A History of Ancient Britain (4 page)

It must have been a strange agony for many of those eighteenth-century thinkers – at once sensing deep time and yet hobbled by their religious faith in a near-instantaneous Creation.
Surely as fascinating as the scientific discoveries sweeping Europe and the world in those enlightened decades is the fact that the natural truth had been lost in the first place? After all, at
least some of the Ice Ages were witnessed and indeed endured by modern humans. People exactly the same as us were driven from their lands as the climate deteriorated – and then generations
later their descendants stepped gingerly back onto the new landscapes revealed by the glaciers’ eventual retreat. At times in our past therefore we must have known all about the
ice – its comings and goings – and for generations those facts must have been passed, parent to child, as part of the lore of the tribes. And then at some point, for some
reason, that part of the story was left untold by some father to some son. Over time fewer and fewer children heard it until finally it was lost to the minds of men.

When and why did a story so huge cease to be worth the telling – so that the truth of it had to be relearned centuries or millennia later, discovered as though for the first time by
scientists like James Hutton and Louis Agassiz? We will never know.

The same can be said for the rest of the truth of Britain’s ancient history, which we still struggle to piece together today: how we came to till the land instead of hunt . . . the
thinking that inspired people to build great houses of timber, earth and stone for their dead . . . the nature of the religion that made them raise avenues and circles of stone . . . the reason why
Stonehenge was built and what it was for – all of it. A day came when the need for Stonehenge finally passed. After all those centuries of meaning and understanding it was left alone. But for
generations after the last ceremony, the last gathering in the shadows of those trilithons, people would still have known the story – the explanation for all that work. Why did they stop
passing it on? That so much has been lost and forgotten is every bit as astonishing as the discoveries that gradually fill in the gaps.

By his insight, Hutton had exposed the reality of an ancient world – millions upon millions of years in the making – and Agassiz had found it shaped most recently not by God’s
wrathful flood but by pitiless ice. There were consequences from all this new understanding, a price to be paid. Since the world was so very old there was suddenly unexpected time to be filled. It
was surely inconceivable that the place had been empty for all these hitherto unexpected ages. Something must have lived there all the while and as well as some
thing
perhaps the world had
also been home to some
one
.

In
The Origin of Species
, published in 1859, Darwin would connect all species with the concept of common descent. In the distant past, alongside all manner of animals, there had been some
ancestor, some relation of modern humankind. The implication of this suggestion – for human origins in particular – was plain to see. But in 1871 he would go further – alarmingly
so, as far as more conservative minds were concerned. The conclusion to
The Descent of Man
has within it the claim that, ‘man is descended from some less highly organised form’,
a line that allowed
caricaturists and others to infer he saw man connected in relatively recent time to some or other monkey.

Even as he was putting the finishing touches to
The Origin of Species
, Darwin had felt the shadows of older, more primitive humans looming over their modern descendants. Good scientist
though he was, the absence of much physical proof in the form of fossilised early human remains discouraged him from saying so in print. But even before he put pen to paper, people had been finding
human remains – fragmentary, enigmatic proof of earlier, older populations. The evidence was there; what was needed was an explanation . . . a story that fitted.

Louis Agassiz had been invited to Scotland in 1840 by his colleague and friend the Reverend William Buckland, the eccentric but brilliant Reader in Geology at Oxford University. Buckland had
been a man of God first and a scientist second. But he was clever enough – and open-minded enough – to make a long personal journey from belief in the literal truth of the Old Testament
to an acceptance of at least some of the scientific facts revealed during his lifetime. (Buckland was as fascinating as he was fascinated. He kept a hyena for a pet – as well as other animals
just as dangerous. Throughout his life he pursued an ambition to taste the meat of every creature in existence and found something to commend in most; only the bluebottle was entirely without merit
apparently, and moles had little to be said in their favour either.)

