A History of Ancient Britain (30 page)

I had met up with Burridge in the hope of watching him cast a bronze sword – and found I was to be a much more active participant than I had initially imagined. He had pre-prepared a
two-part sword mould of fired clay and this he heated in a gas furnace to ensure it would not shatter on contact with the molten metal. Once he was content that all the temperatures were correct
– a moment reached only after several hours of careful fire-tending – he stood the glowing mould upright in a cylinder packed with sand, ready for the all-important pour. Liquid bronze
is every bit as mesmerising as copper: again there was the illusion that something alive jumped from the crucible and down into the mould. There is a hot smell too, wholesome and somehow
reminiscent of baking. After just a few seconds we were able to sink the mould into a cauldron of cold water, to cool it. I was afraid it would explode, that the change in temperature would be too
abrupt, but it just hissed and sizzled like noise from chipped potatoes lowered into boiling fat, and released a coiling wreath of steam. Once it
was cool enough Burridge
let me use a chisel to knock the fired clay away in chunks to reveal the sword.

Again the mystery was all around, the disbelief that accompanies anything that confounds mind and eye, or at least asks for more than a scientific explanation. How can it be? What had been a
glowing orange liquid, moments before, radiating heat like the sun, was now an elegant green sword, shaped like a long, thin tongue and already hard enough to chop wood with. How could that be
possible?

No wonder we have ended up with legends like the sword in the stone – a mighty weapon created by magic and drawn from the rock only by the once and future king. Without the benefit of
schoolboy science, no witness to the creation of a sword from a pile of dust balanced within a fire could ever hope to understand what has just happened. Even Burridge, as modest and unassuming an
expert as you will ever meet, was happy to admit he was nervous every single time – even after making hundreds of swords. The possibility that the process will fail, for some reason, is ever
present and the emergence of an intact, perfect sword is always greeted with relief. It was, and still is, about some volatile, mysterious magic.

Unlike copper, bronze was for much more than just show. It could be made into all manner of very useful, very effective items – knives, axe-heads, tools of all descriptions, swords. In the
hands of master bronze-workers Britain would be led into a whole new age.

The spread of metal had all sorts of consequences for every level of society. For one thing, the time was now past when everyone had to spend every waking hour working in the fields to grow
enough food. For a few individuals, those with an entrepreneurial bent, say, or the brute power and determination to get their own way, metal opened up new worlds of opportunities. Sources of
copper and tin were limited, and scattered far and wide across Britain, Ireland and the rest of Europe. Inhabitants of previously overlooked places, who had once been on the periphery, were thrust
suddenly centre-stage, purely because of the nature of the rocks beneath their feet. People wanting bronze had to gain access to copper and tin as well – had to find ways to move those raw
materials around, bring them together – often across considerable distances. For the first time society was vulnerable to modern-sounding concepts and preoccupations like ‘supply and
demand’.

Specialist metal-workers, metal traders and, most importantly of all, those who could control the new trade routes, would create positions of
power for themselves; and
where there was power there was the potential to obtain personal wealth. For that new, self-made elite of the Early Bronze Age the Stone Age must have seemed a quaint and distant memory.

In this New World it was no longer just the ancient, sacred landscapes of monuments and tombs that mattered either. Now there was an importance and a value placed upon practical, natural
features like harbours, river routes and valleys. First the causewayed enclosures and then later the great stone circles and monuments of the Late Neolithic had given scattered communities reasons
to meet up – and the places at which to do so. There had been husbands and wives to find, binding ties to establish and maintain for the good of body and soul. With the advent of metal the
need for ties became practical and lucrative as well. Beautiful, desirable polished axes of rare and special stone had been exchanged over great distances, given names and treasured, passed within
and between clans as powerful heirlooms. Now there were other things to covet – metal objects – and the making and obtaining of those new objects of desire demanded even stronger links
between disparate locations and more clearly defined and ordered ways of moving between them.

