merges with a busy dual carriageway. This is a fragment of Dere Street, and it would have been fine to walk on this needless-to-say straight road back up the hill, but the automobile has robbed me of this pleasure. Instead I have to wind along Anglo-Saxon lanes, past some enormous, conical eighteenth century pottery kilns, over a ford and up the hill to the small castle at Halton. The fort of Onnvm (or Hvnnvm), the Wall’s fourth, lies in the grounds of the castle, but is only visible as a raised platform, though even this is confused by centuries of ploughing. Here and there are suspiciously square blocks of cut stone, and it would be surprising if they were not Roman, given the systematic robbing that has gone on for the last thousand years.
A little further along there is a grassy platform in the field that bears witness to one of the Wall’s seventy-nine ‘milecastles’, but I’ll leave the account of these until the ruins become more substantial further on. The Vallum, though subtle, is also visible here, but the local cows object to my inspecting it. Shortly afterwards I arrive at the crossing of Hadrian’s Wall and Dere Street, the ‘Portgate’, the point at which I would gave emerged had I continued along the green lane and risked my life on the dual carriageway, and where probably a monumental arch in the wall stood. Now there’s just a roundabout and a pub, and the black tarred road shooting southwards as straight as an arrow is all that remains of Rome’s glory.
The Vallum becomes more obvious as the path continues uphill, through a forestry plantation and past the likewise more pronounced outline of Milecastle 24. After this the path crosses the road, and another feature of the frontier system appears unmistakably. As if the Vallum and the Wall weren’t already enough, a ten-foot-deep, V-shaped ditch was dug immediately to the north of the Wall along most of its length, only disappearing where an escarpment renders it superfluous or solid rock makes it too difficult.
The path continues alongside the Ditch for the next few miles and gradually the terrain becomes more rugged. I pass the site of another battle, ‘Heavenfield’, this time between rival Anglian and Welsh kings in the seventh century. The Wall at that time must have loomed large over the armies and probably constrained their strategies too.
The path now drops again towards the Tyne Valley. Over the road is the first visible stretch of the Wall since Heddon. Here, the massive foundation stones are the full ten feet wide, but the wall itself is a couple of feet narrower. The Romans planned big, but were quick to scale back their enterprises when they realized they had overstretched themselves. Here at Planetrees, for the first time, the Vallum, Wall and Ditch are all visible together, and the magnitude of the monument in total suggests there was no shame in this ‘scaling back’.
The path continues through woodland and then turns left down a lane towards the concretely named village of ‘Wall’ and my lodgings for the night, naturally enough ‘The Hadrian Hotel’. Back in March, when I came to see the Wall illuminated by torches at dusk, I sat by a roaring fire at this old inn to eat my rabbit stew and drink my ‘Centurion Ale’, but God only knows what I’ll get for my cena tonight; dusty wayfarers must ever roll the dice. I just hope it’s not lamb.
Berkhamsted, 20th December, 2010
Dies qvartvs: Cilvrnvm to Vindolanda
Across the River Tyne, along the Roman military road and Hadrian’s Wall, and via the temples and forts at Brocolitia and Vercovicivm, being the sixteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
Exhausted from yesterday’s long walk, I sleep well, and at ientacvlvm manage to procure some hot sauce for my eggs — a rare treat. A party of four Midlanders are walking the National Trail like me. They talk about every conceivable thing connected with their walk except the very thing that defines it: the Wall itself. History as a conversation topic is almost as taboo in England as religion and politics. It is too ‘high-brow’.
Landowners determine the fate of ancient monuments more than the solidity of their foundations. Hutton complained in 1801 that his walk along this stretch was ‘miserably soured’ by the recent destruction wrought on the monument by the local landowner, Henry Tulip Esquire, in order to ‘build a farmhouse’. Still, it must be admitted that at least some of the Wall survives here, while nothing remains where it fell victim to General Wade and his road. The State and its army, I suppose, is the biggest landowner of all.
Just north of the village, at Brunton, another stretch of the Wall is to be found, longer and taller than where I left it last night, about half a mile away at Planetrees. Here too is one of the best-preserved turrets, standing up to eleven courses high and with the deep grooves left by the door mechanism still visible at the entrance.
From here the fort of Cilvrnvm is only a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the river, but the official route takes a big detour to the north. Unaware of the path by the river when I came here in March, I stole across the fields to visit the ruins of the Roman bridge, and found two decomposing crows hanging on a particularly vicious barbed wire fence I tore myself to shreds trying to get over. A macabre scarecrow, perhaps? The landowner’s attempt to put the fear of God into antiquarian trespassers? Whatever the intention of this disturbing message, this time I decide on the extra mile to avoid confrontations with potentially unhinged gentlemen farmers.
Anyway, half a mile to the modern bridge and then another half back down the river path brings me to a short stretch of the Wall and the massive v-shaped abutment of the first of the Wall’s three major river crossings. Also surviving are the deep foundations of the bridge’s easternmost tower. There is supposed to be a carving of a phallus here, a symbolic defense against the ‘evil eye’, but I’m unable to find it. Back in March, the abutment was almost submerged, but though the level has since fallen, there are still waterlogged parts. Poor old Hutton, being ‘obliged to wade’, didn’t get to see it either. Cilvrnvm’s bath house, one of the best preserved in Britain, rises up immediately on the other side of the river, an impressive sight. Visiting this particular relic feels like a ‘discovery’, being somewhat out of the way and less-than-obviously signposted, and this is just as well, as the frustration of the long detour (with Cilvrnvm looming tormentingly only a stone’s throw from here) would have been a bad start to the day. It is very spoilt of me, I know, but my Christmas list includes a fully reconstructed and functional Roman bridge across the Tyne, but if pressed I would accept a cheaper suspension bridge like the one at Willowford.
Retracing my steps and passing through the small village of Chollerford, I eventually reach Cilvrnvm (in English, the oddly generic ‘Chesters’, meaning ‘Roman fort’, as though the progenitor of all chesters) and all is well again. Though low-lying and subtle, as usual, the ruins here whisper stories about their ancient inhabitants. Barrack blocks, complete with colonnaded verandas, Commanding Officer’s residence with private bath house and hypocaust (under-floor heating system), regimental strong room and perimeter wall (also showing where Hadrian’s Wall joined the fort) are all crystal clear and irrefutable. But the jewel of Cilurnum is the common bath house by the river. In parts the walls stand over my head, and in the whole province of Britannia the functions of the various treatment rooms are nowhere more obvious than here. You can still put your birrvs britannicvs (a native hooded cloak) in one of the arched alcoves in the changing room and sit on the bench to sweat in the calidarivm (hot room). Freezing, naked in the frigidarivm (cold room) requires almost no imagination at all, and neither does relieving yourself into the deep latrine channels. There is no one about, so I yield to the temptation to sit and rest in the calidarivm, fully clothed, of course, and the sun manages a little of what the hypocaust did a couple of thousand years ago.
Yet again, the small museum is stuffed with the treasures from this and the surrounding forts. Found here, life-size but headless Juno Dolichena, queen of the gods of both East and West, stands on a cow, and from Coventina’s shrine at Brocolitia, three water nymphs drink from their horns. This museum was dedicated to the great John Clayton, born in 2545 (1792) and former owner of this estate. Though a lawyer by trade, he took it upon himself to save Hadrian’s Wall from destruction by local landowners by buying up as much of it as he could manage, relocating the farmers and instigating an extensive programme of excavation and restoration. Without Clayton, Hadrian’s Wall might only exist today in history books, and so my respect and admiration for the man is boundless.
Leaving a site like this is always difficult, so I dawdle a little with coffee and cake before steeling myself for the stiff march up the other side of the Tyne Valley and through the village of Walwick. The path takes another wide detour north, so I risk a shortcut, first along the road and then through meadows, and soon arrive back at what seems to be the Ditch. A little behind and running straight and parallel with the Ditch is a flat grassy ramp. Is this a remnant of the Wall, or a length of Wade’s road that escaped asphalt? The Ordnance Survey map gives no indication.
The path continues beside the Ditch, rising steadily before passing through a small wood. A fine view greets me on the other side: at Black Carts the Wall climbs the hill ahead, dead straight and heading west, the tallest and longest manifestation yet. I must first head downhill, past the clear outline of Milecastle 29, then up again in the shadow of the Wall and another well-preserved turret, eyed by suspicious cows chewing the cud in the Ditch. After half a mile the monument peters out to become a grass-covered mound of rubble at the top of the hill. The view over the rugged moors and towards the Cheviot Hills is beautiful, so I take my prandivm here: the last of my sandwiches and a bottle of good cervisia from the gift shop at Chesters. This is a fine spot to contemplate, being the most northerly point of the Wall, and by extension of the Roman Empire, for most of its life. Forwards, the black massif of the Cheviots, the wild land of the Selgovae and Votadini tribes, must have seemed bleak and uninviting to the soldiers stationed on the Wall. A backward glance is already friendlier, and must have grown only more so as their thoughts fled the barbarians, continuing eastwards for thousands of miles and not stopping until the perfumed gardens of the Levant.
A little further on, the line of the Wall turns fractionally southwards (and will continue so until Lvgvvalivm) and the Ditch breaks up into a confusion of massive boulders. This is ‘Limestone Corner’, one of the stretches where supplementary fortifications were abandoned and suggesting that the Wall was more a showpiece than a truly defensive structure. The path continues gently downhill for the next half a mile until Carraw. Here the ramparts and general outline of Brocolitia, the Wall’s fifth fort, are more clearly discernable than Vindobala or Onnvm, but no actual buildings are visible. The interest in this site lies in the tiny religious complex a little to the west. No less than three temples have been discovered here: of the Nymphaeum, only a few scattered blocks of masonry remain, but the walls of the Mithraeum survive waist-high. Wooden posts, altar stones and statuary were discovered here in 2709 (1936), submerged in the bog, and subsequently replaced with replicas (I saw the originals in the Hancock Museum on my first day). Remains of wood and wicker-work from the seating had been preserved in the anaerobic peat, and walking down the central aisle towards the altar, even today one has the feeling of being in a small, intimate chapel. Mithraea were dark places, apparently, symbolizing the central allegory of the cave in which Mithras slaughtered the ‘primordial bull’ in order to give life to the world. The sniffy early Christians objected to such sacrificial rites and perhaps resented the competition it offered their own ‘supreme sacrifice’ myth. It is known that Christians destroyed Mithraea in the fourth century, and perhaps this one fell victim to the zealots too.
I still have enough wine in a plastic bottle to make a few more small libations, and I hope Mithras won’t be offended by this rather meager offering, but these days, like Antenociticus, he should probably be glad of what he can get. I think of the altar carving I saw in Newcastle while I pour, with Mithras looking fine in his Phrygian cap — bravely killing the bull while being attacked by a scorpion and a wild dog. A replica of one of the god’s helpers found here, either Cautes or Cautopates, I forget which, stands in the aisle beside me, watching over the ceremony. Strange indeed to imagine this dark, trippy Eastern mystery cult being nurtured here in wildest Northumbria seventeen centuries ago! No doubt the nearby springs had been sacred to the native Britons long before the Romans arrived and influenced the choice for the site. One is always tempted to ascribe a nebulous other-worldliness to such places and to throw words like ‘ley lines’ around to explain it. The scientist in me scoffs at such nonsense, but the fact remains that when I first came here three years ago, I sat down to rest, stretched myself out on the grass in front of the temple and immediately fell into a deep, dreamless sleep from which I woke remarkably refreshed half an hour later. Was it the healing life-force of the bull’s blood that replenished me? Or the half-bottle of strong Spanish wine I’d had with my prandivm?
The Temple of Coventina, the probably native goddess of springs and wells, is now just a bog, but a drop of my ‘holy wine’ remains, so I pour a last libation into the peaty water. John Clayton excavated this site in 2629 (1876) and the carvings of the goddesses recovered are in the museum at Cilvrnvm I visited this morning.
I continue westwards, feeling invigorated and holy, and this is just as well, because the terrain feels more rugged with every step and I know that the rest of the day’s walk is an ever more exhilarating roller-coaster of escarpments that even today make you tremble with awe and muscle failure at the might of the Roman juggernaut.
The path continues for the next two miles beside the Ditch, past the best preserved remains of a milecastle yet seen (number 33, more later) and a similarly well-preserved Turret 33b before climbing the hill towards Sewingshields. I pass through a wood, with crags falling away to my right, and on the other side the Wall appears again, still climbing the hill and following the escarpment’s every exhausting contour. The views over Broomlee Lough and the Northumbrian moors are magnificent. A trig point at the top of the hill marks just over a thousand feet above sea level — not quite the highest point of the Wall, but perhaps the most beautiful. All but the strongest of frames will be flagging at this point, mine being no exception, and so I gather resources and exhort myself to forget the frailty of the body and enjoy these moments, for Hadrian’s Wall, indeed life itself, is rarely better than this.
The Wall peters out at the top, to be replaced by a rather disappointing dry-stone dyke, even if it is ‘recycled’ from the monument’s masonry. However, as long as the body isn’t suffering too terribly, the ups and downs of the path, each one presenting a new and surprising vista, are still a delight; especially knowing as I do what is at the end of this stretch. After a punishing mile, the Wall appears again on the other side of a wood, neatly and evenly restored to give a hint of what it looked like when new. Towering before me is the fort of Vercovicivm (‘Housesteads’ in English), the eighth and finest on the Frontier Road. There is a Roman well in the vicinity, apparently, but I lack the time to divine it today. At the bottom of the hill, at Knag Burn, a gap in the Wall witnesses an unusual ‘civilian gateway’, added, it seems, to ease the pressure of traffic through the fort. This was the immigration and customs control of the ancient world, and though no separate ‘nothing to declare’ gate was needed when entering the Roman Empire with a herd of cows, the principle is the same.
It’s a quarter to six by the time I’ve circumambulated the fort and arrived at the museum, and I’m worried that it’s already closed. Fortunately it isn’t, and the friendly attendant tells me I can stay on the site as long as I like, as long as I close the gate after me. This warms my heart after the frosty reception I received at Segedunum. Though tiny again, the museum has a lot on display, such as the carving of three men in birri britannici. When William Stukeley, antiquarian and friend of Isaac Newton, came here in 2478 (1725), the landscape was literally littered with altar stones and statuary. Who knows how much of Hadrian’s Wall’s stonework and artwork is still buried, lost to private collections or hidden in the walls of farmhouses?
Surviving in the fort are the waist-high remains of the praetorivm (headquarters), hospital, barracks, granaries (the best, alongside Coria’s) and latrines (the best along the Wall). Perched on the hillside, there is also a fine view to the East of the soaring and plunging escarpment I have just travelled. The perimeter wall, though not as high as it once was, is unbroken, and so the impression of actually being in a Roman fortress is nowhere stronger along the frontier. Adjoining the fort to the south are the partially excavated remains of the vicvs, or civilian settlement. It’s not hard to imagine what the thousand or more Tungrians (a Germanic or Gaulish tribe) stationed here would have needed to help them forget they were perched on the edge of the world, and it’s not surprising how quickly the Britons gathered around the fort to meet those needs. Hadrian disapproved of the vices rife in the civilian settlements, but he was wise enough not to prohibit them. Soldiers weren’t allowed to marry officially until the third century, but a blind eye was turned to unofficial marriages in the vici. When Septimivs Severvs lifted the ban, families of soldiers began to move into the forts themselves. The Roman Army was going native, but the vicvs and its vices continued to boom. In the foundations of one building, since nicknamed ‘the murder house’, two skeletons were found apparently concealed under a newly laid floor.
