A History of Ancient Britain (40 page)

When he died, sometime in the second century
BC
, he was at least 25 years old and, but for the presence of some parasitic worms in his gut, in generally good health. His
beard and moustache had been carefully trimmed and his fingernails manicured – suggesting that for at least the last few months or years of his life he had been a stranger to hard work.

So well preserved was Lindow Man, as he came to be known, even the contents of his last meal were intact inside his stomach. In the hours before he was dispatched he had eaten unleavened bread.
Something else he had consumed contained the pollen of the mistletoe plant, which was sacred to Iron Age peoples in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

He had been hit twice on the top of his head with something heavy and sharp, maybe an axe. The position of the wounds suggested he might have been on his knees when they were delivered and they
were forceful enough to drive fragments of bone into his brain and to crack one of his back teeth. Someone also hit him hard enough in the back, perhaps with a knee or a well-placed foot, to break
one of his ribs. A thin cord had been used to throttle him, snapping his neck in the process. It is not hard to imagine the rib breaking as someone used knee or foot to gain enough leverage for the
strangulation. The cord, a thin piece of leather, was left in place, the slipknot still pulled tight against the skin of Lindow Man’s neck. He was already dead when his throat was cut with a
sharp blade; his body was then placed face-down into a bog, naked but for a fox fur cuff around the top of one arm.

It was the almost elaborate sequence of events – the level of violence inflicted and the nature of his final resting place – that prompted archaeologists to see him as a sacrifice
rather than a murder victim. Their case is made stronger still by the fact that Lindow Man was not the only soul to end up in that particular patch of bog: partial remains of two more men have also
been recovered from the Lindow Moss. One of those had six fingers on one hand and since other so-called ‘bog bodies’ from elsewhere in Europe have been found with physical abnormalities
– oddly shaped spines, short arms or legs – it is thought their physical appearance in life may have singled them out for ritual killing.

Two bog bodies found in Ireland in 2003 provide yet more evidence of
massive violence, as though the desire was to kill each victim more than once – to inflict what
has been called a ‘multiple death. It was peat-cutting that brought Clonycavan Man back into the fresh air – although the machinery had taken his legs and hands before he was spotted.
It is thought he was between 25 and 40 when he was put to death, sometime between 400 and 200
BC
. In life he wore a moustache and a goatee beard but it was his elaborate
hairstyle that captured most attention – an upswept quiff of long hair held in place with a gel of pine resin and vegetable oil.

Calculations based on his surviving body parts suggested he stood around five feet five inches tall, and so maybe he styled his hair to give himself a little extra height. It turned out the pine
resin in his hair had come either from south-west France or northern Spain – so he had access to what could only be described as a luxury commodity. He had been struck repeatedly on the head
and chest with a heavy-bladed axe, many more times than were necessary to kill him. Soon after death a gaping wound, more than a foot long, was opened across his stomach, as though to disembowel
him.

Clonycavan Man was found in February 2003. Less than three months later and only 25 miles away, peat-cutters found Oldcroghan Man – also dispatched with excessive force. He too had been a
mature adult, between 25 and 40 years old at the time of death, and had also been done away with during the middle centuries of the Iron Age, between 360 and 175
BC
.
Oldcroghan Man, however, was a comparative giant – fractionally less than six feet tall and with a powerful, muscular build to boot.

Only his torso and upper arms were recovered but in his case it was deemed likely his killers had cut him into pieces before depositing just part of him into the bog. Since his head was missing,
it was impossible to say how many injuries he might have received in total, but a knife wound visible in his chest would have been enough to kill him. The pathologist was able to say the assailant
delivered the blow while standing right in front of his victim, no doubt while looking him in the eye. His arms had been pierced from front to back so that twisted hazel withies could be passed
through – likely so they could be used to pin his body into position in the bog. Like Lindow Man he was naked but for an armband. Again like Lindow Man his manicured fingernails suggested he
had been from a stratum of society unaccustomed to manual labour.

Stabbed through the heart, decapitated, dismembered, pinned underwater into the mud of a bog – whoever Oldcroghan Man was, someone made sure he wasn’t coming back.

We cannot know what was motivating the killers. Perhaps it was felt the gods had grown bored with gifts of metal. Maybe life itself had to be offered up – not just
the lives of animals but those of people too. The Iron Age eventually became a time of plenty – surplus food, surplus livestock – and a rapidly growing human population meant there were
plenty of surplus people as well.

The changes to society that had begun in the Late Bronze Age continued apace in the first centuries of the Iron Age. From around 800
BC
the climate was in a downward
spiral for at least two centuries and people sought new ways to understand themselves and the altered world around them. The new circumstances – not least the economic collapse prompted by
the devaluation of bronze – were felt by everyone. People responded in different ways in different parts of the country but were seemingly united in a determination to find alternative
techniques for creating and maintaining the ties binding them to their neighbours.

The effects of climate change were not uniform – nor was the erosion of bronze as society’s firm foundation. Southern Britain had always been closer to the Continental supplies of
the special metal and so the impact of its demise was felt more keenly there. Likewise climate change had different effects in the east of the country than it had in the west and the responses it
prompted from farmers in the uplands were different to those in the lowlands.

What shines through all of it is something we can still recognise in the Britain of today – and that is the growth of distinct regional identities. Whatever else was happening, life became
more locally focused. The solutions people found were local ones – local to them, wherever they happened to be.

From around 600
BC
the climate began to improve, and in the warmth of longer summers the differences between the regions grew yet more pronounced. People living in the
north and east of Scotland felt the need to build massive, hollow-walled circular towers of stone, called brochs. The inspiration for their construction eludes archaeologists still. Often they are
on the coast, prompting some to suggest they might have been a response to a perceived threat of invasion from the sea. Others believe they were symbols of power, ordained and commissioned by
chiefs or petty kings as highly visible demonstrations of their might. It has also been said they might have been places of refuge for communities that spent most of their time in lesser dwellings
nearby. In times of need – when under attack from
stock-rustling neighbours perhaps – they could shelter with their beasts inside the local broch and wait for
the trouble to pass by.

