A History of Ancient Britain (27 page)

According to the larger legend, Wolund’s skills with metal were coveted by King Nidud of Sweden, who sent a troop of horsemen to capture him. Having brought him to his castle, Nidud first
had Wayland hamstrung so he could never leave his forge, never stop making tools and weapons; and the notion of the lame smith is one that occurs again and again. In Greek tradition there is
Hephaestus, god of the blacksmith’s fire and worshipped by craftsmen of all sorts. Alone of all the pantheon, Hephaestus was imperfect – ugly and lame. The son of Hera, Queen of the
gods, he had made the mistake of intervening in a quarrel between his mother and her husband Zeus. Zeus was enraged and threw Hephaestus from the top of Mount Olympus. His fall from grace lasted
for a whole day until he landed on the island of Lemnos where, forever broken, he built his forge inside the fires of a volcano and set to work.

It seems that from the very beginning metal was seen as something that came at a price.

The Britain in which metal first arrived was still at the height of the Stone Age. By around 2500
BC
farming had been established for centuries and people were living
lives that were still, at least in part, nomadic. Fixed settlements and villages were in the main the stuff of the future and for now it was about moving, season by season, in search of new grazing
and fresh soil. Everything a family needed and possessed – food, shelter, clothing, tools and the rest – was obtained directly from the natural world.

Still central to everything was flint – the same that had been sourced and worked for uncounted thousands, even millions of years, and by the Late Neolithic period it was needed in vast
quantities. Farming had enabled the population to grow into the tens if not hundreds of thousands and with more and more people came the need for more and more cleared and prepared fields. By the
middle of the third millennium
BC
, the demand for tools to get all that work done was approaching a point where only industrial levels of tool production could sustain the
pace.

A real sense of that Neolithic demand is to be had from a visit to the flint mines known as Grime’s Graves, near Brandon on the Norfolk-Suffolk border. Now in the care of English Heritage,
the site encompasses almost 100 acres and the whole place is protected as a Scheduled Ancient Monument. No wonder. From around 3000
BC
and for more than a thousand
years thereafter miners dug at least 433 separate vertical shafts – some as much as 40 feet deep and 30 feet in diameter – to reach thick seams of flint. (Flint
is a mysterious material in its own right, chiefly found as nodules or larger masses within sedimentary rocks like chalk and limestone. Even now geologists are unclear about precisely how it forms
but it seems likely that at some point, millions of years ago, a thick, gloopy material trickled inside gaps and cavities bored into harder sediment by sea creatures like molluscs. Chalk itself is
the accumulation of the skeletons of trillions upon trillions of tiny sea creatures that lived short lives in warm tropical oceans before dying and sinking to the seabed. Their skeletons were made
of calcium and over time built into thick layers that were eventually compressed to form chalk. During subsequent millennia, pressure and time conspired to change the consistencies of that
layer-cake of sediments – and in the case of whatever thick mineral soup leaked into those cavities in the chalk, the end product was the glassy, brittle material called flint.)

At Grime’s Graves (an Anglo-Saxon name meaning ‘the quarries dug by the masked man’) the miners knew precisely the kind of flint they wanted – because in places they dug
straight through shallower seams of lower-quality material in search of what lay many feet beneath.

The sheer physical effort involved in the excavation of the mines almost beggars belief. Working primarily with picks made from red deer antlers, Neolithic miners removed thousands of tons of
chalk from every shaft. Archaeologists have worked out it was likely that no more than perhaps a couple were open and in use at any one time – so that the resource was carefully and
methodically exploited. As they dug deeper the miners must have built wooden platforms connected by ladders and then, on reaching the flint, began working horizontally to create rabbit warrens of
galleries and tunnels. They would have encountered the flint as whole thick floors of material, like solidified spills of toffee and treacle, and this they would have smashed into pieces, with
stone hammers, ready for removal to the surface. Back in the daylight other specialists worked the raw flint into blanks for axes that were then distributed far and wide throughout the country for
finishing and eventual use. For a world of farmers, the endless work of cutting down trees, building shelters and tools and all the rest of the daily grind of toiling over crops and animals, axes
were the essential item. It has been estimated that thousands of tons of axes were mined from Grime’s Graves during the millennia when the area was actively exploited.