Hadrian’s Wall, here doubling as the fort’s northern wall, now continues through another wood, and when it emerges, a curious sight greets me: a tiny fort, like Vercovicivm’s baby brother, annexes the Wall. This is one of the ‘milecastles’ (number 37) that I’ve been mentioning intermittently. Playing card shaped, they typically contained two small barracks with a road running between them, a staircase up to the wall walk and two entrances. Here the north entrance still has part of its arch, but intriguingly falls away over the cliff into empty space — a gateway to nowhere. Scholars still argue about the purpose of the milecastles, but most agree that they were the walls original ‘forts’ and ‘checkpoints’, and that their importance probably diminished after the building of the larger forts.
The Wall is bigger and bolder now, winding along the ridge and dipping fearlessly into every gulley. There is another long, gradual ascent, again reaching about a thousand feet above sea level. The Wall peters out at the top, then drops steeply, but the views over Crag Lough and the wooded cliffs behind it are breathtaking. At the bottom the path continues up again and along the wooded cliffs I saw from the top of Hotbank Crags, but I’m saving this part of the walk until tomorrow. Instead I continue along the military road that runs just behind the Wall, built some decades after it. The flagstones and kerb have all been worn away or stolen, of course, but what the Romans built, they built to last. Nearly two thousand years later, the solidity of the foundations makes this road a delight to walk on as it winds over the difficult, rocky moorland just below the ridge. After a mile or so, at Peel Crags, the green road drops to a black one. I continue downhill in the peculiar pre-dusk light until I meet the Vallum, which has wisely refused to climb the ridge since I last saw it at Sewingshields.
My lodgings are at the youth hostel, where, for a small bribe, I manage to procure a private room. I take cena at the adjacent ‘Twice Brewed Inn’. Neither wishing to sully my newly purified body after the visit to the temple complex at Brocolitia, nor to offend Mithras by consuming the sacred bull merely for carnal pleasure, I disdain the beef, and indeed the flesh of any hornèd beast, and order instead the humble cod, encrusted with bitter herbs.
Berkhamsted, 22nd January, 2011
Dies qvintvs: Vindolanda to Banna
Via the Stanegate and the forts at Aesica and Magnis, and along Hadrian’s Wall, being the fifteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
I wake in a state of nervous excitement. In some respects today’s walk will be the high-point of Hadrian’s Wall; from the pivotal frontier township of Vindolanda, whose corpus of mundane documents revolutionised our view of everyday life in the Roman Empire, to the dizzy heights of Winshields and the best preserved stretch of the Wall at Walltown Crags, this unlikely no-man’s-land has yielded inestimable knowledge of the Roman world. Another unexpected development was the sudden announcement, received by radio telegram on my portable telephone yesterday, that I would be joined after all by the elusive Miss T. We have arranged to meet this afternoon at the Roman Army Museum at Magnis.
After a leisurely ientacvlvm, I leave the hostel and head south until I reach the ‘Stanegate’, the Roman road from Coria to Lvgvvalivm. I turn eastwards along it and shortly arrive at the stump of a Roman milestone, one of only a few in Britain surviving in situ. The arrow-straight road, though unfortunately tarred, is a pleasure to walk on in the cool morning sunshine. The ridge surges up to the north like an enormous wave that never breaks, the Wall snaking along its crest. After about a mile I arrive at one of the forts that defended the original, pre-Hadrianic frontier — Vindolanda, or probably ‘Gwyn Llan’ (‘The White Fortress’) in Old Welsh. At the entrance I notice the timetable for the ‘AD 122’ motorized omnibus by which Miss T will come later. Walkers’ intuition (or is it something else?) tells me our paths will cross sooner than I originally anticipated, and so I send her a radio telegram with instructions to get off at the ‘Milecastle Inn’ at Cawfields instead.
Already in the modern reception building this site transports you to the past: a Roman-style courtyard with fountains and statues tempts you to linger, but the knowledge of how much there is to see and contemplate forces me to resist. A small temple to an unknown god lies on the left as you approach the fort, and a little further are the remains of the vicvs, the best preserved in Britain and more in evidence than the internal buildings of the fort themselves. There are two bath houses: the later and more substantial lies in the midst of the civilian settlement; the earlier lies to the south, but was already demolished in Roman times. One of Vindolanda’s many delights is the road leading through the vicvs up to the West Gate, which still has its original flagstones. Beautiful statuary is often replicated so perfectly, as at Brocolitia, that you can’t always tell whether you’re looking at the original or a copy; a dilapidated old road, on the other hand, gives you the irrefutable sensation of following ancient footsteps. Stand on those broken flagstones and the houses of Vindolanda’s civilian settlement and its perimeter wall grow almost palpably around you. An archaeological dig on the internal buildings of the fort is underway as I pass through.
Much of the perimeter wall on the eastern side stands tall and thick, well over head height, and features the remains of semicircular civilian houses built against the wall. Further on, the path descends to a garden in a dell ornamented with statues and a beautiful reconstruction of a temple. The museum is also here, brimming with artifacts from this important site. Apart from samples of the Vindolanda tablets and an excellent display about their restoration and interpretation, there is also a collection of sandals and other leatherware, miraculously preserved in the anaerobic peat.
The nearly five hundred tablets that make up the remarkable ‘Vindolanda Corpus’, thin pieces of local birch wood with writing in ink, were first unearthed from a rubbish heap in 2726 (1973). The oldest known written documents in Britain, they cover everything from military records to birthday party invitations to the complaints of a merchant to the governor of Britain that, though innocent and of good reputation, he had been beaten by soldiers with rods until he bled — a warning to us all to be careful of doing business with men who carry weapons for a living.
‘xv K(alendas) Ivnias n(vmervs) p(vrvs) [co]h(ortis) i Tvngrorvm cvi prae<e>st Ivlivs Verecvndvs praef(ectvs) dcclii in is (centvriones) vi ex eis absentes singvlares leg(ati) xlvi officio Ferocis Coris cccxxxvii in is (centvriones) ii Londinio (centvrio) [i] vas…ad…apadvn… vi in is (centvrio) i ac… allia viiii in is (centvrio) i…c…ipendiatvm xi in.a i xxxxv svmma absentes cccclvi in is (centvriones) v reliqui praesentes cclxxxxvi in is (centvrio) i ex eis aegri xv volnerati vi lippientes [x] summa eor[vm] xxxi reliqvi valent[es cc]lxv in [is (centvrio) i]’
‘The fifteenth day before the Calends of June [today!]. Net number of the first Cohort of Tungrians, of which the commander is Ivlivs Verecvndvs, the Prefect, 752 (including 6 centurions), of whom are absent: 46 guards of the governor, 337 at the office of Ferox in Coria (including 2 centurions), 1 centurion in London… Total absentees, 456 (including 5 centurions). Remainder present, 296 (including 1 centurion). From these: 15 sick, 6 wounded, 10 suffering from inflammation of the eyes. Total of these: 31. Remainder fit for active service: 265 (including 1 centurion).’
‘Cl(avdia) Severa Lepidinae svae [sa]l[v]tem iii Idvs Septembr[e]s soror ad diem sollemnem natalem mevm rogo libenter facias vt venias ad nos ivcvndiorem mihi ii [diem] interventv tvo factvra si …s vacat Cerial[em t]vvm salvta Aelivs mevs et filiolvs salvtant vacat sperabo te soror vale soror anima mea ita valeam karissima et have Svlpiciae Lepidinae Cerialis a S[e]vera’
‘From Claudia Severa, greetings to her Lepidina. On the third day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present. Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelivs and my little son send him their greetings. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. To Svlpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa.’
‘… eo magis me cad … em mercem r… vel effvnder …r… mine probo tvam maies[t]atem imploro ne patiaris me [i]nnocentem virgis cas[t]igatvm esse et domine prov… prae[fe]cto non potvi qveri qvia va[let]vdini detinebatvr ques[tv]s svm beneficiario ii centvrionibvs nvmeri eivs [tv]am misericord[ia]m imploro ne patiaris me hominem trasmarinvm et innocentem de cvivs fide inqviras virgis crvent[at]vm esse ac si aliqvid sceler[i]s commississem vacat’
‘… he beat me all the more … goods … or pour them down the drain. As befits an honest man, I implore your majesty not to allow me, an innocent man, to have been beaten with rods and, my lord, inasmuch as I was unable to complain to the prefect, because he was detained by ill-health. I have complained in vain to the beneficiarivs and the rest of the centurions of his unit. Accordingly, I implore your mercifulness not to allow me, a man from overseas and an innocent one, about whose good faith you may inquire, to have been bloodied by rods as if I had committed some crime.’
Time is pressing by midday, and on my way out I see the great man himself, the very one who deciphered the tablets, Robin Birley, taking his lunch in the garden. I’m too much in awe to approach him with the usual ‘I’ve got all your records’ speech and must be content with paying my respects at a distance.
Leaving the site on the eastern end and crossing the Stanegate I stumble across the second of the milestones, exactly one Roman mile on and much taller than the one I encountered earlier. From here the path climbs through pasture until I meet the modern Military Road again where it intersects the Vallum. The path climbs further to meet the course of the Wall along a pretty wooded escarpment high above Crag Lough. At the end of the lake the Wall reappears and falls steeply to ‘Sycamore Gap’, where the eponymous tree stands picturesquely at the foot of a gap in the structure. The path climbs again and at the top the well preserved Milecastle 39, ‘Castle Nick’ nestles comfortably in a dip, or ‘nick’ in the ridge. The roller coaster continues above Peel Crags, followed by another impossibly steep drop to which the Wall still tenaciously clings after nearly two millennia. At the bottom the Wall peters out again, but the Ditch is strongly in evidence as the long climb towards Windshields crags begins. The sun burns unimpeded on the wilds of Caledonia to the north as I climb past Milecastle 40. When I reach the trig point at over eleven hundred feet, the highest point of the Wall, I am, as always, awed by the thought of a twenty-foot-high, nine-foot-thick stone wall labouring up and over this wind-blasted peak — another fine spot for contemplation of this furthest reach of an ancient civilization. Or was it? For a short time there was another wall with paved roads and bath houses a hundred miles further north, and though Antoninus’s memorial isn’t as dramatic as Hadrian’s, I set a mental course for another fine walk along it in the future.
From here to the Irish Sea the road is ever downwards, though never easy. The roller-coaster continues and the Wall is in increasingly good condition. Several turrets are visible for the next two miles as it continues to snake over the gradually descending crests and troughs of the ridge, often at impossible gradients. Milecastle 42 is well preserved, with the massive masonry of its gates still visible. Sitting awkwardly on a steep slope, it is often cited as an example of inflexibly bureaucratic Roman thinking: milecastles were to be exactly one Roman mile apart, regardless of how inconvenient the situation or how close a better site.
From here I turn south, passing the outlines of a few temporary Roman camps that possibly accommodated soldiers while building the Wall, on my way to meet Miss T at the Milecastle Inn. Perfectly synchronized, I see her getting off the bus a few hundred yards short, clothed in the finest walking garb and looking more at home in the Alps than in Northumbria. We embrace at the crossroads and celebrate our reunion over cold cervisia at the inn, refreshing ourselves for the long hot march ahead.
We retrace my steps back to Milecastle 42, and after climbing a steep slope, the Wall suddenly disappears over a cliff, the result of quarrying. The road continues around the quarry lake and through pastures uphill to Great Chesters. Here a farm straddles the north wall of the fort of Aesica. This site has been little excavated, but in the south-east corner stand the walls of a small shrine featuring an original altar stone, complete with typical relief of a libation jug, the only one still in situ along the frontier, if not in Britain, though the only supplicants these days, apart from ourselves, are a couple of chickens. As we approach the shrine, Miss T is babbling about something or other of little import, and so, with mock pomposity, I interrupt her, saying “Silence, mortal, for you are in a temple!” Her subsequent silence suggests annoyance rather than obedience, but I smile at her and am forgiven.
We stop to rest and eat inside one of the ‘offices’ by the western wall of the fort. This spot is indescribably beautiful. Moss and grass grow on the ancient walls that surround us but for one, leaving the view open onto the merged fort and farm, where sheep and horses and chickens graze and peck contentedly in the pleasant spring breeze. I feel a sudden need to stop time: the last year with Miss T has been a journey of great joy and latterly of great pain, but everything is perfect now. In the shade of the eighteen-centuries-old lichen-covered walls, she smiles sweetly while I commit this moment to the dusty electronic archives of our lives…
I am suddenly struck by an odd sense of déjà vu, or to be more exact, déjà rêvé, as the French wouldn’t say. Three months ago, just before moving house, I was woken in the night by an intensely lucid dream, so vivid, in fact, that had it not been happy, I would have called it one of the ‘night terrors’ that have plagued me all my life. In the dream I am walking with Miss T through the ruins of an ancient, yet modern city, still inhabited and lively, in which the ruins merge seamlessly and beautifully with the landscape. We are both very happy, but then, suddenly and unexpectedly, Miss T disappears without trace. Distraught, I spend the next dream-time, which could be hours or weeks or years, anxiously looking for her. Just at the point of giving her up for dead, grief-stricken, she suddenly reappears, holding a box, which she hands to me, smiling and happy — by way of an apologetic gift, perhaps. As I take the box, I am angry at her happiness. How can she be so careless of the grief and worry she has caused me during her disappearance? I open it to find a baby, smiling like her. This explains both Miss T’s absence and her joy, but I am still angry, because it is now clear that she has tricked me into giving her this baby, which I never asked for and never wanted. But now the strangest thing happens, though of course it is natural enough in the logic of the dream: the baby looks straight at me, and in an adult voice, actually in my own voice, says, “Hello, Guy!” Now I forgive her for her trickery and we are all happy again. I woke from the dream with a violent start and a pounding heart.
Looking around us at the ancient Roman walls, which have ‘merged’ with the landscape, at the working farm and the animals which keep this little ruined city alive, and sensing our great happiness at being here, I am suddenly struck by the prophetic nature of the dream and wonder with a peculiar mixture of excitement and dread (isn’t it always the way?) how much more of it will come true.
We proceed from Aesica through a wood and up Cockmount Hill. The Wall is mostly grass-covered rubble here, though Turret 44A stands tall, overgrown with weeds and perched dramatically on the corner of a cliff. The Wall appears sporadically along these rugged heights, once again disappearing over an eroded cliff, but is nowhere grander than at Walltown Crags where the road winds between it and rocky outcrops, forming a natural walkway. Hutton notes that two Roman altar stones were used for washing dishes outside nearby Walltown Farm and that, back in the twenty-third (sixteenth) century, Camden was afraid to approach this area for fear of bandits. We stop here for a belated birthday supper Miss T has prepared: a tantalizing Roman picnic of nuts and dates, a cake made with honey and anchovy paste (to approximate garvm, the Roman fermented fish condiment) and boiled quails’ eggs with a dip of mixed spices and more garvm. She also gives me a fine birthday gift of an original twenty-sixth century print of an etching of a scene in Spitsbergen. I thank her with a tender kiss and the old Wall casts long, ominous shadows in the chilly evening sun.
Soon after we get going, the Wall disappears again over another cliff and into another lake created by quarrying. At one point the whole of this stretch was in danger of destruction, but was saved just in the nick of time, as awareness of the value of ancient monuments was growing. On the other side of the lake is the fort of Magnis (Carvoran in good Welsh), though now only a barely discernable raised platform in the fields behind the Roman Army Museum. Here on display are military artifacts and a fine film of the ‘virtually’ reconstructed Wall, but it is after seven and already closed when we pass. We continue downhill for half a mile beside the clearly defined Ditch, towards the village of Greenhead and the melancholy Poe-esque ruins of Thirlwall Castle, built with instantly recognizable cubic masonry stolen from the Wall.