Whatever their function, they remind me always of cooling towers – broad bases, a narrowing at the waists – except the architects of the brochs achieved that elegant shape with dry
stone rather than poured cement. From time to time modern architects and builders have sought to construct their own, but their best efforts collapse in no time. The expertise required to build so
high and so massively without mortar is beyond us now.

As often as not the surviving examples stand alone in the landscape, like the statue of Ozymandias. At Gurness on Orkney, however, there is a famous broch at the heart of something more
complicated and involved. There a bank and ditch surrounds an entire stone-built settlement – the massive broch acting as a hub for the lesser buildings radiating away from it, as though on
the spokes of the wheel. The tower stands nearly 12 feet tall today but would once have been nearly three times as grand. The hollow wall contains stone-built staircases that wind towards the roof
level so that the occupants could command a view for many miles across the surrounding countryside.

The mere ruin of Gurness remains impressive. The impact it had in its pomp – standing at least 30 feet high and visible from miles around – can only be guessed at. Just inside the
entrance is the setting for an iron-shod post that would have supported a massive wooden door. On either side are square recesses for a blocking timber that barred the door shut from the inside.
Everything about Gurness Broch says, ‘Keep Out’. There is little known about the people who lived there, except to say a succession of inhabitants used the place for hundreds of
years.

Excavation has produced sherds of Roman amphorae of a kind that went out of use by
AD
60. If fine Roman wine and olive oil were being enjoyed in Gurness during the first
century
AD
, then perhaps the story of a King of Orkney in Colchester in
AD
43 is right enough after all. In any case it seems safe to imagine Gurness
was a seat of power for several lifetimes, and that it first came to prominence in the middle centuries of the Iron Age.

If iron is strangely absent from the picture in the Early Iron Age, then evidence of where people were living is not. As well as brochs in the north of Scotland, tens of thousands of Iron Age
settlements of different sorts have been identified by archaeologists, scattered all across the British Isles. It is these many and varied domestic sites as much as anything else that demonstrate
the emergence of different regional identities.

Brochs are unknown outside Scotland. In other parts of Britain people found different ways to stake their territorial claims. Some favoured small, massively defended
houses called duns; some in Scotland constructed crannogs, homes built upon platforms supported on stilts above the waters of lakes and lochs. In the south of England – as well as along the
Welsh border and the east of Scotland – farming communities devoted some of their energies to the building of hill forts. Often these were on a colossal scale, housing hundreds of people.

In the world before metal – the Neolithic world – people had forged relationships by creating special meeting places. At first there were the so-called ‘causewayed
enclosures’ and gradually these had evolved, defined by more and more elaborate boundaries; some had been further complicated inside by the building of circles of timber and stone. In any
case they had mattered for millennia.

During the Iron Age all sorts of enclosed spaces began to matter again – but in different ways and for different reasons. Maiden Castle, the most complex Iron Age hill fort in Britain, was
begun as a causewayed enclosure during the Neolithic period. Around 600
BC
it was extended and remodelled to enclose an area of 16 acres. A century and a half later it was
tripled in size by architects blessed with a real sense of grandeur. The Maiden Castle we see today, with its multiple sinuous banks and ditches coiled around a space the size of 50 football
pitches, is the grandest of its kind not just in Britain, but also arguably in the whole of Europe.

Niall Sharples has argued that some of the later building phases reveal that relationships between communities were being established or reinforced during the Iron Age through the medium of
labour. Limestone incorporated into the eastern entrance was quarried not within the confines of the hill fort itself but from a location some miles away on the far side of the South Dorset
Ridgeway. There was no practical need for the limestone – especially from a source that only added to the logistical complexities of the construction project. Sharples has argued instead that
it was built into the entrance as a highly visible display of the relationship between the inhabitants of the fort and people living on the other side of the Ridgeway. Rather than exchanging metal
tools and weapons, people were demonstrating their mutual ties by co-operating on large-scale building schemes. By contributing raw materials – and perhaps the strength of their own backs as
well – they were acknowledging and honouring their responsibilities to one another.

Hill forts started to appear in Britain from around 600
BC
often in lofty positions overlooking prime agricultural land. Also in Dorset are two
more splendid examples, at Hod Hill and Hambledon Hill. On a wind-blasted peak on the Llyn Peninsula in Gwynedd, in north Wales, is one of the finest and most impressive to be found anywhere in
Britain. Tre’r Ceiri – ‘the Town of the Giants’ – perches on an exposed ridge around 1,300 feet or so up Yr Eifl, ‘the Hill of the Rivals’.

The climb up from the valley floor gives a person plenty of time to wonder what on earth possessed any people, in any age, to make life so exhausting for themselves. But finally you arrive on
top of the ridge and at once the inspiration for living up a mountain is all around. There cannot be a better view in Wales.

Incredibly, parts of those revetments have survived at close to their original height of around 10 feet or more. Enclosed within the six-acre interior are over 100 dry stone houses, mostly
survivors of the latter period of occupation by Rome. It is thought that at the height of the pre-Roman Iron Age, around 200
BC
, there might have been 100 people in
Tre’r Ceiri, living in perhaps 20 houses.

The term ‘hill fort’ can be misleading, as it implies defence in a time of war. Archaeologists believe the threat of conflict was not always the spur for their construction, however.
More than places to defend, they were places in which to live. Their inhabitants’ choice of elevated positions may have had more to do with their relationship to and stewardship over the
surrounding fertile land.