While studying divinity at Oxford he had found time to attend lectures in geology and mineralogy. Fascinated by rocks and fossils since childhood though he was, his faith convinced him the
findings of geology would confirm rather than undermine the Book of Genesis. During the first decades of the nineteenth century he travelled all over Britain on horseback, clad always in his
academic gown, to try and prove it and in 1821 his attention was drawn to a cave discovered at Kirkdale in Yorkshire by a squad of quarrymen. Large quantities of fossilised animal bone had been
found inside and when Buckland visited he was able to identify dozens of species – including tropical exotics like elephant, lion, hippopotamus and hyena.

A literally Biblical interpretation of the find would have suggested the animals were victims of The Flood, that their carcasses had been swept into the cave’s recesses – all the way
from the tropics where they had lived and died – as the deluge swirled across the entire surface of the globe. Buckland, however, was able to suggest an alternative explanation that sought to
reconcile his scientific observations with his faith in the received word of God. Though well aware of Hutton, and the teachings of Uniformitarianism that had followed in his
wake, Buckland adhered to a version of ‘Catastrophism’, a philosophy that explained Earth’s development in terms of sudden, violent, often short-lived events of such magnitude
they had literally changed the world.

Rather than imagining a single creation of the world during six 24-hour days, Buckland believed there might have been a whole series – each followed by a catastrophic extinction event that
wiped the slate clean. He reasoned, logically, that he and the rest of modern humankind were simply part of the most recent, which had sprung into being after Noah’s ark came to rest on Mount
Ararat.

Buckland observed that the fossils in Kirkdale Cave were sealed beneath a relatively thin layer of mud and concluded it was only this topmost deposit that had been laid down by the great deluge.
He imagined an antediluvian Britain populated by all manner of creatures – and suggested the hyenas had scavenged their remains as carrion. When The Flood struck all traces of the earlier
fauna – other than those protected inside the cave – had been swept away.

After the publication of his findings in 1822 Buckland was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society, ‘for outstanding achievements in research’. The following year saw the
publication of his masterwork
Reliquiae Diluvianae, or, Observations on the Organic Remains . . . Attesting the Action of an Universal Deluge
(known as
Relics of The Flood
), which as
well as winning academic approval became something of a surprise bestseller with the general public.

Earlier in 1823, just prior to completing the book, Buckland heard about yet more elephant bones – discovered this time in a sea cave at Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula of south Wales
– and immediately travelled there. As soon as possible after his arrival, in an area that is remote now and likely all but inaccessible then, he made his way down the side of a cliff known
locally as Yellow Top (on account of the sallow lichen that ekes a living on its surface) and across to the entrance of Goat’s Hole Cave.

The landscape there is stunning today and can only have been as breathtaking in the Reverend Buckland’s time. The cliffs are of limestone and have been scoured and beaten by ice and
elements, wave and tide, until only the bare bones of the world remain. There is no hiding the age of the world at Paviland; her face is washed clean of all makeup and the sunlight
is unforgiving, revealing every wrinkle of a long life. The several caves of Yellow Top were cut by waves when the sea level was nearly 30 feet higher than today; the mouth of
Goat’s Hole itself is shaped like a teardrop, lying lopsided towards the right.

Everywhere on the approach the limestone is pitted and pocked, sculpted and carved into outlandish, otherworldly Henry Moore shapes. The possessive tides pull back just long enough to permit an
hour’s access to the base of the steep rock face that leads to the cave, so that any visit in Buckland’s footsteps is either short – or made half a day long by the inundation of
the lower slopes by deep and dangerous water. Inside Goat’s Hole Cave the world of the Reverend Buckland is intact. Behind, back in the daylight, the waves boom just as they did for him on
that January day in 1823, counting more of the seconds, more of the minutes that have passed since the place was transformed into somewhere eternally special. For students of early humankind in
Europe Paviland is a place of pilgrimage, made almost sacred by what it once contained – by what was laid there by people who knew an entirely different world.

