A History of Ancient Britain (57 page)

Once constructed, the walls were manned by auxiliaries, pulled in from the same territories again and with fewer rights still. I try to imagine the Caledonia, the Scotland they marched through.
The books are full of doom and gloom about the weather, about how the soldiers must have suffered and grumbled, and just bided their time until they might be moved to somewhere else, somewhere
warmer, or at least drier. But I have seen France and Belgium and Germany and, while I appreciate the scenery in those places, I cannot help but think Scotland must have struck some of them as an
astonishing place.

Much was made by their superiors of the great impenetrable forest of Caledon; modern scholars, however, have wondered whether it was a myth created as an excuse for failure. But maybe there
really were trees there that had been free to grow for thousands of years, making shade for bears and wolves.

I wonder what they thought of the slow, black rivers, and of the mountains that were ancient even then. Some of the soldiers must have rowed and sailed their ships past the islands off the west
coast, islands to the west of time where the sun set, or into fjords cut by glaciers and flooded long
ago by rising seas. For every soldier that moaned, and remembered only
smothering rain and achingly cold winds, there must have been others who were changed for ever and stayed for good.

But regardless of how much Scotland changed them – or they changed Scotland – I am also impressed by how much of their world they were able to carry with them; so that their sojourn
in inhospitable territory was much less uncomfortable than it might otherwise have been. One famous tablet from Vindolanda proves the soldiers were careful to wear
subligaria
, underpants.
What the Romans could not bring from home, to alleviate the misery of service in that wind-blasted, rain-sodden land of the Picts, they either invented or acquired from the locals.

In the lands between the walls the natives shared such enthusiasm for one item of clothing, historians have suggested it may even have formed the basis of a cult. Judging by its depiction on
engraved stones and the like, the
birrus Britannicus
was a forerunner of the duffel coat. Figures cloaked and hooded in some sort of one-piece garment crop up again and again, often
suggestive of a deity. It seems the Roman soldiers stationed in Caledonia found the garment was the only solution to the enervating cold. They certainly wore them and may even have exported the
idea back home. (Elsewhere it has been shown Romans in Britain wore socks with their sandals. What with that and duffel coats it seems the Italians must have earned their reputation for sartorial
style much more recently.)

Like Hadrian’s Wall, the Antonine Wall provided a means of taxing people moving north and south, as well as stopping tribes in the north uniting with their southern counterparts in hope of
making mischief. Despite all the hard work, however, despite the ambition of the Emperor and the determination of his Governor to do his bidding, the Antonine Wall proved a step too far. The Romans
in Scotland might have drawn a parallel between their own efforts and those of the mythological Greek king Sisyphus, doomed by the gods to push a huge boulder uphill. By
AD
160 a permanent presence so far north had proved uneconomic and unsustainable. In due course the Romans pulled everyone back to the great wall raised in Hadrian’s name.

Two centuries had passed since those first landings in Kent. But by the time the Roman auxiliaries were accepting Hadrian’s Wall was their line in the sand, Caesar was a distant memory. To
be Roman was no longer to be just an invader. It was to be immersed in something much more complicated – an exchange of ideas flowing in both directions. Southern
Britain had emerged from the turbulence of the past as home to something quite new – a Romano-British culture that was a unique synthesis of both.

In the north, however, beyond the wall, it was and would remain a different story. To the mystification of the Romans, their version of civilisation simply was not wanted there. And yet the
incomers had changed that part of the world too. Celtic Britain had been the natural development of all that had gone before. Just like those in the south, the tribes of the north had evolved their
own territories, separate from one another but also sharing one unifying Celtic culture. Now the Romans had changed that as well.

When their engineers and surveyors made their plans for the wall, the line they drew across the country was largely arbitrary. Look on the map and you will see they were connecting east to west
at the narrowest convenient point they could find, between the Tyne and the Solway. Contrary to popular opinion, Hadrian’s Wall is not the same as the modern border between Scotland and
England – although pretty close in places, the wall is entirely in England. That line drawn across the country by some foreign surveyors looking for the easiest place to build a wall would
help shape events in Britain long after the Roman hold on the place was over.

By
AD
160 mainland Britain had been cleaved in two, between Britannia in the south and Caledonia in the north. Nothing would ever be the same again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ROMANS

For Fernand Braudel human lives were ephemeral flecks of foam riding upon the waves of a deep ocean. We are therefore powerless and inconsequential in the unfolding of that
longue durée
– the ‘long term’ – subject always to the impossibly languid motion of time.

This is an image worth bearing in mind when we think about the world we have built, and upon which we depend. The story of the Britain we live in is deeper than any ocean. Every square foot of
the land has been touched and modified by us or by our forebears during perhaps a million years of human habitation. Britain’s principal cities – London, Glasgow, Birmingham,
Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield – all of them have been busy urban centres for at least a thousand years. Much the same is true for the
towns and villages as well. Most have been home to people, one way or another, for thousands of years at least.

The depth of history in Britain is remarkable – and not necessarily repeated everywhere. In
Notes From A Small Island
Bill Bryson observed there were more seventeenth-century
buildings in Malhamdale, his adoptive village in the Yorkshire Dales, than in the whole of North America. All this means Britons are walking every day upon the very stuff of their own history as a
people.