From here to Gilsland are two miles of pasture, paddocks and people’s back gardens, occasionally flirting with the Vallum and Ditch, but sadly, the Wall, nowhere else more magnificent and dramatic than on this stretch, has disappeared anticlimactically for today, and, in a way, for good. Likewise, our inn in Gilsland, a mile short of Banna, is pleasant enough, but the fish the landlady is good enough to supply us with so late in the day is disappointingly bland after Miss T’s lovingly reconstructed portable birthday cena.
Berkhamsted, 6th October, 2011 and Deptford, 7th December, 2014
Dies sextvs: Banna to Lvgvvalivm
Across the River Irthing, via the fort at Camboglanna and along Hadrian’s Wall, being the fourteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
After oiling up with Miss T’s patent muscle elixir, a short walk from the inn takes us to Poltross Burn and Milecastle 48 with its well preserved stairway to a hypothetical upper floor and walkway. The Newcastle to Carlisle railway slices through the north-west corner of the structure, and the Wall, a few courses high, continues on the other side of the embankment and uphill though someone’s back garden. The house itself has gone to rack and ruin; a local giving me a lift into Gilsland back in March told me he had once seen a goat poking its head out of one of the windows. The road into Gilsland interrupts the Wall, but it continues, loftier than before, with the remains of Turret 48a on the other side. We pass through Willowford Farm, where a barn wall features a Latin inscription by the builders, and the Ditch bottom serves as a farm track. From here the Wall drops steeply towards the River Irthing and the still substantial masonry of the Roman bridge. The river is now some distance from the abutment, having changed its course over the last eighteen centuries. A modern bridge affords a crossing a little downstream and the road climbs the steep opposite bank, up which, back in 2554, poor old Hutton had to haul himself on his hands and knees. Milecastle 49 stands immediately at the summit with fine views down to the valley of the Irthing. The Wall continues for the next quarter of a mile over head height and featuring another carving of a phallus, though after a feverish hunt for the slippery member, we are unable to locate it. No doubt because of the olive oil, quips Miss T.
The fort at Banna (Birdoswald) at the end of this stretch offers yet another collection of different perspectives on Hadrian’s Wall. The perimeter wall is high and well preserved, especially the gateways, but the internal buildings have all but gone. On the other hand there is evidence of long post-Roman occupation here. The museum is small, but fascinating, including the touching tombstone of a Roman child. Miss T suggests a possible plot line for the play: perhaps the wife of the fort commander was reluctant to move to this far-flung outpost of empire, and perhaps she blames the death of their baby on the bad climate and the distance from good doctors (the fort doctor would, after all, probably have specialized in the military injuries of grown men). As she is thus speculating, we hear chicks chirping loudly, and in our twenty-first century minds, we assume this is part of the museum’s audio-visual display, but after some investigation, it turns out that the “baby birds of Birdoswald” are in fact real ones living in the rafters.
After a stroll around the perimeter wall, with the massive masonry of its relatively well preserved eastern gate, we stop for a picnic of root vegetable crisps and an expensive bottle of elderflower wine bought from the English Heritage shop. Black clouds have gathered and it starts to rain. Either air pressure or wine procures me a blinding headache, and we continue in rain and pain through pasture land, through which the wall runs for a short while before petering out. The Vallum is still in evidence to our left, but it is confused for the next mile with the remains of an earlier, temporary ‘turf wall’ and its associated ditch. The road then turns into woodland, deeper into which we turn in an attempt to find the Roman quarry, complete with original Latin graffiti, from which stone was probably hewn for the building of the wall. We eventually find it, high above the river, and the area is so quiet and secluded that before long we are engaging in a furtive fuck against the rock face.
Something is wrong. Such al fresco cavorting is normally a delight, but Miss T’s lips and ample buttocks, usually so warm and yielding, are cold and tense, and I cannot come, thrust furiously as I might. Miss T gives forth some shrieks of pleasure, muffled, of course, for fear of attracting unwanted (or quite possibly wanted) attention, yet I can’t help but feel she is acting. Our lovemaking was hampered from the beginning by such irritations on my part: acting is for the scaena, not for the cvbicvlvm.
Back out of the woods we continue along a path by the road that marks the course of the absent wall, though two turrets in good condition are still in place. It was cold and windy on my last visit, and so I crouched inside the westernmost one (number 51B) to shelter from the wind, warm myself with hot tea from my miraculous ‘vacuum flask’ and watch the so-called ‘automobiles’ flash by at a celerity too great for the human eye to take in.
A little further on, at Bankshead, there is a good stretch of wall and a unique survivor along the Frontier Road, namely a ‘signal station’, which seems to have predated the Wall, which was then built to incorporate it, joining it an odd angle. The station, a square tower, in appearance much like the turrets, has a commanding view over the surrounding countryside and is believed to have formed part of a communication chain along the whole frontier. This was how it was done for thousands of years: traveling speed was limited to that of the fastest laden animal and communication to the visible and audible. For millennia, until the electrical telegraph made it instantaneous in 1837 (sorry, 2590), fire and smoke were the best and fastest way to transmit long distance messages, and here in Cumbria is a fine relic of that vital ancient technology.
Miss T is overcome by fatigue and decides to catch the AD 122 omnibus on to Lvgvvalivm. We agree to meet later at the hotel and sup together, but in the meantime I have important business to attend to and so must press on westwards.
Half a mile further, on my last trip, I turned southwards to visit Lanercost Priory, but, being in March, the ruins were closed for the winter and I was forced to sneak into the grounds like a thief. This, however, allowed me to enjoy in perfect peace the beautiful Gothic temple to a god the Romans themselves had introduced to the Britons, built with the inevitable stones stolen from you-know-where. This is indeed a holy place, and there is evidence to suggest that Saint Patrick himself, the British Roman citizen captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Ireland, where he later converted the people to Christianity, was born in this area, possibly in the vicvs of Banna. Unfortunately, it is after five, and time will not allow a second visit today. Instead I continue to Hare Hill, where, in a sense, the tallest section of the wall survives to a height of nearly nine feet. In fact, it was substantially restored in the twenty-sixth (nineteenth) century, but let’s not split hairs over superlatives: this short stretch of towering wall gives a very good impression of the original monument, so it’s authentic enough for me. There is supposed to be an inscription here that reads ‘PP’, for primvs pilvs, the chief centurion of a legion, reminding us again that it was the Roman army who were the builders of this wall and who wanted to be remembered as such, but as usual I lack the time to hunt for it.
I quicken my pace now, not wishing to be caught up by nightfall. I am slightly irked by today’s slow pace, but must acknowledge the cost of trading distance for the delightful companionship Miss T has afforded me. For the next couple of miles the path continues westwards and ever downwards through meadows, interrupted by a brief detour south through Howgill Farm, where I see a Latin inscription on a stone above a barn door, watched in turn by the obliging but somewhat irritable farmer, doubtlessly tired of amateur antiquarians traipsing across his land. The wall is occasionally visible as a grassy bank, with rubble exposed now and then, but is clearly dying a slow death, and just after Dovecote Bridge, I bid it my final farewell at its graveside. The Wall in this area was built of soft Cumbrian sandstone, which has all but eroded away with the centuries, but here lies symbolically buried to protect it from the elements.
I march onwards in the dying light, through the village of Walton (meaning, not surprisingly, ‘wall town’ − the monument surviving, as so often elsewhere, only in the name) and up to Newtown, where I am forced to give up and summon a Hackney carriage by portable telephone. I lack the time to search for traces of the fort of Camboglanna, lying a little to the south. I should have liked to continue through the now flat, lush farmland, through Bleatarn Farm, where the last vestiges of the Vallum live on as a barely perceptible undulation in the meadow, and on to the pretty River Eden for the last trot into Lvgvvalivm (or Carlisle in Anglo-Welsh), but it would be too sad and lonely a quest, chasing a vanished wall in the ghostly moonlight.
Deptford, 25th August, 2014
Dies septimvs: Relaxatio in Lvgvvalio
Being the thirteenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
Our lodgings in Lvgvvalivm, unlike most so far, are comfortable and modern, so I am surprised to wake little refreshed after a somewhat fitful sleep. As we stroll through the red Anglo-Scottish town, I struggle to imagine the white Roman city, capital of the province of Valentia, that once stood in its place, at the same time trying to ignore Miss T’s disdainful comments on what she unashamedly sees as a dreary provincial hole. Her haute bourgeoise, Londinivm-centric arrogance can betimes be irksome, and so I hasten us towards the excellent Tullie House Museum, hoping that this will divert her, and, happily, it does. Already in the gardens there are the foundations of a Roman shrine, or perhaps the basin of a fountain, and inside, from the enigmatic bronze face mask to the altar stones and funerary monuments, all well displayed and explained, Lvgvvalivm’s museum adds piece after beautiful piece to the puzzle of life on the frontier complex. Though shockingly irreverent, we can’t help but giggle at the memorials to the Roman citizens our puerile and puellile minds, actually with very little juxtaposition, construe as being dedicated to ‘Ludicrus Spurius’ and ‘Titia Voluptua’.
The museum is so good that I feel like lingering, and Miss T indulges me for a while, though she seems anxious to get going, on what obscure errand I cannot fancy, as her train doesn’t leave until the morrow. It is four o’ clock by the time we make our exit, and I am all for a visit to Lvgvvalivm’s forbidding castle in the hour or so we have left until closing time, but Miss T rightly suggests we ought to take a late prandivm or early cena instead. We find a tea room with a decent looking menu and sit down to eat. Towards the end of the meal she announces suddenly that she has an announcement to make. I feel my stomach drop.
“You remember R., the ‘coffee boy’ in my office?” she says with an oddly inscrutable expression, and I nod by way of affirmation, my vocal cords having suddenly seized up. “He’s offered to take me out, and I’ve accepted.”
It is obvious to anyone but a fool like me what she’s up to, but a word of explanation is necessary at this juncture. Four and half years ago, M and I separated at her instigation (a fait accompli on her part, my opinion being superfluous), and we moved into different flats, but staying within the same town and continuing to work together at the same office. The separation seemed, to a simpleton like me, amicable enough, and I was released from my marital obligations with benedictions from my good mistress to sow my seed whither I would. The lady herself, according to her own testimony and, for all I knew in truth, remained chaste, to what purpose only she and the god of Abraham knew, because her position was, and remained, that our marriage was irrevocably over. Despite the apparent parting of ways, for the next couple of years I was in M’s company on average some fifty or more hours a week, almost as much as before, sharing with her every detail (except the sexual ones) of my private life, as with an old and unquestionably trusted confidante, while she remained mostly taciturn on the subject of hers, restricting her conversation to the purely emotionally neutral — to the aesthetic, philosophical and humorous — and offering only the most banal, superficial commentary on her relationships with friends and family. Go figure, as she herself would say in her adopted idiom.
It was in this peculiar state of affairs that I met Miss T a year ago at the last meeting of the poetry appreciation group I was running at the time in a public house in Londinivm opposite William Blake’s grave. Pretty, witty and full of joie de vivre, yet promising unplumbed depths, she seemed to offer an escape from a bondage I had yet to identify. There was fun and games a-plenty that summer of 2762, all carefully scrutinised by M, it goes without saying, but the fun-loving Miss T, it later transpired, was hiding something from me from the very start. Thirty-eight years old, unmarried and childless, she was suffering a good deal more than most, for reasons I could only dimly glimpse, from that most modern ennui of western women, that causes them, in today’s parlance, to experience the mother of all ‘meltdowns’, in mortal dread of the biological time bomb ticking away inside them. Unbeknown to me at first, naïve dolt that I am, I had been selected for the dangerous job of defusing this bomb. The concealment of her plan to effect this was never very subtle. From discarding the prophylactic sheathes on our first night together to exhortations to ejaculate into her uterus not long after that, she ploughed forward with the single-mindedness of a madwoman in the execution of her grand design. She catered to my every whim (‘tradesman’s entrance’ love excepting), flattered me, cooked sumptuous feasts for me and generally made me feel like the king she assured me I deserved to be. She indulged, or seemed to indulge, my continuing friendship with M and the fact that, by now after over four years, we had still not finalised the divorce.
Of course this couldn’t last. Sooner or later Miss T was going to demand that I fulfill my part of the bargain I had unwittingly entered into. I felt the first breath of the coming storm last September during a drunken tantrum in Patavivm, in which she made it abundantly clear that she wasn’t “going to wait forever”. I resented her threats, but grudgingly acknowledged her right to some sort of commitment on my part, and promised I would make a decision within the fortnight. This I did in due course, coldly announcing that I would not divorce M. She burst into tears and implored me not to ‘break her heart’. I was, in turn, what our American cousins call an ‘imperial asshole’ about it, but I couldn’t help myself: the ‘hard sell’ tactics, the salesman-like hustle to sign quickly or lose the deal, confused and hurt me, and so I reacted defensively. The lady was casting me as a duplicitous husband who had broken his shallow, cowardly promises to both wife and mistress, but I was no such thing; after only four months, I was simply not yet ready to sign.
The next seven months made for a sorry tale of emotional warfare, with each taking turns to be Rome or Carthage, bullying or being bullied in a sado-masochistic courtship battle that in the end, unlike our historical model, could only produce two losers.
Back to the present, to Lvgvvalivm on the twelfth day before the calends of June, in the year 2763, during the third consulship of Silvio Berlusconi, and Miss T suddenly raises the stakes on her latest hand, namely with the handsome Brazilian tea boy. Exhausted from the sixty-mile march over the roller-coaster of the frontier road and from the year-long roller-coaster of our relationship, it is now my turn to throw in my useless hand and burst into tears. Heedless of the embarrassment my unmanly behaviour must surely be causing her, she takes my hand in sympathy, and, glowing inwardly with her triumph, suggests we get a bottle of wine for auld lang syne. Somehow we end up in the castle’s grounds, laughing and joking as always, though my salty tears will not cease. Later at cena, the silly banter and the tears continue unabated. Over the speakers drifts a wistful rendition of a song we both love, and Miss T remarks cryptically that it is ‘apt’, though she neglects to explain who, in the words of the song, is taking what away from whom:
The way you hold your knife,
The way we danced till three,
The way you changed my life,
No, no, they can’t take that away from me…
Back in the hotel room, I bring out the poems I meant to read her last night to celebrate our tour of the Wall: Rudyard Kipling’s Roman Centurion’s Song and the swan song of the Emperor Hadrian himself. Kipling, the old patriotic devil, warbles pleasantly enough, somehow managing to make a poem about Roma and Romans a poem about England and the English, and astoundingly insinuating the latter’s uncontested superiority.
I’ve served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall,
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.
For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze —
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June’s long-lighted days? […]
Legate, I come to you in tears — My cohort ordered home!
I’ve served in Britain forty years. What should I do in Rome?
Here is my heart, my soul, my mind — the only life I know.
I cannot leave it all behind. Command me not to go!
Quite different the philosopher-king Hadrian’s haunting ‘farewell to his soul’, composed on his death bed in 891 (138) and as solid and enduring as his wall. I render it first in my comprehensive school Latin pronunciation (which is to say ‘self-taught’, but thank you anyway, Mrs MacKenzie), and then in a translation I have since lost. I include here Henry Vaughan’s beautiful English rendering from 2405 (1652) as a better substitute.