Now several of the shafts have been reopened so that it is possible to
climb down into the ancient dark. And what you find there is more than just a mine – it is a
glimpse of a surviving part of the Neolithic world. Some of the tunnels are so tiny and confined they could only ever have been worked by children. Here and there archaeologists have found hearths,
human remains and what have even been interpreted as shrines. Bones and skulls and also personal items including finished axes and other tools and belongings were intentionally left behind from
time to time, before the shafts were finally backfilled.

As well as stabilising the landscape above, the act of backfilling may have mattered on a more spiritual level. It seems possible the miners understood they were taking something from deep
inside the living body of Mother Earth – and that they were concerned to make amends, to pay for the harvest. They may also have been at pains to try and ensure there would always be more
flint to mine. Perhaps they believed the flint was something else that ‘grew’ from the Earth, no different in many ways to an edible root or tuber. For farmers used to reseeding the
ground with some portion of the latest crop to ensure next year’s harvest, it may well have seemed logical, vital even, to put back the odd axe in the hope of ‘growing’ more.

All of it smacks of a highly ordered and organised activity. The season’s work at the mine would have required the marshalling, in one place and at one time, of a large group of
like-minded people. Having set aside the tasks more directly related to farming, they had to gather for weeks at a place like Grime’s Grave and set about tool preparation on a near-industrial
scale. Rather than relying on hunting for the supply of antlers for picks they may have corralled a herd of red deer somewhere close by so that the material could be guaranteed. As well as the
miners there would have been a whole community working on the surface – preparing the clothes, food, shelter and tools required by the men toiling below ground. It seems, too, there was a
holy man or woman – someone whose preoccupation was the well-being of the mine and its contents.

So, long before there was metal, when it came to obtaining the essential material of flint, the Stone Age farmers had already developed sophisticated approaches to meeting their own needs, and
those of the planet. It was into such a world that there came, around 2500
BC
, a technology that would blow even those sensitive, inquiring minds. Metal arrived with such
momentum it would eventually catapult Britain right out of the Stone Age, where it had languished, in truth, since human time began. When ‘British’
society
landed again after that explosive impact, it was well on the way towards the world of today.

It seems the earliest landfall by the metal-makers – those who carried in their heads and hands the wondrous knowledge of how to take special rock and transform it into something utterly
knew – was not in Britain but in south-west Ireland. At Ross Island, surrounded by the Killarney Lakes of County Kerry, archaeologists have identified the source of the metal used to make the
very first metal tools found anywhere in Britain.

Irish archaeologist Billy O’Brien has spent decades learning about the lives and times of people who gathered there as early as 2,500 years ago to exploit rich seams of copper.
O’Brien explained that the first copper mines were dug in the Balkans, as much as 6,000 years ago. By 3000
BC
pockets of copper technology were appearing further west,
in northern Italy and elsewhere along the Mediterranean coast. It took another five centuries for knowledge and understanding of the potential of copper deposits to reach north-west Europe and when
it did so, it arrived fully formed in the heads and hands of experts. ‘Copper metallurgy first appeared in Ireland at a relatively advanced level, probably through contacts with metal-using
groups on the Continent,’ he said.

People equipped with lifetimes of metal-working experience were therefore prospecting in south-west Ireland when they spotted what they were looking for in rock formations at Ross Island. Copper
ore is relatively unremarkable and the sight of it would only mean anything to someone who had had it pointed out to them before. Having located the naturally occurring seams, the foreigners set to
work with a will, likely aided and abetted by the locals. Seams were exploited by lighting fires against rock faces to make them brittle enough to shatter with stone hammers. In this way gaping
quarries were created as miners smashed their way into the seams. Anyone visiting the location today would take the deep gashes and fissures as natural features – but they are the work of the
earliest copper miners in either Britain or Ireland.