Some of the earliest bronze items in Britain have been recovered from sites in the north-east of Scotland – axes created from a union of Irish copper and Cornish tin. They were cast around
2200
BC
, very early in the story of British bronze, and whoever it was that had the authority to coordinate such an operation at that time, to obtain and move the necessary
ores around the country, was elevated into a position of power; and that power was rooted in the control of one particularly well-defined natural feature of the landscape.

The Great Glen slashes diagonally across Scotland, from south-west to north-east, like the scar left by a Jacobite’s broadsword. It separates the Highlands from the Lowlands and has, from
the very beginning, shaped the destinies of those people born either side of it. In fact it is nothing more or less than a geological fault line. The landmass of Scotland – like that of the
rest of Britain and Ireland – has been bundled together from assorted bits and pieces during billions of years. Other continents came and went, formed and disintegrated as the tectonic plates
making up Earth’s surface floated aimlessly across the planet’s molten core from south to north and east to west. Occasionally they knocked lumps from one another in the course of that
endless bump and grind and eventually a handful of those fragments came together, like pastry scraps crumpled into one lump, to
form the dry land we know today as Britain.
Scotland’s Great Glen is the most obvious physical evidence of it all and that sword wound is where two of the plates come together. The fracture was later exploited by an Ice Age glacier
that ground its way along the fault line from north-east to south-west, and all of that upheaval has resulted in one huge valley – a convenient, low-lying straight line that cuts across the
country more directly than any motorway ever could.

The south-western entrance to the Great Glen (the slip road onto that motorway, as it were) is called Kilmartin Glen and runs through Argyll between the town of Oban and the village of
Lochgilphead. The landscape is of such breathtaking beauty it is easy to see why people were drawn there from the earliest times, and in fact the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic were regular
visitors as soon as the ice sheets withdrew 10,000 years ago. Some places are just good for the soul.

Something like 350 monuments are clustered within a six-mile radius of the modern-day village of Kilmartin – everything from tombs to standing stones and from cup and ring marks to
medieval castles, proof of how much the place has always mattered, to countless generations.

It was during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, however, that people began really to go to town, developing what can only be described as an entire ritual landscape in which individual monuments
are best seen as parts of one elaborate scheme. It is even thought onlookers might once have gathered on the natural terraces on the valley sides to watch ceremonies and processions performed among
the henges, stone circles and burial cairns on the valley floor below. Needless to say, Kilmartin Glen has been a destination for generations of archaeology students, and I was lucky enough to have
archaeologist Alison Sheridan as my guide. I first worked for Sheridan – who showed me around those Neolithic houses of Orkney’s Skara Brae – when she codirected the Kilmartin axe
factory dig with Mark Edmonds, the Langdale axe-man, in the early 1990s. She is one of those academics who wear their knowledge lightly.

She explained how Kilmartin Glen was like a roundabout, a hub where copper from southern Ireland and tin from Cornwall were brought together for onward passage to bronze consumers living in
Scotland’s north-east. For those tribes whose territory Kilmartin Glen was – those whose ancestors had long ago settled the area simply to exploit its fertile soils – the
fledgling fashion for the new metal provided a new and wholly unexpected source of wealth. Picture a kind of prehistoric customs post, where people wishing
to pass through
the portal in either direction had to declare whatever goods they were carrying and pay the necessary duty. Simple geography had dictated that the people controlling Kilmartin Glen were in a
position to demand a share of the constant flow of metal items

It almost goes without saying that those metal traders likely resented the demands of the inhabitants of Kilmartin – and would surely have preferred to pass through without parting with so
much as a crumb of their valuable wares. In other words, it would have been beholden upon the locals to demonstrate the ability to back up their demands with the threat of force – leading
inevitably to the rise of those with the confidence to throw their weight around.