Animvla, vagvla, blandvla
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nvnc abibis in loca
Pallidvla, rigida, nvdvla,
Nec, vt soles, dabis iocos…My soul, my pleasant soul and witty,
The ghest and consort of my body,
Into what place now all alone
Naked and sad wilt thou be gone?
No mirth, no wit, as heretofore,
Nor jests wilt thou afford me more.
We make love for the last time, slowly and tenderly, and I am still crying when I come. Miss T is silent and solemn, and I am relieved that she has at last stopped acting and reverted to her true self, at least to her true sexual being, because she continues to walk the boards in other ways. After a year of bitter warfare she is all magnanimity and sympathy now for my wretched capitulation, yet fails ultimately to hide how much she is enjoying her revenge for my ‘breaking her heart’. This is as it should be: victoribvs spolia, as the Americans say. To the victor go the spoils.
Deptford, 27th August, 2014
Dies octvs: Lvgvvalivm to Maia
Via the forts at Vxelodvnvm, Aballava and Coggabata and along the western end of Hadrian’s Wall, being the twelfth day before the Calends of June, 2763
I wake early, relieved to find Miss T still beside me, but not for long. Naturally patrician, though the daughter of a humble Welsh dentist, she refrains from vulgar triumphal whooping and ‘fist pumping’ and handles me as though I were made of glass, which in fact I am. She knows she only has to wait patiently for the foul spell she has cast to kick in, and then she will reap her rewards, whatever they might be.
Very soon we are at the railway station, and as I wave farewell to my still sphinx-like companion, a dull ache develops in my chest that, for once, my hypochondriacal mind does not construe as imminent cardiac failure. I have been looking forward to this previously unseen stretch of the vanished wall over the North Cumbrian salt marshes for some time, but now, in these dramatically altered circumstances, I am dreading it.
The first thing I do, after packing up at the hotel, is to go backwards. Down to the river Eden and over it I go, eastwards instead of westwards, upstream instead of downstream, backwards instead of forwards. Am I running back to Aesica, to the dream city where we were happy and all was well with the world? Am I trying to turn back the clock? Somewhere in Rickerby Park I come to my senses. I see a low ridge rising just to the north and I climb it. Here was the fort of Petriana or Vxelodvnvm (possibly ‘High Fort’ in Welsh), and a little further north, the line of the wall itself, as ever occupying the highest ground possible on the east-west line. I turn left and make my way back into town.
Once more in Lvgvvalivm I turn and turn about, lost. I head for the castle, but what will I hope to find there? It is a grim and forbidding structure, built, it is believed, in 1846 (1093) to secure the Conqueror’s son’s conquest of Cumbria from the Scots and was venue for a thousand raids and sieges thereafter. I loved mediaeval castles when I was small: their dark, winding corridors and dank, musty dungeons thrilled my childish, Gothic imagination. But now they seem to me almost too modern, too dreary, too English — symbols of the British ruling class’s eternal entrenchment of power and little more. Not so the crumbling ruins of the Roman world, though of course they also represent the vanity of worldly aspirations, but not only those. However flawed and sometimes hypocritical, the marks the Romans left behind symbolize the vestiges of a dream of civilization, of the way human life and endeavours might be, rather than a cynical, scoffing resignation to what they are.
But I digress. Apparently reluctant to leave Lvgvvalivm, I stumble into the castle anyway, despite my lack of enthusiasm. I peer at the intriguing, ornate carvings, possibly made by prisoners in the Middle Ages and attend a demonstration by an inevitably becostumed man on… I have absolutely no idea what, though I applaud with the rest of the children when it is finished. Suddenly finding myself on legs unused to walking, I stagger and roll somewhat on my way out of the castle, and once out of the city centre and away from prying eyes, I give way yet again to childish tears. I seem to have become an infant who has lost his favourite toy, or indeed his mother.
After a short walk along the banks of the Eden, I find myself staring at a scattering of massive cubes of stone, like a god’s abandoned dice game, wondering what it all means. It takes a while for me to realize that these are the remains of Hadrian’s Wall where it once crossed the Eden. Unlike in Coria, where the stones of the collapsed bridge have been reassembled into some kind of order, these lie meaninglessly strewn, all the more so, paradoxically, for being evenly spaced. The Wall’s last surviving masonry, like my little world, has simply fallen apart and lies in pieces on the ground.
The next three miles along or near the riverside pass me by in a thick inner fog that the blazing sun, though by now at its peak, cannot disperse. A cow with swollen udder stands over her very recently born calf, lying shivering and pitiful beside her. I pass through the tiny villages of Grinsdale, Kirkandrews and Beaumont in a daze, pausing briefly at the latest for another fruitless search for a Roman inscription on an English wall. I can’t summon the strength to hunt for more Roman masonry in the Norman church.
The road now turns westwards, away from the river and very slowly up a small hill. I am on the very foundations of the vanished Wall itself, and, of course, the view soon opens out onto the distant mountains of Scotland, a nation the Wall inadvertently created. From here I descend into the village of Burgh by Sands (pronounced bruff) and the fort of Aballava. Nothing here remains of the fort, Vallum or Wall but the name (Anglo-Saxon burh, meaning ‘fort’ or ‘castle’) and the stones stolen to build the fortified church. In the tenth (third) century Frisians and Moors were stationed here, and one wonders whether, like the stones of the church, their DNA survives in reconstituted form in the villagers. Somehow I gather the strength to enter St. Michael’s Church, in which the head of a Roman god adorns one of the walls. King Edward I of England died nearby in 2060 (1307), not in battle but of dysentery, an ignominious but perhaps karmic end to one who had dedicated his life to the obsessive bullying of Arabs, Welshmen, Scotsmen and Jews, and was ‘laid in state’ here in this little provincial church.
The road continues westwards, just south of the vanished Vallum, and before long I am standing at the edge of the Burgh Marsh, a five-mile-long, half-mile-wide salt marsh, across which spring tides can flood in a matter of minutes. A sign warns me of this, and there are even tide tables posted with all the needful information, but inwardly I am ignoring all this and hoping that the sea engulfs the plain when I am in the middle of it. If I perish, it will put an end to the comfortable misery I have been denying to myself for the last ten years; if I survive, it will shake me out of the death-like torpor that has suddenly gripped me.
As is happens, no such tides deluge me and the next two miles to Drumburgh are merely an exhausting trudge under the pitiless Cumbrian sun, witnessed only by the cud-chewing cattle and the peculiar village of Boustead Hill, perched on a lofty mountain top fifty feet above the plain. That said, the fantasy of the flood has somehow done its work, and my own flood of tears has been miraculously dammed. I arrive in Drumburgh with renewed faith in tomorrow and new strength in my tired muscles, though I will have to wait until said morrow to know the substance of this faith. But it is enough for now.
Drumburgh sits on the site of Coggabata, or Congavata, a smaller fort than Aballava. So-called Drumburgh Castle, built from the stones of the fort, is merely a fortified house, like the church in Burgh, more a place of refuge from bandits than the function its title would suggest. Border country is often thus, it seems: a lawless no-man’s land by virtue of its maximal distance from the relevant seat of power. These are peaceful times, however, and I need not march with my hand on my sword (or even Swiss army knife). Beside and beneath the front door of the castle, elevated for greater security, are a couple of weathered Roman altar stones, the last traces of what Hutton reports Camden as reporting once lay strewn everywhere in these parts.
The road from Drumburgh to Maia or Mais is closer to the line of the Wall, but inconvenient for walking, and so the national trail takes a detour southwards, which I attempt to shorten by taking an alternative path. This goes wrong, however, and I end up having to clamber over a murderous barbed wire fence, pursued by curious young cows. No sooner have I cleared this obstacle than another presents itself: an equally murderous hawthorn bush. Having torn my clothes and tender flesh on that, I then attempt to leap across a muddy ditch laden with my heavy rucksack, but fall short into the mud with much cursing and weeping.
Through farm tracks the road now winds towards the village of Glasson and past the Highland Laddie Inn, like many buildings in this region thus called for its claim to have hosted Prince Charles Stuart during the 2498 (1745) rebellion. A kindly soul sitting outside with his ale in the evening sun calls out to me that I’m “nearly there!”
Soon the road meets the river again, now miles wide and here called the Itvna Aestvarivm, or the Solway Firth. A jaunt down to the water’s edge brings a curious sight: a ruined red sandstone wall, fallen in parts, intact in others, stretching eastwards along the firth and, according to the map, roughly where the Wall itself should be. I ditch my rucksack and race along it, lurching and stumbling over the rocky shore for perhaps half a mile, taking dozens of digital photographic images and talking to myself in a febrile frenzy. My crazed mind, exhausted by the physical and emotional upheavals of this journey, cannot let go of the hugely erroneous belief that I, linguist and wastrel, have somehow confounded the world’s best archaeologists and rediscovered the lost western extremity of Hadrian’s Wall. I seem to be in the process of, in modern parlance, losing it.
At some point hunger and fatigue force me to regain my senses for the second time today, and I retrieve my rucksack for the last flagging miles past Port Carlisle and into Maia. Nothing now remains of the fort that guarded the end of the eighty-four-mile wall across the Roman Empire’s north-western frontier, needless to say, but a little wooden pavilion with a pretty mosaic of sea birds looks across to Scotland and the setting sun, and wishes the weary traveller fortvna vobis adsit, or ‘good luck go with you’. Now more than ever, I feel I am going to need it.
Deptford, 1st September, 2014
Dies nonvs: Maia to Allonby
Via Lvgvvalivm again and the fort at Bibra, being the eleventh day before the Calends of June, 2763
My room in the guest house is more of a suite, and is even furnished with an ‘optical disc player’, affording me the luxury of a choice of private viewings of various moving picture shows. I choose a diverting example from the so-called ‘Carry On’ series of saucy satires, much loved in my childhood, with which to lull myself to greatly needed sleep. In the morning I partake of a cold buffet breakfast, which the landlady has laid out for me in the ‘kitchenette’, fully appreciating the privacy this gives me. Though better than yesterday, I still feel somewhat delicate, and prefer to shun the society of my fellow man.
I am faced with a dilemma: I have planned a hopelessly ambitious twenty-seven mile walk for today, and so at nine thirty I am already late out of the door if I mean to reach my lodgings in Allonby by nightfall. The already blazing sunshine compounds my difficulties, as the long march around the wind-blasted, treeless peninsula will afford me almost no shade. As if that weren’t enough, a great part of the walk will be on tarred roads that, despite the remoteness of the area, may well be choked with automobile traffic, the Devil’s favourite mode of transport. I would have loved to tramp around the beautiful Solway coast, with the Scottish mountains ever looming to the north, following the line of now vanished Roman ‘fortlets’ that once dotted the shoreline, separated from one another, of course, by the inevitable miles pedes, or one thousand Roman feet. In an ideal world I should have traversed the endless sands to the south of the peninsula, the empire of a million seabirds, and waded across the channel of the River Wampool to reach the Skinburness Marsh, with Silloth only a few miles further down the coast, but much as I might have fantasized about a quick end to my sufferings yesterday, I am not in fact ready to die yet. The quicksands and lightning tides of the Solway Firth are suicide enough for those with knowledge of them, let alone for those without.
No, today I must swallow my traveller’s aesthetic pride and take the motorized omnibus back to Lvgvvalivm, thence returning to the Cumbrian coast at Silloth, a three-hour trip to accomplish a mere seven or eight miles as the crow flies. That said, it is not unpleasant to revisit yesterday’s long, both inward and outward journey from the comfort of the dependable ‘bus’ number AD 122. There is a long wait in Lvgvvalivm for the connecting journey, which for some reason I am loath to spend wandering the city again, and so I remain in an inn near the omnibus station, reading Hutton and drinking icy ‘Pilsner’ ale to cool myself down in the fierce heat.
Back on the omnibus, we trundle through lush North Cumbrian farmland in a south-westerly direction towards the coast, and after an hour or so we arrive in the little resort town of Silloth. I buy a bag of the small local shrimp for my lunch and make my way to the shore, where I turn southwards to follow the coastal path, which winds at first through a pleasant though tiring grassy dune landscape. If tiring for the legs, the windswept sand dunes, as always, are restful for the soul, and before long my thoughts fall into a gentler, more peaceful rhythm than the one they have known these past few days. Instead of the insistent, monotonous beat of ‘why, how, why, how, why, how?’ that has been pounding in my head for the last forty-eight hours, a more melodious one now takes its place:
Shapely little gemstone upon a rocky shore,
Weather-smooth and wistful, yet fresh as newly made;
Amber glowing warmly unto the very core;
Deep as coral forests, and wise and rare as jade.
I stop to rest, crouching gratefully under a small bush growing out of a sand dune at such an angle as to offer a little shade from the burning sun, take out my notebook and write down the eulogistic first verse. Oddly, the valedictory second soon follows:
How I wish I’d found it, this precious little jewel,
Somewhere else than where I did, on a smoother shore,
In a different circumstance, in a time less cruel.
Nothing though could taint my joy, nor make me love it more.
It is while writing this that suddenly, as if by some other, infinitely subtler medium of communication than the bludgeoning radio telegram by which it actually arrives, I receive auditory notification of an incoming message from Miss T on my portable telephone. As often before, she lists the highlights of the trip in highly condensed and wittily formulated form: little lambs, baby birds, the quarry, the Wall, of course, but most of all, “being together”.
In my heart of hearts, I know full well what she is up to, but I buy her wares wholesale all the same. She flattered, pampered and indulged me for a few days, then, having softened me up, she lobbed a bomb and ran, like a modern Brigantian guerilla, abandoning me to ponder my losses and the ruination caused by the blast. Now, in my grief and despair, having had enough time to stew, she is offering to clear the wreckage, pay compensation and restore my world exactly to its former state. It is a simple but highly effective little strategy, and it has, in the youthful argot of today, totally worked.
And yet it hasn’t. To many, the employment of strategy to win the love of a beloved is proof enough that the strategist’s love is real. Why else, they say, would the strategos go to such absurd lengths to get what she wants, if not driven by the purest, truest, most ardent ‘love’? But I am not of that mind. There could be many, indeed countless forces driving the love-strategist, including the afore-mentioned defusing of the biological time bomb, coupled with the suitor’s at least reasonably healthy financial prospects. Now, you may argue, and with some justification, is that not in itself the be-all and end-all of love? Is not a woman who wishes you above all others to satisfy such universal lady-needs truly a woman in love? But therein lies the rub. It transpired the day before yesterday that I am not the only one desired to supply the goods. I have a competitor, and Miss T (not the king, mind) has arranged for a joust between us, the prize for winning which is her hand. Ergo, Miss T loveth not me; she loveth the winner. That she seems to want me to win is beside the point. From the beginning she has only considered her own needs (id est time bombs and their speedy defusing) and has never once thought of mine beyond the merely superficial. My greatest and all-consuming need is not to be spoilt, flattered and pampered. Above all, it is time I need, not time bombs, more time, though not necessarily much more. One year, as it turns out, will be more than enough to free myself once and for all from M’s insidious, friendship-feigning clutches, and if Our Lady of the Ticking Clock will not wait that long, despite possessing me body and soul in the meantime and lacking only my signature to clinch the deal, I doubt she ever truly loved me at all.
No, I will not joust, nor will I beg, but nor will I give up and acknowledge her dishonest farewell (just how dishonest will soon be revealed). Instead, I reply to her telegram with the first verse only of the poem, a deceitful stratagem to match or even surpass her own. The second I save for the real goodbye that, deep, deep down, I know must come anyway. Her answer follows almost immediately:
I love it, and I love you.
