Under Another Sky : Journeys in Roman Britain

284 Pages·2015·5.14 MB·English

by  Higgins

Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
A Note on Names
Introduction
Chapter One: Kent and Essex
Chapter Two: Norfolk
Chapter Three: London
Chapter Four: Silchester
Chapter Five: Wales and the West
Chapter Six: Bath
Chapter Seven: Hadrian’s Wall
Chapter Eight: Scotland
Chapter Nine: York
Chapter Ten: Cumbria and the Lakes
Chapter Eleven: The Cotswolds and the South-West
Chapter Twelve: Norfolk, again, and Sussex
Notes
Places to Visit
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
The eighteenth-century antiquary who was fooled by a historical hoax so
compelling that it took a century to unmask; the nineteenth-century
septuagenarian who walked the length of Hadrian’s Wall, twice, believing he
would be the last to undertake a journey so evidently quixotic; the modern
papyrologists who, with all the skill of wartime code breakers, decipher the
fragmentary scrawls of surviving writing by the Romans in Britain: it is the rich
and evocative stories of these people, and many others, that are told in Under
Another Sky.
This is a book about the encounter with Roman Britain: about what the idea of
‘Roman Britain’ has meant to those who came after Britain’s 400-year stint as
province of Rome – from the medieval mythographer-historian Geoffrey of
Monmouth to Edward Elgar and W.H. Auden. What does Roman Britain mean
to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of?
How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse?
Charlotte Higgins has traced these tales by setting out to discover the remains of
Roman Britain for herself, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a splendid, though
not particularly reliable, VW camper van. Via accounts of some of Britain’s
most intriguing, and often unjustly overlooked ancient monuments, Under
Another Sky invites us to see the British landscape, and British history, in an
entirely fresh way: as indelibly marked by how the Romans first imagined, and
wrote, these strange and exotic islands, perched on the edge of the known world,
into existence.
About the Author
Charlotte Higgins was born in Stoke-on-Trent and studied Classics at Balliol
College, Oxford. She is the Guardian’s chief arts writer.
List of Illustrations
The genii cucullati from Housesteads. (© English Heritage)
The trusty VW camper van.
The tomb of Longinus Sdapeze. (© Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service)
A photograph from the 1909 Colchester Pagaent, with Boadicea in her chariot in
the foreground. (© Colchester and Ipswich Museum Service)
Thornycroft's sculpture group of Boadicea and her daughters at Westminster
Bridge, London. (© UIG via Getty Images)
A fragment of Roman wall uncovered by the Blitz and preserved as part of
London Wall car park.
The Bank of England depicted as a ruin by Joseph Michael Gandy, 1830. (©
Courtesy of Trustees of Sir John Soane's Museum, London/The Bridgeman
Art Gallery)
The Roman walls of Silchester.
Silchester's amphitheatre. When Stukelely came here, it was a large pond, a
watering-hole for cattle.
The Great Work at Wroxeter.
Tessa Verney Wheeler at Lydney. (Photograph by Lydia Carr. Image © Rt Hon
Lord Viscount Bledisloe; used with permission)
The snake-haired deity who adorns the pediment of the temple to Sulis-Minerva
in Bath. (© Bath & North East Somerset Council)
Roger Tomlin’s drawings of the writing on the now lost lead tablet that Edward
Nicholson interpreted as part of a correspondence between early Christians.
(Courtesy of Roger Tomlin)
Hadrian’s Wall. (© Getty Images)
‘Roman Wall Blues’. (© Britten/Auden)
Arthur’s O’on: an illustration from Alexander Gordon's Itinerarium
Septentrionale. (Courtesy of the British Library)
Arthur’s O’on reinvented as the dovecote in the stable block of Penicuik House,
south of Edinburgh. (Courtesy of Sir Robert Clerk of Penicuik)
A mighty bronze sculpture of Constantine the Great sits outside York Minster
The Severus tondo, showing Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna and their
children Caracalla and Geta. The face of Geta has been defaced since, after his
death, he was subject to damnatio memoriae. (© Bildagentur für Kunst,
Kultur und Geschichte)
Hardknott Castle. The Roman camp presides over a mountain pass in one of the
loveliest spots in England.
The Crosby Garrett helmet after restoration. (© Christie's Images/The
Bridgeman Art Library)
The Rudston Venus – now in the Hull and East Riding Museum. (© Hull and
East Riding Museum: Hull Museums)
Aeneas sweeps Dido off her feet. Part of the great Dido and Aeneas mosaic
found at Low Ham, and now in the Museum of Somerset in Taunton. (©
Museum of Somerset)
The vast walls of Burgh Castle, near Great Yarmouth.
A detail of the exquisite decoration on the Mildenhall Dish. (© The Trustees of
the British Museum)
List of Maps
Map of Colchester
Map of London
Map of Hadrian’s Wall
Map of the Antonine Wall
Map of the City of York
To Matthew Fox
Under Another Sky
Journeys in Roman Britain
CHARLOTTE HIGGINS