As well as the extraction sites, O’Brien has also identified and excavated various processing areas, where stone hammers and anvils were used for pounding the large lumps of ore into
coarse powder ready for transformation into the metal itself. It bears mentioning that apart from a single droplet of smelted copper, not one metal item has been recovered from Ross Island. Instead
the processed ore was taken or sent elsewhere, to be made into axe-heads and other tools.

Wherever it was taking place, that processing – smelting being the correct term – would have been a magical wonder for people watching it for the first time.
I grew up in a world from which men flew to the Moon and back. Like everyone else alive in the developed world of today I take for granted wonders like mobile phones, computers, the Internet,
wi-fi, Skype, the Large Hadron Collider and talk of quarks and String Theory – but with my hand on my heart I will swear I have never witnessed anything more viscerally amazing than the
transformation of powdered rock into molten metal. No matter how carefully the science of it all is explained, I defy anyone to watch the process without a lump forming in the throat. It is magical
enough to make a man cry.

The secret lies in heat – the kind of extreme heat that can be coaxed from a fire only by using bellows. Just a pair of leather bags suffices and, provided they are pumped rhythmically for
long enough and their manufactured breaths funnelled into the flames by a tube of fired clay, then the temperature can be pushed high enough to make the magic happen.

Copper ore is called malachite and appears as a faintly greenish rock, sometimes shot through with black bands (the Romans’ principal source of the stuff was Cyprus and it is from cyprium,
or
cuprum
, ‘the metal of Cyprus’, that we get our version of its name). As well as copper, the ore contains atoms of both oxygen and carbon that must be removed to leave pure
copper behind. The powdered ore is first ‘roasted’ in a fire, a process that drives off any carbon dioxide, leaving just copper oxide – which is a chemical combination of copper
and oxygen. The copper oxide is then heated a second time – to nearly 1,100 degrees centigrade, using the bellows – in a fire composed primarily of charcoal. Charcoal is rich in carbon
and as it burns it creates an atmosphere around the ore that is low in oxygen, so that the oxygen within the ore is drawn out and consumed by the oxygen-starved flames. With the oxygen gone, only
copper then remains.

If this is complicated to explain and to understand, then imagine how much trial and error must have been employed by the very first people to attempt the miracle in the first place. Who even
thinks up such a possibility – that of changing the very chemistry of stone so that it becomes another material entirely – far less finds a way to make it real? It must surely have
taken hundreds, if not thousands of years of experiment by people before the process was finally nailed down; and it was the possession of such knowledge, so hard won, that set the metal-makers
apart from other men and women.

On a number of occasions now I have had the privilege of standing beside some of those who have learned to replicate the techniques of ancient copper smelting – and
every time the miracle has taken me by surprise. When the temperature is just right, for just long enough, what had simply been dry powder heaped into a crucible of fired clay turns spontaneously
into liquid. It is impossible to describe the colour or the consistency of that liquid. Suffice to say that when the crucible is fished out of the glowing embers using a pair of tongs, and tipped
up to let the copper pour out, it seems to be filled with something alive.

If molten copper is like anything, then it is a little like blood – but rosy-orange blood, viscous and with a perfect sheen on its surface, reflective like a mirror, or a living eye. No
matter how delicately that crucible is tipped the liquid seems suddenly to leap up and out of it, lightning fast and darting like a lizard. Its life, if life it is, is less than brief however, just
a few moments between crucible and mould before it seems to die before your very eyes – so that what had been quick and nimble like a flash of inspiration is suddenly still again, for ever.
The sheen that had been on its surface dies too, leaving behind a steadily dulling patina that becomes first pink, with a hint of green, before passing through many shades of red. It is elemental
stuff – like a glimpse of what must happen inside the heart of a star – and for want of anything else to burn while you watch, the living metal draws your breath towards it and consumes
that as well, so that you gasp.