So it seems I am to be king for another day, thanks to the subtle sorcery of verse, but I do not reply. To do so would be either to lie about my feelings or to tell the truth, and I lack the courage for both. My victory is wholly Pyrrhic, as hers in Lvgvvalivm must have been too. The joy and the pain of the last year’s increasingly overt wranglings with Miss T, coupled with the disturbingly covert wranglings with M have left me exhausted and weak in both mind and body. My poor little brain and my poor old bones crave peace, if only for a little while, if only to gather strength for the final battle, whenever and wherever, whatever that might be. Have I not earned my rest with metre and rhyme? What cruel tyrant would deny me sweet repose after such lines? Who indeed!
That said, there can be no better place on earth to enjoy an ephemeral victory than where I am right now. Scotland, the fabled kingdom of my childhood, much emboldened and forward-looking since the so-called ‘devolution of power’ in 2750, looms larger now, even as I move away from it, and the Cumbrian dune landscape is a delight to the senses. I pass a small pond teeming with tiny tadpoles, which a bizarrely placed information plaque (ah, modernity!) informs me will one day become the warty natterjack toads famed for their incredibly loud croak, assisted by their Dizzie-Gillespie-like vocal sacs. I watch the tadpoles for some time, distracted. The pond seems to be almost visibly evaporating in the blazing sun that has not relented for some weeks now, and I am seized by anxiety that it will dry up and that these rare creatures will die. This small explosion of beleaguered life hangs by a thread, and there is nothing I can do to help. Or is there? Later it occurs to me that I could have poured in my last two pints of water — a small, but possibly critical amount, suffering a dry mouth so that a hundred toads might live. Then again, the bacteria in my water might just have killed them more quickly than the sun. There is no redemption. Life is a bitter, relentless, bloody, vindictive war, and its greatest prize is mere survival.
I continue southwards along the coast, and after a mile or so arrive at the tiny village of Beckfoot, where a field close to the shore more or less occupies the site of the fort probably called by the Ravenna Cosmography Bibra. Here were stationed the Cohors II Pannoniorvm, a cohort from the modern day Czech Republic, or the Czechoslovakia of my youth — whichever you prefer. Interesting archaeological finds were also made here of a Roman cremation urn of such enduring quality that analysis was able to demonstrate that the deceased inside was burned in considerable luxury on a ‘feather-stuffed mattress on an oak bedstead’. As the hero of Billy Wilder’s ‘Sunset Boulevard’ wryly observes, “Funny, how gentle people get with you once you’re dead.”
The 1,800 feet of Criffel now tower majestically over a bank of fog across the Solway Firth, and the tide is out so far I feel as though I could just walk across and climb the misty mountain. Quite apart from the afore-mentioned suicide that would entail, I will not be attempting this today, as I am already exhausted after a mere four unassisted miles. I am also fretful of the march into the wild interior tomorrow. The merciless sun continues to beat down upon me and, presumably, on the poor natterjack tadpoles as well, as I stagger on though the sandy, green desert. There follows another pointless, febrile hunt for the non-existent remains of Tower 16b, while a heat-immobilized donkey eyes me with pity as I obsessively inspect each block of the loose masonry abounding here, instead of doing something more sensible with my time like him.
There is a slight climb to Dubmill Point before the descent into the sweeping bay of Allonby (the suffix attesting the former presence of Norsemen) and my lodgings for the night at the amusingly named ‘Baywatch Hotel’, where the lares (household gods) are the deified Pamela Anderson and a boxer whose name I enquire after, then immediately forget. I take my supper outside, watching the sun set over the Oceanvs Hibernicvs and the north-western edge of the Roman world, so fiercely defended in this province against the fierce Celtic warriors of old. After that I retire to my cheap but somewhat dingy room upstairs and, utterly heedless, sleep not unlike the proverbial dead.
Deptford, 4th September, 2014
Dies decimvs: Allonby to Derventio
Via the fort at Alavna and along the Roman road, being the tenth day before the Calends of June, 2763
I awaken in better spirits, but it is late, and so after an al fresco breakfast of a bacon roll and a cup of tea, I return immediately to the coastal path, there being a long road ahead of me and no time to tour Allonby. A melancholy shire horse tethered next to a rustic gipsy caravan bids me farewell from the former fishing village, and after a couple of miles I arrive at Swarthy Hill, on the brow of which lie the remains of the only surviving fortlet, the hypothetical number 21, of the frontier defenses beyond Hadrian’s Wall. Like Milecastle 42 on the Wall, it sits on an awkward slope of the hill, while a better situation squarely on the brow of the hill waits only a stone’s throw away. As a result, this, like its Wall counterpart, is cited by English historians, usually disdainfully, as a demonstration of the Roman desire for order in all things, taking precedence even to practicality. It is an intriguing foible. Certainly there is evidence enough that the frontier architecture was at least partly for show, a giant display of Roman might, but perhaps it was even more. Maybe it was a display, too, of precise measurements and symmetry of design, of exact science and engineering, and if this fails to impress our scientific minds today, one only has to think of the irregular, haphazard, slapdash world of the barbarians on the fringes to imagine how it must have awed then. Then again, perhaps not. Is it just possible that the disdain of today’s historians is mere ‘inverted snobbery’ — that peculiarly pervasive English contempt for refinement and aesthetics over utility, that we so often see in upturned Anglo-Celtic noses sniffing at what they secretly resent and consequently deny to be a superior ‘European’ culture? Somehow I can’t help but suspect that the ancient Celts, nurtured by the same rocky soil and breathing the same damp air as the modern British, self-deceitfully turned up their noses in just the same way then as we do now.
Anyway, the ramparts and ditches of Milefortlet 21 have been fully excavated and partially reconstructed, so you get a good idea of the layout of the structure, which once consisted of a high turf wall with wooden gates and three internal buildings, all now robbed, rotted and ploughed out of existence. A Roman gaming board was found here, eternal companion of the common soldier, who must have been, in all likelihood even more here than at other frontiers, as the modern, vulgar expression goes, bored utterly shitless. From the nearby top of Swarthy Hill, the view across the bay to Alavna (Maryport), my next stop, is breathtaking.
Back at the bottom of the hill I pause briefly to view the twenty-third (sixteenth) century ‘saltpans’, large circular ponds used for the extraction of salt from seawater, a reminder of how difficult this commodity was to procure, and consequently how valuable it must have been until fairly recently. The expression ‘worth its salt’, the word ‘salary’, from the Latin salarivm, meaning the supplement to a soldier’s wages given just to buy salt, and the slaves forced to work and die in hellish salt mines may testify to the worth of this white gold, that the rise of the automaton, like so many of the things of modern life, has rendered almost worthless.
I try to savour these last three miles of beautiful coastline, of easy walking and good weather before turning inland, but all too soon they are gone. No matter, though, for there is plenty ahead to kindle the fire of the imagination. After a climb I arrive at the fort of Alavna, occupied during Hadrian’s reign by the ‘First Cohort of Spaniards’, but of which nothing survives but the ditch, viewable from a reconstructed watchtower in whose shade some ewes and lambs are sheltering from the still fierce sun. As ever, the thrifty English picked the large fort clean for the building of Maryport. The treasures that Alavna yielded are housed in the Senhouse Museum, adjacent to the fort, and what treasures they are! Hundreds of objects, especially altar stones, stand protected and well explained here, possibly the oldest collection of Roman artifacts in the country, having been begun by the Senhouse family in the 2320s (1570s). One ‘votive pillar’ is inscribed:
ROMAE AETERNAE ET FORTVNAE REDVCI
or ‘To Eternal Rome and Fortune the Home-bringer’. The goddess Fortvna seems to have been popular in Britannia, particularly, as here, in her capacity to bring her supplicants safely home. I wonder what Rudyard Kipling would have made of that phenomenon. A similar piece to this one now resides in the British Museum in Londinivm, dedicated by one Gaivs Cornelivs Peregrinvs from Saldae in modern day Algeria.
Another altar records:
Forewarned by a dream, the soldier told the wife of Fabivs
to set up this altar to the nymphs who are to be worshipped
I would dearly love to know why Fabio’s wife was commissioned for this task and which nymphs the soldier meant, so that perhaps, having also been forewarned by a dream, I might set up my own altar, but I suppose those inscriptions weren’t cheap, hence the extreme abbreviation often found on them. The relevant nymphs would surely have known.
Altar stones, funerary monuments and endless carvings of penises all testify to the extraordinary superstitiousness of our ancestors, and some anecdotal plaques nicely explain what is difficult to interpret from the stones alone. Particularly atmospheric is the description of the ritual placation of the lemvres, the vengeful spirits of the unloved and uncared for dead who plagued the living from time to time. At midnight on the Nones of May, and then two and four days thereafter (the lemvria), the head of the household, or paterfamilias, would cast black beans behind him with averted gaze, inviting the lemvres to feed and leading them to the door, after which he would ask them to leave the house. I am reminded of a well-loved childhood ritual and how much we have lost in discarding such hallucinogenic belief systems in favour of an altogether less logical and more tedious Christian one. Each year on the ninth evening before the calends of January, my mother would furnish me with a mince pie, a glass of brandy and a cigarette, or in a good year, a cigar. These I would lay on a plate by my bedside, inviting the weary spirit called Santer Claws (or however you spelled it) to come and feast, and, with luck, leave miraculous gifts behind. When I woke, to my heart-arresting amazement, I would invariably find the pie half-eaten, the brandy glass fully drained, the cigarette or cigar butt burned out and a pile of miraculous gifts hanging in a pillowcase by the bed, all festively wrapped in gold and silver. It was proof beyond all questioning of the existence of mysterious, inexplicable, supernatural forces, and my young life was infinitely richer for it. As the poet who will be dominating the next part of the Frontier Road said:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not — Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
I tour the collection twice, reluctant to leave this remarkable museum on the edge of the world (the Roman world), but it is after two and my belly is growling, and so I head downhill into modern Maryport to take a late prandivm. I know I am not alone in experiencing the paradox of a shrinking appetite when on long, strenuous walks, but today I have a sudden craving for the hearty roast beef offered by a public house on the way to the harbour, and apart from the inevitably overcooked vegetables, it is tasty enough and unquestionably hearty. Afterwards I wander down to the picturesque, muddy harbour, which, as usual these days, is still alive, but barely. This one, together with my ultimate goal of Glannoventa, seem to have been the ports that kept the entire western frontier zone alive with corn, salt, wine and olive oil, but now serve only pleasure yachts and a few fishing boats.
Having spent three bitter-sweet days on the Solway Firth it is now time to follow the Frontier Road into the wild interior. In going into Maryport, I have taken a detour from the Roman road, which, of course, runs dead straight from Alavna into Derventio (or, as the English tongue would have it, the world’s most unfortunate toponym of ‘Cockermouth’), and so I must tramp uphill through Maryport’s suburbs for a mile or two before I can rejoin it. The pleasure of following the Roman road comes at an extremely high price: as often mentioned before in this tale, these eternal highways are often the victims of their own success. All at once, the pavements disappear and the road straightens up, suddenly becoming a psychopathic autobahn full of homicidal motorists. There is no verge to walk on at all, and the road seems little wider than it must have been in Roman times, about enough for a cart and a horse going in opposite directions, but not for two carts. Every time an automobile roars past, to preserve life and limb, I am forced to press myself and my thick rucksack against the thorny hedgerow. For a seemingly endless mile I keep up this terrifying dance of death, grateful for the blonde hair that helps to disguise the new white ones I must surely be getting every time two cars pass one another beside me.
Thankfully, at Folly Bridge the tarred road swings eastwards and, to my unutterable relief, the Roman road continues uphill as a green lane. That the stones which once paved the road have been stolen by local farmers over the centuries is a matter of the utmost indifference to me as I stride gratefully along the gloriously peaceful, arrow-straight track, imagining the horses that long ago pulled the cartloads of supplies from Alavna’s harbour to Derventio, and thence to the forts and settlements in the wild Cumbrian hinterland. I stop to chat to a lady dog walker, a fellow appreciator of this ancient road, but dally as I might, this delightful journey is soon over, and I am forced to take a long detour around the village and estate of Dovenby. The route rejoins the Roman road after that, but this time only as a footpath beside a hedgerow which may or may not have been the agger at some point, the raised platform of the Roman road.
After another mile or so, I arrive in Derventio, once a substantial Roman town, perhaps the size of Coria, but of which almost nothing now remains except in names: the village of Papcastle and the River Derwent. I proceed through the suburbs, across the river and into the modern town of Cockermouth, my lodgings for the night and the birthplace of the great poet William Wordsworth, whose verses nestle somewhere in my rucksack and whose life-road I will be eagerly following for the next three days.
Deptford, 9th September, 2014
Dies vndecimvs: Derventio to Keswick
Via Buttermere and Castlerigg Stone Circle, being the ninth day before the Calends of June, 2763
It is ironic at several levels that my lodgings in Derventio are a twenty-fourth (seventeenth) century water mill, now the town’s youth hostel. Before steam, it was simple water that powered the industrious Britons’ Industrial Revolution, and nowhere were they more industrious than in the north-west of England, where there is an abundance of rain and hills, and therefore fast-flowing watercourses. The economic and technological leaps forward that this simple, clean energy source initially facilitated led to ever-increasing urbanization, pollution, deforestation and species death in the following centuries, first in Britain, then in Europe and ultimately over the whole world. The rest — the trillions of tons of carbon waste products we have pumped into the atmosphere during the last two hundred years and, whether or not connected, the ever more erratic weather systems battering the globe — is history. At the moment, the scientific community is still dithering about naming the prime mover of the catastrophe to come, but there will come a time soon when they are unanimous, and the finger will turn a hundred and eighty degrees to point back to ourselves.
What I witness in Derventio is the aftermath of a tiny foretaste, an hors d’oeuvre, a gustatio of the coming cataclysm. In November last year monsoon-like rains fell on Cumbria and the River Derwent burst its banks, rising up to eight feet higher than usual and flooding a large part of the town. A policeman drowned in nearby Workington, the town at the mouth of the Derwent, while directing traffic away from the bridge that then collapsed under him. A footbridge by which I meant to enter Cockermouth last night has also been swept away and many shops and houses near the river still stand empty and gutted clean after seven months.
Wordsworth House, where the poet himself was born, was also flooded, but a great effort was made to drain and restore the building before the tourist season started, and so I go in to take a look. The house is large and splendid for the otherwise humble town. The poet’s father, a lawyer by trade, must have been a resourceful man: he even lent substantial sums to his master, the morbid James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, who kept the favourite of his many mistresses in a glass-topped coffin, in the house in which he had set her up in luxury, long after she had begun to decompose. Young Wordsworth was not close to his father, apparently, but an odd quirk of the distant paterfamilias was to have a profound effect in shaping the poet: he forced his son to memorize long excerpts from Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare. This presumably well-meaning torture could only have one effect. No child, or adult for that matter, can derive any meaning from Spenser’s and Milton’s tortuous verses these days (or even two hundred years ago), but how the meaningless music of the master metricians must have rung in the boy’s head! Wordsworth loved to walk, especially in his native Cumbria, and I doubt a single step was unaccompanied by an iamb or a trochee. This illustrates the eternal, insoluble dilemma of education: however much we may loathe our parents’ vicarious educational bullying, for better or worse, it makes us who we are. There is no legislating against it, and perhaps it is better that we don’t try.