Although the atmosphere of Buckland’s time survives, many of the physical details he recorded within the cave sadly do not. It is hard to imagine how much pristine archaeology remained,
untouched and unnoticed, in places like Goat’s Hole Cave as late as the early nineteenth century. So much of the British landscape has since been picked clean by professional archaeologists
and trophy-hunters alike that it takes some imagination to picture a time when our more recent forebears seemingly paid scant attention to the evidence of ancient worlds lying all around them.

As Buckland walked towards the rear portion of the cave, beyond the reach of the worst winter storms, he noted that everywhere the floor was covered with ‘a mass of diluvial loam of a
reddish-yellow colour, abundantly mixed with angular fragments of limestone and broken calcareous spar, and interspersed with recent sea-shells’. So far so familiar, but also abundant in the
mix were the teeth and bones of ‘elephant, rhinoceros, bear, hyena, wolf, fox, horse, ox, deer of two or three species, water-rats, sheep, birds and man’.

Here then was a time capsule – where remnants of ancient pasts, times when other creatures altogether made this land their home – that had been left alone until antiquarians like
William Buckland finally disturbed their peace.

Buckland knew previous visitors had recently collected quantities of
supposed elephant bones and ivory, and it was close by the location of those enigmatic remains that he
opened his own trench. What he found, though it evidently moved him hardly at all, would eventually change the world.

‘In another part,’ he wrote, ‘I discovered beneath a shallow covering of six inches of earth nearly the entire left side of a human female skeleton.’ He was admirably
methodical as well as confident in his ability to identify all he saw. Scattered among the bones, and laid around them in the grave, he found two handfuls of periwinkle shells, each perforated with
a tiny hole so they could be strung together as a necklace. There were scores of fragments of cylindrical ivory rods, whittled down from tusks and as thick as a finger. There were other items of
ivory too: rings measuring a few inches across, pieces cut into ‘unmeaning forms’ and another the size and shape ‘of a human tongue’. He found as well ‘a short skewer
or chopstick, and made of the metacarpal bone of a wolf’.

The rod fragments and rings, the shells and the wolf bone – all were stained a deep red colour, as were the human bones. Buckland was instantly sure whoever had dug the grave and placed
the body inside it had then liberally backfilled it with a great deal of red ochre: ‘They were all of them stained superficially with a dark brick-red colour, and enveloped by a coating . . .
composed of red micaceous oxyde of iron which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch around the surface of the bones. The body must have been
entirely surrounded or covered over at the time of its interment with this red substance.’

Likely because he associated jewellery with the female of his species, Buckland assumed he had unearthed the body of a woman. And given that he had spotted the ramparts of a Roman camp on the
cliff top directly above and behind the cave’s location, he quickly decided she had made a home for herself where she was in easy reach of the soldiers – a camp-follower, as it were.
Perhaps the final nail in the coffin of her reputation was provided by the red ochre heaped upon her remains – a scarlet woman indeed. ‘The circumstance of the remains of a British camp
existing on the hill immediately above this cave, seems to throw much light on the character and date of the woman under consideration; and whatever may have been her occupation, the vicinity of
the camp would afford a motive for residence, as well as a means of subsistence, in what is now so exposed and uninviting a solitude.’

The good Reverend was sure, in other words, that he had found the skeleton of a prostitute – whose immorality had condemned her to be buried far from civilised
society in the very cave where she had conducted her business. From that moment, the remains from Goat’s Hole Cave were labelled the ‘Red Lady of Paviland’.

All of this Buckland wrote up for his forthcoming
Relics of The Flood
and, along with everything else he had seen on his travels, his Red Lady convinced him of the truth of a world shaped
by catastrophes. Whatever and whoever she might once have been she was ‘clearly not coeval with the antediluvian bones of the extinct species’. In other words, in his mind she belonged
to a world much more recent than the pre-Flood animals whose bones littered the cave.