The most visible, and arguably the most famous, prehistoric feature of Kilmartin Glen is the so-called ‘linear cemetery’ – a sequence of tombs strung out for more than three
miles along a line running south by south-west from Kilmartin village; it is uncertain precisely how many there were in ancient times. Ploughing and field clearance during the intervening millennia
may have destroyed much of what was created in the Bronze Age, but five tombs are still visible today and their scale indicates that those interred within were folk of substance.

Unlike the communal tombs of the Neolithic, those of Kilmartin’s linear cemetery were built to contain just one or two individuals, each within a stone-lined cist or grave buried beneath a
vast cairn of boulders. One of them, called Nether Largie North Cairn (10 feet at its highest point and about 70 feet across), was reconstructed following its excavation. Inside is a single grave
cut into the floor. Propped up alongside, leaning against the wall of the modern-built chamber, is the massive capstone that once sealed the grave, and it is another marvel. Carved and pecked into
the surface that was once the underside – the one the departed loved one was meant to spend eternity looking up at – are at least 10 axe-heads, as well as dozens of cup marks.

Here then was a man or woman of great importance – one at the very top of the society that had grown rich from controlling the passage of metal through its territory. The last axes he or
she would look upon were plainly for his or her eyes only, an eternal reminder of the object the new wealth was built upon: the bronze axe.

Excavation of a stone cist inside a burial mound at Poltalloch, near Lochgilphead, in 1928, unearthed over 100 individually carved and drilled beads and trapezoidal plates of Whitby Jet lying
among fragments of
cremated human bone and lumps of charcoal and ochre. This was the grave of someone special, someone worthy of honour in life and death. Once the beads and
plates had formed an elaborate necklace, in fact a masterpiece of the jeweller’s art. Strung on multiple cords, each shorter than the last so that the whole formed a near-complete breastplate
of black, it would have been as captivating as a quadrant of the night sky. It is now on display in the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh, and makes a person wonder just who would have
owned such a treasure 4,150 years ago. (When Queen Victoria, mourning the death of her husband Prince Albert, commissioned black mourning jewellery made of Whitby Jet she was just the latest, in an
extremely long line of wealthy women, to covet a particularly unusual and special material. The fossilised wood of Monkey Puzzle trees, Whitby Jet has been prized for thousands of years on account
not just of its shiny appearance but also because it feels quite unlike anything else. Rather than being cold to the touch like stone, jet feels almost warm, like varnished wood. It also has
electrostatic qualities, so that when rubbed against the skin it will attract small particles of dust and chaff – surely a magical property for people living in a pre-scientific world.)

She – and such delicate finery was surely intended for a woman rather than a man – had had time during her few decades of life to develop refined, even exotic tastes. She also had
the wealth to indulge them. Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, is over 300 miles from Kilmartin and yet she was able to order up a bespoke item of jewellery from a specialist craftsman there, as
remote, in modern British terms, as one living somewhere in the Far East. Did she commission it herself so she could power-dress to impress? Was she then a woman of substance in her own right, a
female head of a dominant clan? Or was it a gift from a loving husband, father or mother who wanted to show how much the woman mattered to him or her by adorning her with jewellery made of stone as
black as night and imbued with magical powers? And when she died what more fitting item could she wear on her last journey into that dark than a necklace made of a blackness that attracted motes of
dust like eternity pulls the sun, Moon and stars?

Kilmartin Glen, at the start of the second millennium
BC
, may be a snapshot of a moment in time – when Britain found within herself the wherewithal to produce the
kinds of raw materials and finished products that had currency in the wider world. Sheridan goes further – arguing that by around 2100
BC
the communities of Kilmartin
would have attracted international attention for their metalwork and for prestige items like the
jet necklace. She happily describes that part of Scotland, at that time, as
‘the epicentre of cool,’ as though communities thousands of miles away to the south and east – back in the lands of the Mediterranean and the rest of Europe – would have
suddenly become aware that smiths and craftsmen working in the British archipelago were producing items of the highest quality.