Like the Bronte family, William relied more on his sister and fellow poet, Dorothy, for companionship and understanding than on his father, and he remained close to her throughout his life. They are buried next to one another in Grasmere, whither I wander tomorrow.
Once again I was hopelessly ambitious in planning today’s walk. I had meant to take the Roman road north-west towards the fort at Maglona (Old Carlisle), visiting the fort of Caermote (the Latin name long forgotten), now a forlorn and remote serious of grassy humps, before turning south-west and ascending mighty Skiddaw, thence dropping down into Keswick, but yesterday’s brush with death has left me shy of daring yet another violated Roman road overrun by homicidal motor-charioteers. Moreover, I doubt I have the strength to attempt a lofty peak like Skiddaw after such a long march. My training for the Chalk Road two years ago even involved climbing Snowdon, but the last year, spent feasting and cavorting with Miss T, has left me soft and weak in both mind and body. The Roman foot soldiers of old would have despised me as an effeminate epicurean, and rightly so.
No, once again I must look facts in the face and make alternative plans. Last night I heard tell of a motorized miniature omnibus that conveys passengers the eight miles or so southwards to the delicious-sounding lake of Buttermere, whence a little-used road will take me through a valley under the wild mountains of Whiteless Pike and Knott Rigg and down into the basin of Derwent Water, and so I decide on that instead. When the tiny vehicle arrives, I find it full of elderly ladies staring at me bemusedly. When I enquire the fare of the driver, he too seems confused. It turns out that this is a free service for old-age pensioners, but after a few moments’ conference, the driver and his passengers generously agree to take me on board, amid much cooing and clucking. In fact, the white and blue-haired ladies seem delighted at this variation in their daily routine and bombard me with questions about my undertaking as though I were a minor celebrity while we rattle through the fertile, undulating coastal plain. It is oddly flattering to be treated like a young Olympian demi-god when you are forty, even by such matronly matrons. Everything, the great philosopher Einstein taught us, is relative.
The driver lets me off just before the village of Buttermere and I thank him and the Derventian ladies for their kindness. Whiteless Pike now towers over me, decorated with cloud shadows, and I am glad that I do not need to climb over it. A country ramble is all my heart desires today, and so I follow the tarred road uphill for a while, then stop for luncheon by the roadside, looking towards Moss Force on the other side of the valley, its tumbling waters much diminished in this hot weather, while I in turn am watched lazily by a little blackface lamb.
The next miles are a gradual descent into the valley floor, skirting the foot of the peculiarly named mountain Cat Bells until I reach Derwent Water, where there is a pleasant woodland walk around the western edge of the lake. Soon Skiddaw rears up again to the north. I hardly encounter a soul today until I reach the suburbs of Keswick: this is a kingdom of sheep, cows and chickens.
Keswick suffered almost as much from the floods as Derventio, but I find no trace of the damage here. The town has a prosperous air, I assume because of the great number of tourists that flock here for outdoor sports, which would also explain the rapid restoration of the town to its former glory. This I cannot understand. I would prefer to visit a town still ravaged by the awesome power of nature, regardless of the inconvenience. Is it not more interesting so, and a kindness to the inhabitants to spend your money there when it is most needed to boot?
I find the youth hostel pleasingly perched on the banks of the River Greta, and though hungry, I leave straight away and head eastwards a mile or so out of town to visit Castlerigg, the Stonehenge of Cumbria. Built around 2500 b.R. (3200 b.C.), this stone circle is believed to be one of the earliest in Europe. It sits in a kind of natural amphitheatre, the auditorium being some of Cumbria’s highest mountains — a magnificent setting to worship the ancient gods of nature…
But what am I doing here? I was supposed to go eastwards from Caermote to Brocavvm (Penrith), from there turning south to join the enigmatic ‘High Street’, the Roman road to Galava that runs across the high mountain tops, steering clear of the bandit country below, but I have lost the way. I was supposed to follow the Frontier Road in the footsteps of the Roman Army, but here I am at a temple to gods whose names had already been forgotten three thousand years before the Romans arrived. I am lost in space and time.
I pace around the stones, disturbing the sheep at their contented chewing. I feel like praying, but how does one pray to forgotten gods? And what would I pray for anyway? My marriage is dead, and yet the inscrutable M still lurks in the shadows, motionless as a reptile, perhaps waiting for the right moment to strike and be avenged for her father’s sins and for my failure to beg her to come back to me, thus wounding her imperious pride. The first night we spent together twelve years ago, I looked into her dark eyes in the dim light to reassure myself that she was a mammal, a peculiar need she mocked by blinking and darting her tongue out in uncanny reptilian synchronization. At the temple complex in Brocolitia, I offered a libation to Mithras and prayed that I might be reunited with her, but neglected to record it at the time, ashamed of my insincerity, and indeed, my blasphemy in wasting the god’s precious time. Why pray for something that is there for the taking? The only reason I have not been reunited with M is that I do not want to — ergo, no divine intervention necessary.
Perhaps Miss T will rescue me from M’s claws, but deep down, I know I cannot trust her either. The dream forewarned me: I am a pawn in her game. She will raise me from pawn to king, but only if I do her bidding. I am caught between a snake and a fox. Do I love one, the other, both or neither? Mejor solo que mal accompañado, as the Spaniards say. Better alone than in bad company. If only I could know this now, but there is none so blind as will not see, as the English say. Around and around the stone circle I pace, lost, drowning in a flood of feelings I do not understand and praying to dead gods for things I do not want.
Deptford, 17th September 2014
Dies dvodecimvs: Keswick to Grasmere
Over Derwent Water and Grasmere Common, being the eighth day before the Calends of June, 2763
I am awoken most rudely in the night. A stranger violently shakes me out of sleep and, feigning civility, hisses through clenched teeth in a nasal southern accent, “Could you lie on your side, please?” Being wrenched out of deep sleep is alarming at the best of times, but, for a moment at least, the repressed hostility of the voice, added to the violent return to consciousness, makes this experience truly frightening, and I gasp for breath. It takes a few seconds to rally my reasoning faculties, during which time my molester stands over me, as if threatening more violence if I do not comply with his wishes. I must have been snoring like a bear, as usual, and keeping him, and possibly others, awake. God knows I sympathize with the victims of my nocturnal ursine growling, but might I suggest that if you can’t afford a private room to shield yourself from the adenoidal roars of others, you should, as our friends from the New World put it, ‘suck it up’ and refrain from uncouthly violating your fellow guests in said communal dormitory?
I grunt and turn away from him, resolving to have it out with this bourgeois thug in the morning. Thankfully, the sound of sulky footsteps indicate that he is withdrawing, and there is no further incident.
In the morning I find my assailant in the canteen alone and reading. He is five or ten years older than me, balding and bespectacled, but tall and sturdily built, with a bony, thuggish head. I approach his table and come straight to the point.
“How dare you shake me out of sleep?”
“You were snoring like a pig!” he replies. It is unusual for a middle-class Englishman to be so honest about his hostility, or at least about its most recent causes. A worthy opponent indeed!
“And now you’re insulting me as well?” I parry. “First you assault me, and now you insult me! How dare you?”
Something is wrong again. True, he is brazenly justifying his aggressive behaviour — if he handled me that way in broad daylight, I could summon a policeman — but my reaction is out of all proportion to the deed. My temples are pounding and I see red. My fists are clenching and I am spoiling for trouble. After a few more pointless volleys, I can see that he begins to sense this. It is suddenly written over his specky, thuggish face — the realisation that he is dealing with a madman — and his jaw and ears slacken. He mumbles a few incoherent words of apology and offers me his hand. This brings me abruptly to my senses and, because I am not a madman, I feel ashamed. I shake his hand and mumble my own apology, shuffling away again.
The pattern of getting into fights with strangers will be repeated again and again over the next six months, and it will get worse. It is a self-destructive urge, less to hurt than to be hurt. My internalized rage is trying to externalize itself, but in such a way that it comes right back again. I am, it will transpire, torn apart with guilt that I am betraying two women at once, that in trying to please both I have only wounded both, and I long to confess my sins and do penance for them. Martin Luther, that anti-Semite bigot, did a very foolish thing when he urged people to smash the confessional booths four hundred and ninety-three years ago, for, as the Scottish poet William Dunbar said:
Quhom to sall I compleine my woe,
and kythe my cairis ane or mo?
I knaw not, amang riche or pure,
quha is my friend, quha is my foe;
for in this warld may non assure.
Later, I make my way down to the shores of Derwent Water to catch the motorised ferry to the south of the lake. This all-too-brief twenty minutes of bliss, floating effortlessly and peacefully (fossil-fuel chug-chug notwithstanding) beneath the majestic Cumbrian fells, this wild kingdom of Celts, then Romans, then Celts again, then Norwegians and finally Englishmen, breathes some sweet air back into my weary lungs, and I leap off the boat onto a tiny wooden jetty at the southern end of the lake.
I walk for a mile or so southwards through the flood plain of the Derwent and cross the river at the village of Grange. Here I enter the narrow pass between the mountains called Borrowdale, and walk another half a mile until I reach the peculiar Ice Age relic of Bowder Stone. A so-called ‘glacial erratic’, carried for many miles by the ice before being deposited, this enormous boulder is thirty feet high and weighs an estimated four million pounds, over a hundred thousand times the weight of my rucksack, though it doesn’t feel that little. Bowder seems to derive from ‘Baldur’, the Norse god of light and purity, son of Odin and brother of Thor. Beloved of his mother, Frigg, she made him invulnerable to all blows (such as from giant boulders?) but one: the sacred mistletoe, his Achilles’ heel. His jealous brother Loki found this out and made a spear out of the mysterious growth. At a banquet he hurled it at Baldur and killed him. His death seems to have been the event that triggered the Ragnarök, or Götterdämmerung or Downfall of the Gods, though the Völva prophesied that he would one day be reborn in the New World.
I suddenly remember again my dream of Aesica, and then, oddly, yet another from some months before that, in which I heard that a close friend of mine had been gruesomely murdered. When I went to the morgue to identify the body, I saw with horror that the victim was none other than myself, decapitated, bodiless. In the second dream, could the box in which Miss T presented me her new-born baby have been a coffin? And was not that baby also me, with my own voice, reborn? Or was it a simple prophecy that I would be reunited with Miss T after long searching and that she would deceitfully bear me a child? A staircase has been generously provided to allow non-mountaineers like me to climb the boulder, which I do, taking my prandivm atop this miraculous rock, consumed by these dark, riddlesome thoughts.
After climbing back down Baldur’s boulder, I continue up Borrowdale and follow the pretty Stonethwaite Beck for a few miles, the valley growing ever narrower and the fell sides ever steeper. I stop to chat to a hiking couple, and when I tell them I intend to climb up to Grasmere Common, they warn me of a dangerous scramble that must be negotiated before I can attain those heights. As usual, this galvanizes me wonderfully: nothing like the whiff of adversity to sharpen the senses and concentrate the mind. A little climb later, I turn left up Greenup Gill and another couple enquires of my destination, only to repeat the warning. Now I’m really excited. Perhaps my heavy rucksack will make me slip on the treacherous scree and I will tumble down the slope and be forced to use the ice axe arrest I learned on Ben Nevis five years ago with my hiking poles, which I take out and extend in readiness. As it turns out, Greenup Edge is a huge disappointment. The tension has been built up so dramatically by the probably well-meaning hikers that anticlimax is inevitable, and I plod sulkily up the admittedly steep but conveniently step-shaped rocks with no danger to life or limb. All is forgiven and forgotten at the top, however: the view over the mountainous border country is magnificent. Time and again one is reminded of why one goes to all the trouble — of the sublimity of the reward — and even though:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;-
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more…
the ethereal macrocosm glimpsed from mountain tops rushes into the godless vacuum left by childhood’s vanished microcosm.
The path disappears for a while on the high plateau of Grasmere Common and I am in danger of losing the way. This is as close to wilderness as it will get for me on the Frontier Road, and I gulp down this rare tonic for my soul while it lasts. The last stretch is that most delightful of walks: a few miles of rough track, rocky peaks rearing up on either side, gliding effortlessly back to the valley floor with thoughts gloriously unshackled and light. The village of Grasmere is where I stop for the night, Wordsworth’s home from 1799 to 1808, birthplace of his most timeless verses and final resting place of his earthly remains.
Deptford, 21st September, 2014
Dies tertivs decimvs: Grasmere to Galava
Via Rydal and along the Corpse Road, being the seventh day before the Calends of June, 2763
With only five or six miles to walk to Galava, where I will rejoin the Roman Frontier Road after three days lost in the wilderness, today is almost a rest day, and I am determined to forget M and Miss T, come what may, and to have a good time of it.
Grasmere is now a wealthy-looking place, no longer the humble peasant village that Wordsworth knew, let alone the ‘Wild Boar Lake’ the Vikings settled and still less the wild bandit country the Romans took such pains to avoid with their road through the mountains to the west, descending only to the fort and civilization in the safety of Galava. A stroll through the immaculate village brings me to St. Oswald’s Church, where the poet and his family are buried. I join the throng of pilgrims who have come to see their graves — a curious ritual, but one I do not question. What is more human than to remember? The souls of poets have already been immortalized, but it is an odd comfort to know that their bodies too are still there. Near my future home in Deptford is a churchyard with a small stone, sometimes adorned with a withered rose, informing you that the poet Christopher Marlowe lies ‘somewhere near’. Wordsworth explains:
What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.
Near the church stands Dove Cottage, a twenty-fourth (seventeenth) century former inn, into which William and his sister Dorothy moved in 2552 (1799), a decision prompted by pathological homesickness brought on by an extended stay in Germany. Good God, I know how that feels! Nearly twenty years ago, a former love of mine, Fräulein K., persuaded me to settle there but, despite some admittedly happy interludes, I spent the next nine years trying to escape from that country.
A spring tide of pilgrims, sweeps me into the building and through its crooked little rooms. The Wordsworths seem to have been very happy here, only moving out eight years later because their family had outgrown it. William married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Hutchinson, in 2555 (1802), and she brought her sister with her to the cottage, later bearing him three children. Wordsworth’s friend and fellow ‘Lakeland poet’, Robert Southey, lived nearby and the opium-eating writer Thomas de Quincey took over the lease when the poet’s family moved out.
With its little ‘wild garden’ overlooking the lake and its mountains, Dove Cottage was the perfect spawning ground for the age of romantic English poetry. It is in the elemental, primeval arts of poetry and music that romanticism reaches its sublime heights, bypassing reason altogether in its search for truth. There is little room for it in that more rational form, the novel, and people who embrace it in politics deserve everything they get. Trouble is, there have been innumerable innocent victims to romantic politics. Let us not forgot that Adolph Schicklgruber, butcher of millions, was a vegetarian and a sensitive artist with a tendency to gush about nature and his tender feelings. Ioseb Jugashvili, the crusher of men’s souls and dreams, was a poet and all about love of the poor, oppressed working man. Saloth Sar, another heartless butcher of millions, had a big hardon, as the Americans say, for the bleeding-hearted philosopher Rousseau.
From Dove Cottage I climb uphill, turn southwest and join the ancient ‘Corpse Road’ above Rydal Water, once used for transporting the dead to Galava. The rocky, leafy lane is fittingly peaceful, and the light drizzle today cools me pleasingly after the last week baking in the pitiless sun. Wordsworth didn’t mind walking in the rain either, sometimes alone, and this apparently erratic, eccentric behaviour, together with his earlier ‘radical’ political views, led some perceptive minds to put two and two together and to deduce that he was a French spy. Solitary behaviour, writing emotionally intense poetry and creeping about in the rain can only mean one thing to the naturally suspicious, some might say paranoid English mind: in 2500 such harmless tendencies made you a traitor to your country; now they make you either a terrorist or a pederast.