It is all around us, whether or not we pay it any heed. In Edinburgh there are people who talk quite seriously about an underground city, a metropolis
of streets and
houses lost somewhere in the darkness beneath the modern hustle and bustle of tourists and traffic. There is a truth to what they say, in that the residents of Edinburgh have always found ingenious
ways to make the most of all the land available to them for building.

The High Street – the long, straight thoroughfare that runs downhill from the Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, known to tourists as the Royal Mile – sits on top of a natural
ridge of sandstone. It is a part of the same geological processes that created the Salisbury Crags that so captivated the eighteenth-century genius James Hutton and led him to see, for the very
first time, the great age of the world.

Edinburgh Castle sits upon a crag of extremely hard volcanic basalt. Behind the crag, a softer tail of sandstone was therefore protected from the advance of glaciers during subsequent Ice Ages
and survived behind its shield to form the ridge upon which a sloping street might later be built. At least two thousand years ago the people of the Votadini tribe may have found the sandstone was
soft enough for tunnelling. They certainly built on its surface, all the way along the ridge and on Castle Rock itself, where they raised the first of many fortresses.

The crag and tail were continuously occupied from then on, later builders blithely burying the homes and bones of those who had gone before them. In the aftermath of Scotland’s defeat by
the English at the Battle of Flodden in 1513 – the same that saw King James IV himself slain alongside a slew of nobles and churchmen – there was panic in Edinburgh. Fears of an
invasion inspired the building, in double quick time, of a wall to protect the city. By the time the townsfolk had raised their Flodden Wall it enclosed a space just one mile long and a quarter of
a mile wide. For the next 250 years not a building was erected beyond that barrier. They built gates through the wall of course, and beside the site of one of them – the Netherbow across High
Street itself – there sits an old pub called the World’s End. It was a joke and not a joke, for the feeling was that beyond that gate was nothing.

Edinburgh’s inhabitants were sealed inside a tiny world within which the only options were to build up or down. As well as creating the first skyscrapers – the tallest in Europe at
up to 130 feet high – they had to burrow downwards as well, underground.

Many centuries later, during the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, the city fathers saw fit to commission a whole new town. The old one had grown rank and pestilent – an
overcrowded shambles known to residents and visitors alike as ‘Auld Reekie’ – and the time had come to
create somewhere grand enough to fit the aspirations
of the sons and daughters of genius. This so-called New Town would be a marvel of the world, built from scratch on open land between the Old Town and the Firth of Forth. In time it would earn the
nickname ‘the Athens of the North’, not least because so many of its architects favoured the Classical Greek style.

Like Rome, Edinburgh is a city built on seven hills, although you would be forgiven for failing to notice that now. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries civil engineers
constructed five gigantic bridges that spanned the gaps between five of the hills – Bunker’s Hill, Heriot Hill, Moultree’s Hill, St John’s Hill and St Leonard’s Hill.
While Edinburgh is still dominated by two summits – Calton Hill (home to both the Royal Observatory and an unfinished replica of the Parthenon, dubbed ‘Edinburgh’s Shame’)
and Castle Hill – the rest were cleverly made to disappear. The others are still there of course, but now they form parts of the foundations for the great arches and spans of George IV
Bridge, King’s Bridge, North Bridge, Regent’s Bridge and South Bridge.

Those five massive structures helped create an entirely artificial level plain of masonry upon which the New Town steadily grew. In the voids beneath, in the valleys below the bridges, yet more
buildings sprang up so that eventually there was a second city underneath the first. More building in the early decades of the nineteenth century steadily filled in the rest of the gaps beneath the
spans until in time it was hard to remember that, beneath it all, there were spaces, huge spaces.

Eventually the phases of building blurred into one another until there was indeed an underground city – some of it made inadvertently by eighteenth-century town planners, some burrowed and
scratched out by British tribesmen and women 2,000 years before, and much of the rest built higgledy-piggledy during the centuries in between. Along the way many of the vast vaults, serpentine
tunnels and dank passages and alleyways – as well as whole streets that were once home to thousands of people – were gradually lost to the world above. Even when the darkness beneath
was absolute, still there were those who found need of the shelter provided by the shadows. Far below the rattle and hum of the bright world above they lit their fires, lamps and candles and made
good use of those otherwise forgotten places.

During the first decade of the twentieth century G.K. Chesterton would be moved and affected by what he called the ‘abruptness’ of the
city of Edinburgh,
without quite managing to put his finger on an explanation for it all: ‘It seems like a city built on precipices: a perilous city. Although the actual valleys and ridges are not (of course)
really very high or very deep, they stand up like strong cliffs; they fall like open chasms. There are turns of the street that take the breath away like a literal abyss. There are thoroughfares,
full, busy and lined with shops, which yet give the emotions of an alpine stair. It is, in the only adequate word for it, a sudden city.’

That the sequence of events, the process by which old Edinburgh was buried beneath new, was invisible to an observer within 50 years of the completion of the building job goes some way towards
illustrating how quickly we forget and move on.

Much of the rest of our man-made landscape has a similar story to tell, and nowhere more emphatically than London. When Julius Caesar first encountered the area in the middle of the first
century
BC
he noted it was already home to a large population and that the ground there was ‘thickly studded with homesteads’. It was already old in
Caesar’s day then, and in truth it is almost impossible to know quite how old, quite how long people of one sort or another have found cause to spend time there.