After a wistful mile I arrive at Rydal Mount, the house where Wordsworth spent his last years. It is a much grander affair than the cottage I just visited, the dubious reward of worldly success. I find it interesting, in the light of this ‘moving up in the world’, that the poet preferred to write in his tiny, Spartan hut in the garden, battered by the Cumbrian elements, rather than in his large, comfortable office in the house: a nostalgic longing for the simple, happy life he had led before becoming a household name, perhaps. His friend and fellow poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge often used to visit, walking from his home in Keswick, as I have just done.
I rejoin the still wooded, still damp Corpse or Coffin Road for the last mile or two into Galava, or in English, Ambleside. The walk has been so brief today that I have time to visit the delightful Armitt Museum on the outskirts of the town. On display here are finds from the Roman fort, including a roughly inscribed tombstone that reads in expanded form:
DIS BONIS MANIBVS
FLAVIVS ROMANVS ACTARIVS
VIXIT ANNIS XXXV
IN CASTRIS INTERFECTVS AB HOSTIBVS
To the good gods of the underworld:
Flavivs Romanvs, record clerk
Lived 35 years
Killed in the fort by the enemy
As ever, the imagination has its work cut out to supply the other pieces of the puzzle of Flavio Romano the archivist’s existence. Where did he come from? Was he from Roma, as his name suggests? Who was the ‘enemy’, and how did he manage to kill Flavio inside the fort? Was he (or she, for that matter) one of the Carvetii, the local Celtic tribe, who had infiltrated the fort, perhaps under cover? And why did he kill Flavio? Was he promised something by the archivist, perhaps a job or money, who then reneged on the deal? Was a woman involved? The mind reels with such speculations.
The museum also functions as an art gallery, and on display are some of the works of Kurt Schwitters, the German artist who came to Galava in 2708 (1945), having fled his homeland and its hateful persecutors. His, like so many of his generation, is a sad story: a hugely influential experimental artist while in Germany (he sculpted an intriguing-sounding monumental phallic statue, later destroyed in a bombing raid, called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery), he naturally fell foul of Schicklgruber’s entartete Kunst (‘decadent art’) pogrom. He left Germany in 2700 (1937) and came via Norway to Britain, where he was immediately imprisoned as an ‘enemy alien’ for the duration of the Second World War. After his release, he ended up in Galava, but his work, in spite of the mesmeric quality of his brightly-coloured portraiture displayed at the Armitt, was not well received here, and he died in poverty only three years later, at the age of sixty-one. How well the Germans, ever the thorn in the side of the Roman Empire and its aggressive, pretentious successors, succeeded in sterilizing the cultural and intellectual life of their country. They wanted ‘purity’, and they got it. From what I have glimpsed of Germany’s cultural produce until 2696 (1933), for centuries it seems to have pulsated with energy and vitality (need I name names?); now it is numbingly dull.
From the museum I head southwards for the youth hostel, a pleasant building on the northern shore of long, skinny Lake Windermere. In my dormitory are two young Indians pacing about listlessly, now sitting on their beds, now smoking and staring vacantly out of the window. We fall into conversation and it transpires that they are students of commerce in Londinivm taking time off for a holiday on the strength of an order that they ‘simply must see the Lake District’. So, off they went, dutifully, but having arrived at this mandatory destination, now find themselves completely at a loss what to do. They ask me for advice and so, ‘identifying’ with these lost souls, though lost in a different way to me, I do my best to help. Do they like watersports, I ask, pointing out the window at Lake Windermere? “Not really.” How about climbing, I continue to point at the mountains beyond the lake? Their bewildered silence suggests I am recommending space travel. Nightlife? Ambleside is quite a party town, I understand. “Neh.” Now I am at a loss. Walking? Actually, walking is acceptable, though I wonder if they are just saying that out of politeness, in order to avoid rejecting yet another suggestion. I recommend the Corpse Road and the ‘Wordsworth trail’ that I have just been on and show them the route on the map, at which they nod politely, but seem to be thinking, ‘why would anyone go to the trouble of walking five miles?’
We wish each other a pleasant day, and go our separate ways, I to see the Roman fort in the fading light, and they to the terrace of the hostel bar, where I find them still chain-smoking and staring vacantly at the horizon on my return an hour or so later.
Galava today, the place where Flavio lived and died, is only ankle-high, sadly, and the imagination must toil and sweat to raise the pre-Hadrianic fortress to its former glory, when it guarded the important road westwards to Mediobogdvm and Glannoventa and northwards to Brocavvm and Lugvvalivm. Old Camden, as usual, was the first to record its existence in modern times, in the twenty-third (sixteenth) century, describing ‘the carcase, as it were, of an ancient city, with large ruins of walls; and without the walls, the rubbish of old buildings in many places’. How lucky he was to have seen these ‘ancient cities’ still standing proud, albeit dilapidated. The next centuries, particularly those of the thieving, wrecking, bulldozing Industrial Revolution, performed the coup de grace to the material remains of the Empire’s northwestern frontier. The foundations of the larger than usual granaries, those crucial forts within forts, can still be traced, and you can still step down into the strong room and imagine the bags of Roman gold and silver that were once stored there, and that perhaps Flavio died defending, but that’s about it. The setting is beautiful, though: the dusk light makes each of the mountains that form the walls of this enormous natural amphitheatre stand out from its neighbours.
I head back to the hostel in the kaleidoscopic Cumbrian dusk to change into my clean shirt and soft shoes, so that I might not offend the good people of Nova Galava as I spend this Wednesday night ‘on the town’. I make for the famous ‘Zeffirelli’s’, restaurant, concert venue and moving picture house all in one, named after the great Florentine, but now Roman senator and film and opera director, Franco Zeffirelli. The somewhat pretentious name is not unjustified: so-called ‘culture houses’ are noble ventures, even if they fail, but this does not. I am in hog heaven with my weary feet snuggling in soft shoes, eating pizza, drinking Italian red wine and listening to the band’s fine rendering of the rhythmic, syncopated, hauntingly dissonant musical genre known as ‘jazz’, a term probably originating in the African-American dialect word ‘jasm’ or ‘jism’, meaning spirit, energy, vigour, or in plain Saxon, ‘spunk’. Spunky this music certainly is, the great gift to the world from America’s emancipated slaves, free after centuries of nightmarish bondage (even deprived of the right to play drums) at least to develop their own inimitable voice in expressing the pain of oppression and the joy of freedom. There is nothing so precious in this life, as every long-distance walker knows, as liberty. The Romans knew this as well as, or better, than anyone, which is why they worshipped the goddess Libertas and waged three wars against their own rebellious slaves, vengefully murdering countless thousands of them for daring to demand liberty. “It’s true that freedom is precious,” said Vladimir Ulyanov, a Russian politician, “so precious it must be rationed.”
I leave half way through the concert, not because it is bad, quite the contrary, but because I am greedy for variety, for, as the poet William Cowper, born in my current home town of Berkhamsted, so memorably put it:
Variety’s the very spice of life,
That gives it all its flavour…
As mentioned, Zeffirelli’s also runs a large moving picture house — so big, in fact, that it is spread across several buildings. It is thence I now hurry to catch a showing of Christopher Morris’s new tragicomedy, ‘Four Lions’, about a doomed revolt among the naturalized but disaffected colonial subjects of a dead empire. Together with Armando Iannucci and Sascha Baron Cohen, Morris forms the glorious triumvirate of modern British satirists. They and a very few others are alone in having the courage to mock a nation that, contrary to its famously self-proclaimed talent for laughing at itself, actually hates laughing at itself and, whether lowly or elevated, does its utmost to silence, often by deceitful and cowardly means, those who dare to try. The Romans gave us both the word and the concept ‘satire’, from lanx satvra, ‘a dishful of mixed fruits’, and though powerful men often tried to silence the great Roman satirists too, it remained, despite their best efforts, a dish upon which rich and poor alike loved to feast.
Deptford, 27th September, 2014
Dies qvartvs decimvs: Galava to Mediobogdvm
Over Hardknott Pass and along the Roman road to Glannoventa, being the sixth day before the Calends of June, 2763
Galava pleased me greatly and I wake refreshed in the hostel’s dormitory. After an adequate breakfast (though as usual I am rapidly tiring of the bland, leaden, greasy fare so beloved of my countrymen early in the morning), I pack up and head out to see the fort again, in case I missed anything yesterday evening. I didn’t, but am happy to begin today’s journey here regardless. I have to go back though modern Ambleside, and on the way I notice a plaque which records that Wordsworth worked in that building for thirty years as ‘Distributor of Stamps’. A duller day job for the great romantic poet is hardly to be imagined, but perhaps that was no bad thing: the easy, monotonous work must have left him with ample ‘headspace’, as the modern term has it, for the composition of verse.
My route now follows a busy road alongside the River Brathay, and after a while I cross it onto a minor road leading westwards on the other side of the river. The vanished Roman road probably followed this side of the river, but in any case, since Alavna I have developed a phobia for busy motor carriageways, those despicable earth-scars that facilitate the personal carriages responsible for twenty-four per centum of the United Kingdom’s so-called ‘greenhouse gas emissions’ in which we will all one day sweat and broil until we are tender.
Another mile or so along pleasantly winding wooded country lanes brings me to Skelwith Force, and I take a short detour to see the pretty woodland waterfall. The linguistic landscape, as always, adds a sensory layer to the scene, for this was for the Vikings Skjallr Foss, or the ‘roaring waterfall’. The Norwegians must have felt very much at home here in this mountainous country, so like their own.
Back on or near the course of the Roman road and past the hamlet of Colwith, there is another mile of woodland until I get lost again. It is only when I nearly fall into a beautiful chasm with a blue lake at the bottom, created by quarrying, that I’m able to locate myself on the map and return to the proper route. This adds a mile and a half to my journey, but it is ever thus that the serendipitous finds make it all worthwhile. I stop for prandivm at a bench by the trackway overlooking the picturesque lakelet called Little Langdale Tarn. Having done with Hutton’s history, I am now reading, for reasons unknown to myself, Walter Tevis’s enigmatic novel, The Man Who Fell to Earth, about a lonely Martian stranded on our world and drinking himself to oblivion to cope with the unbearable strain of the complex human society in which, by twists and turns of the plot, he becomes inextricably entangled. Sipping, betimes gulping the wine I procured this morning in Galava, I am worried by the extent to which I identify with this character.
The valley called Langdale now begins to narrow before the ascent to Wrynose Pass. I pass a little grassy hump called Ting Mound, the first part of the toponym, like Iceland’s Þingvellir, Shetland’s Tingwall and the English word ‘hustings’, betraying the former presence of one of the Norsemen’s outdoor parliaments. The consensus-minded men from the North Country met here by the side of the Roman road eleven centuries ago to make decisions and administer justice, just as the Athenians did fifteen centuries earlier, by the will of the majority. It is an intriguing paradox that the ‘wrathful Norsemen’, from whom the English prayed so fervently to their new god (having recently killed their old ones) to be saved, once settled, could be so civilized.
I now begin the climb towards Wrynose Pass. There are few pleasures I know in this life to surpass walking through mountain passes, and I have two to enjoy today. With the rugged mountains rising imperiously on either side, you toil upwards with the view ever more constricted. Then, at the top, the road levels out and you can rest for a while until, suddenly, the perspective explodes and the whole world opens out before and beneath you. That you are in the footsteps of the ancient Celts, Romans and Vikings further seasons this feast for the eyes. I proceed downhill in some excitement, since on the valley floor the tarred road swings slightly to the left and the footpath continues on the original Roman road, though as usual it is so worn, so overgrown with turf and moss, that it is difficult to discern. No matter though: whether on moss, gravel or tar, the landscape itself has guided me today along the same route that the Romans took, give or take, without needing to consult the history books.
Soon the road becomes a predictably straight farm track leading up to the atmospherically named Black Hall, but there I grind to a halt. The Roman road continues as a footpath for a while before winding up the hill towards Hardknott Pass, but a high stone wall blocks my way, and the wooden steps over it have either collapsed or, I can’t help thinking, been deliberately smashed to pieces. The landlord of Black Hall, however, even if innocent of the vandalism I suspect, is clearly in no hurry to repair the damage. His dogs are also barking and snarling threateningly behind a fence nearby, and so, knowing when I am not wanted, the cues being as unambiguous as they are here, I grudgingly take the alternative path back up to the tarred road above.
The aforementioned pleasure of the second mountain pass (Hardknott), however, goes a long way to removing the bitter taste in my mouth left by yet another embittered farmer wreaking revenge on ramblers, his misguidedly targeted arch enemies, and before long I am back on the Roman road looking down on the magnificence of Mediobogdvm, eternally guarding this road and its well-laden travellers against long-vanished marauders. Nothing can prepare you for this sight: Eskdale, wild and rugged here at the top, lush and wooded at the bottom, splays open, with the ancient city of Mediobogdvm sprawling across a rocky outcrop eight hundred feet above the sea. A footpath leaves the tarred road to the right, leading steeply downhill and taking you across the leveled ‘parade ground’, apparently the best example in the Western Empire, and down into the fort itself, with its sturdy grey walls snaking over the hillside. Here were stationed Dalmatian troops from the shores of the sea named after the Emperor Hadrian himself, the Mare hadriaticvm, or Adriatic Sea. The fort seems to have been built at the same time as the Wall, reinforcing the notion that from Arbeia on the North Sea to here, approaching the Irish Sea, is a single fortification, a single limes and a single road.
It is a joy to stride around these relatively towering walls and turrets, some reaching ten feet tall, playing at being a Roman infantryman, or even, as I am the only one here but for the inevitable sheep, the legate himself, especially as his house, the praetorivm, is still in evidence within. The bath house, as usual, lies outside the fort. Its rough, grey stone and green mossy floor seem primitive compared to the luxury of Cilvrnvm, which now seems strange and distant in my memory, though only twelve days ago and a mere fifty or sixty miles away as the crow flies. One of the rooms is circular, a so-called svdatorivm, from svdor, meaning ‘sweat’, hence a kind of ‘perspirarium’, if you will. Mediobogdvm also had a large vicvs in its day, apparently, though nothing remains. Strange to think of a civilian settlement in this wild mountain country, but once again this testifies to the vast Roman economy imported from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of the Irish. What is civilization but the sum total of its produce, both material and intellectual? Where it is produced is irrelevant.
By the time I have completed a circuit of the fort and all its buildings and taken my five hundredth digital photographic image, my belly is complaining, so it is with reluctance that I leave this miraculous fort in the now dramatically shifting light and head down into the valley for the last mile or two to the hostel. I take cena at the nearby and pleasant Woolpack Inn, a fitting name for a tavern in this green empire of sheep.
Deptford, 2nd October, 2014
Dies qvintvs decimvs: Mediobogdvm to Glannoventa
Via the forts at Glannoventa and Muncaster and along the Eskdale railway to the sea, being the fifth day before the Calends of June, 2763
At ientacvlvm I encounter the fellow hiker, Ralph, with whom I fell into conversation yesterday evening. A true gentleman of the fells, Ralph seems to know every inch of this wild country, but his dramatic and poetic Cumbrian mountain stories are told with humility, a rare thing these days, and also with great love, as though he were talking not about hills, but about the wife who apparently never accompanies him on his journeys. With his lumpen nose, crooked mouth and melancholy eyes, he is not blessed with good looks, but this only serves to make him more sympathetic. Though sheer prejudice on my part, I cannot help but mistrust so-called ‘conventionally attractive’ people, and am unfairly favourably disposed towards their opposite.
The lively post-ientacvlvm conversation is interrupted or, more correctly, hijacked by a young woman with wild red hair and thick-lensed spectacles, who now tip-toes to our table bearing an ancient, battered copy of Wainwright’s ‘Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells’. She doesn’t need to open her mouth for me to recognize my arch enemy. ‘Ha! We meet again, Geek Girl!’ I must restrain myself from saying as she deftly wheedles her way into our dialogue, after we, out of misguided politeness, summarize what we have just been talking about for her benefit. Being both old-fashioned in that way, or perhaps just plain timid, we let the lady talk, optimistically assuming that she will stop at some point and let us resume our thread. Dream on, suckers, as an American would say. No, whether we like it or not, she is going to dissect every tedious detail of that tedious fucking book, the bible of that rare, but unfortunately not shy creature, the Lesser Spotted Mountain Geek, and our input is only admitted if it also refers in an appropriately reverential tone to the sacred scrolls.
I note with interest that after ten or fifteen minutes of this subtle torture, Ralph wears the same pained, drained expression as the one I presumably wear, but he nevertheless stokes the flames of the interloper’s evangelical zeal with his own humble comments on the holy book. As usual, I try to stay out of it, but am mysteriously drawn into this world of mind-numbing minutiae. A shiver runs down my spine as my memory involuntarily ‘flashes back’ to the vampire-geeks in Castle Acre on the Chalk Road — also on the last day, oddly enough.
“It’s a very useful guide,” Ralph says diplomatically.
The lady remains silent. Such a self-evident truth need not be uttered by a mere mortal. She is daring him to say ‘but’, to challenge the word of God as revealed to the prophet Wainwright, and after a short pause to summon courage, Ralph does in fact but.
“But there’s too much detail. All those tiny drawings and long descriptions can be very tiring…”
I feel like yelling “Bravo!” It was a brave thing to say and it needed saying. What my countrymen often fail to grasp is that ‘geeks’ (and I thank our cousins in the New World for having the insight to identify and classify these creatures), for the most part, are bullies. Do not be fooled! They hide behind their glasses and their harmless, arcane pursuits as smokescreens to conceal their ultimate purpose: power. Oh yes, my friends: the geeks and their companions-in-arms, the dorks and nerds, far from serving their fellow man and enriching the world with their insanely narrow, and therefore narrow-minded erudition, they seek only to dominate it, or at least, as much of it as they can. One day they will destroy us all with their counter-productive, at worst destructive over-specialization; for factoids, details and data, the tinier and further removed from ‘the big picture’ the better, are the life-blood of the vampiric geek and worth infinitely more to him than illogical, unstructured, ill-informed human beings and their sad little lives.
Unfortunately, Ralph does not, or will not know this. Perhaps he is better-natured than me, or perhaps he is afraid of the awful truth, but in either case he lets the lady bully him with her unquenchable thirst for rambling tedium (in both senses) for the better part of the next half an hour. I can see from his face that he is aching to get away from this bore, to escape to the freedom and peace of his beloved fells, but the lady is utterly indifferent to his need. I am blessed with time, however, and can make use of this monologue to arm myself against future encounters. We eventually make our excuses and head for the door, but Geek Girl is still pursuing us, still talking at us, even as we make our ‘desperate bid for freedom’.
I bid my farewell to Ralph and once more turn around to go backwards, though thankfully not because I am lost, like I was in Lvgvvalivm. No, today I have the luxury of time, and so I leave my rucksack in the hostel and head back up the valley towards Mediobogdvm, delightfully unburdened. After an hour or so of leaping about among the ancient masonry, I go back and pick up my wretchedly heavy pack for the last mercifully short stretch on foot.
For a pleasant mile or so I stroll by the surprisingly quiet waters of the River Esk, the Roman road having been long gone, even before the asphalt roads came and ruined everything. The vegetation has suddenly grown lusher from the rough, glacier-scoured landscape I passed through at Hardknott Pass yesterday, as though the Ice Age has ended overnight. A little lamb dances along the top of a dry stone dyke, playing at being a goat, and I recall once seeing two other lambs, while I was walking in the Pennines, taking turns to climb onto and then leap off their reclining, indulgent mother’s back.
In the next moment I find myself at Beckfoot Railway Station. I have timed my arrival to coincide with that of the steam-powered locomotive, and I don’t have long to wait before it rolls into the picturesque doll’s house station. The thing is tiny, like a child’s toy train! Known locally as ‘Lal Ratty’ (Cumbrian dialect for ‘little railway’), the only three-foot wide railway line was built in 2628 (1875) to transport iron ore from nearby mines to Glannoventa. Given that George Stephenson (remember?) was born in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, it seems apt to finish the journey on the revolutionary mode of transport he devoted his life to developing. Moreover, I am dog-tired and footsore after this exhausting odyssey and I crave a little comfort. I choose an open-topped carriage, for better views, and sit down to have the prandivm I procured at the station café, travelling the last glorious miles of the Frontier Road on the comical little train, but in grand style.
Puff puff peep peep goes the toy train westwards along the river, but after a mile or so we veer to the right, around Muncaster Fell and through woodlands. Backward glances to the shrinking Cumbrian mountains are to no avail: tempvs fvgit, as the Romans used to say, and time flies never faster than when you want it to stop. In forty fleeing minutes we arrive at the port of Glannoventa on the Oceanvs Hibernicvs, now going by the name of Ravenglass on the Irish Sea, and my journey is suddenly over.
Or is it? I have a cunning plan to arrest time. I hurry to the guest house I have booked, past an uncharacteristically aggressive and territorial Saint Bernard’s hound, thankfully imprisoned behind a stone wall which I hope is too high for the brute to jump, and there dump my rucksack on my bed, but not before the garrulous landlord has explained the history, inner workings and dangers of every inch of the old building of which, having spent considerable time and monies restoring it, he is evidently extremely proud. After freeing myself with much nodding and many reallys? I hasten southwards, trying not to look at the crumbling remains of ancient Glannoventa yet, then turn eastwards through more woodlands.
I am going backwards again, like I did at Vindolanda, Lvgvvalivm, Maia and Mediobogdvm. What a fool I am, trying to turn back the clock! Time waits for no man, as folk say here. You can’t step in the same river twice, said the wise Heraclitus. I know all this, thanks to the sages of old, so why am I fleeing back to Aesica, where I had been happy with Miss T ten days ago? For that matter, why am I still in Frankfurt with M twelve years ago, furtively glancing at this goddess-like creature, busy delighting the crowds with her performances? When it comes right down to it, aren’t I still in Berlin, excitedly exploring the newly liberated city with the charming, mysterious, eruptive Fräulein K. nearly twenty years ago? Perhaps I’m still sitting on the grass at Framlingham Castle with my long-lost friend J1 and his mother one sunny summer’s day in 2730 (1977). Like the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages and the Stone Age, I know these times are dead and buried, but I can’t help myself: I must try to keep them alive.
Half an hour later I arrive at the austere grey walls of Muncaster Castle, the suffix betraying the former presence of a Roman fort. Though nothing has been confirmed by excavation, and I will soon find out why not, due to Muncaster’s proximity to the major fort and vicvs at Glannoventa, it is believed that it was merely a fortlet, or castellvm (from which the English word ‘castle’ derives) supporting or guarding the latter on the road from Mediobogdvm.
I pay the fee to enter the modern castle, though such ‘stately homes’ usually hold little interest for me. In fact, it sometimes makes me cringe to see how the impoverished old upper class is forced to throw open its doors to riff raff like me in order to pay the enormous heating bills. In truth, I am merely, as the Americans say, ‘dicking about’ and delaying the end of my journey. I pace about the musty old palace listlessly. In one room a shameless cat is sleeping in high style on an ancient, lavishly carved four-poster bed, as though it owns the place. At the end of a dark corridor hangs a twenty-fourth (seventeenth) century portrait of a certain Thomas Skelton, better known now as Tom Fool, Muncaster’s last jester and progenitor of all England’s ‘tomfoolery’. Given all the tomfoolery of my life of late, still married to and ruled by a vengeful harpy after nearly five years of separation, still playing childish courtship games with Miss T and still clinging to a dead-end marriage and an unfulfilling dead-end job in a dead-end town, it is as though I am not so much staring at a portrait, but at a mirror. However, a closer look at the figure in the picture, with its cold, staring, somewhat dead eyes, and a little background information about the subject shakes me out of my gloomy thoughts. Quite the clown, Skelton would sit under a tree outside the castle and misdirect lost travellers to the quicksands of the estuary, where some would meet their appalling deaths in the treacherous mire. From the same vantage point, he would carefully watch the people who came and went, and by this means came to know that his master’s daughter was cavorting with a lowly local carpenter. After informing said master, an ancestor of the current owner, of these goings-on, he was instructed to dispatch the amorous tradesman. Skelton won the carpenter’s confidence and got him blind drunk. When the poor wretch fell asleep, jolly Tom Fool used the carpenter’s own tools, a mallet and chisel, to decapitate him, reputedly quipping when he had finished his grisly work, “When the lazy dolt wakes up, he’ll have trouble finding his head.” Tomfoolery, indeed! I shall never use that word the same way again.
A disturbing thought strikes me: both M and Miss T are clowns of the highest caliber. With their comical dance routines, uncanny mimicry, razor-sharp wit and derisive, caustic satire of those that cross them, they charm, disarm and bludgeon everyone they meet. M’s sense of humour, moreover, is so hard-edged and sharp that its targets frequently bleed. Both are deceitful dissemblers, both vain and easily wounded. That clowning and deceit are closely related is no epiphany, but does not Tom Fool also show that it is sometimes, perhaps often kin with violence as well? Beware the clown, little dolt, lest you lose your head like the poor carpenter, and as you did in your dream!
Muncaster is supposed to be haunted, of course — a fable for tourists, perhaps, but one I do not doubt for a moment as I scamper back down the stairs with my neck hair standing on end…
Before I leave, I am privileged to receive a private audience with the lady of Muncaster herself, a stately dame in her sixties. Straight away I ask her about the Roman fort, of course.
“Oh yes, that,” she says, failing to conceal her irritation at the inconvenience of history. “The archaeologists are always pestering me to let them pull the floorboards up, but they’ve got another thing coming if they think for a moment I’ll allow that.”
“But isn’t it amazing to think of a Roman fort right here, under your feet?” I say, frothing slightly at the mouth.
She does not answer.
“And even if there’s nothing left of the fort itself,” I continue excitably, “that it still lives on in the castrvm part of the name?”
She looks at me as though I am clinically insane.
Leaving the castle, I find more reasons to dither in the beautiful gardens and in the ‘owl sanctuary’, with its countless fine examples of the wise predators, but the sight of caged animals always makes me sad, and I head back through the woods after a while with a heavy heart.
Half an hour later I arrive back at the fort of Glannoventa, eleventh (fourth) century home to a cohort of Belgians of the Morini tribe, the same that had helped Ivlivs and Clavdivs launch their invasions of Britannia, and I may finally open my eyes to the beautiful, melancholy ruins of the fort’s bath house. The walls stand high, well over my head, with arched doorways and a decorative niche, where perhaps a bust of Hadrian once perched to remind the bathers of where their loyalties should lie. It is the perfect end to the magnificent Frontier Road, for is not the bath house the very essence of civilization, symbolic of our striving, whether wise or not, to lift ourselves out of Mother Nature’s murky swamp and to scrape off the mud therefrom? The Romans perfected the technology of the aqueduct, the hypocaust and the steam room, but they had no soap, so they oiled themselves up and scraped their skin with a curved tool called a strigillvm or strigil. The story goes that Hadrian once saw an old, worn-out soldier in a bath house rubbing his back against the wall, and when he asked him why he was doing this, the old man replied that he couldn’t afford a slave to scrape his back. Hadrian took pity on him and gave him money for this. Word of the emperor’s generosity got round, as it will, and the next time he visited the bath house, he saw many ‘poor’ men rubbing themselves against the walls as the old soldier had done. He laughed and told them to share a strigillvm and take turns scraping each other’s backs. I think of the current consul, the corrupt media tyrant Berlusconi, and wonder whether we will ever see such a good-humoured, generous-spirited philosopher-poet-king such as Hadrian ever again.
I clamber over the railway line to search for the earthworks of Glannoventa’s western walls, looking out across the lonely sands and to the Oceanvs Hibernicvs, but there is nothing more to see — they tumbled into that ocean centuries ago. There is nowhere else to go now; my journey is over.
Deptford, 5th October, 2014
Afterthought: Dies vltimvs?
Back home via Barrow-in-Furness and Londinivm, being the fourth day before the Calends of June, 2763
Ravenglass, sitting at the estuary of three rivers in a natural harbour of sand dunes, is a pretty, peaceful village. I have a few hours to kill before my train home, and so, ever clinging to the past, ever going backwards, I head back to the Roman fort. A man and his dog are strolling among the ruins — both for their own reasons enjoying this lovely spot. The locals are proud of this place. How else could so much of it, though little enough, have survived these nineteen centuries? They call it Walls Castle, the name betraying both knowledge and ignorance of its origins at one and the same time. The past is always slipping away from us. For every stone or name or love that survives the ravages of time, a thousand thousands perish. Glannoventa is merely the best guess at the name of this place; it could as well be Glannibanta, or even Tunnocelum. We still remember Abelard and Heloise, Anthony and Cleopatra and sometimes even Hadrian and Antinous, but love mostly lives on only in fiction.
I’ve spent two weeks traipsing along this glorious, rugged frontier road, carved out by a people obsessed with a dream of bringing the civilisation they had inherited from the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Egyptians to the very ends of the earth. Did they succeed? Was it worth the enormous trouble they went to? Were they arrogant and deluded for wishing to do so? All the evidence suggests that when the Romans left, after nearly four hundred years, though a few generations at most still clung on to the old habits, life in Britain gradually drifted back to the way it was before the ‘foreigners’ arrived. Villas, bath houses, forums, fountains, sewers and aqueducts were all abandoned and left to rot. Men let their hair and beards grow long and stopped bathing. Unlike in Gaul and Spain, which were also inhabited by Celtic cousins, the Latin language and the practice of writing disappeared. Within a hundred years, it was as though the Romans had never been here. The crumbling bath houses became cattle byres and only some of the roads remained well trodden. I wonder what Hadrian would have made of all the decay. Perhaps he would just have laughed and said, “It was fun while it lasted…”
Yes, all good things must come to an end: the Roman Empire, holidays, childhood, ancient roads and love. But then again, in the words of the immortal Israel Gershovitz:
Our romance won’t end on a sorrowful note,
Though by tomorrow you are gone.
The song is ended, but as the songwriter wrote,
‘The melody lingers on…’
I climb onto the train to Barrow-in-Furness and with it trundle round the beautiful South Cumbrian coastline, humming the melody of the song and lost in strange reveries. I’ve travelled the whole length of the Frontier Road, but my journey is not yet over. For a short while, the limits of the Roman Empire were pushed northwards into Scotland, and I know that one day I will walk Hadrian’s Wall’s little brother too, but first I must attend to long-neglected business back home. For twelve years I have been living in a lucid dream, but it is time to wake up and face reality now. The followers of Siddhartha Gautama believe in the continual rebirth of the imperfect soul, until perfection is attained, and I believe it too, because I dreamt it, but before you can be reborn, you first must die.
Deptford, 7th October, 2014
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