"Under Another Sky" by Charlotte Higgins

The author and her boyfriend travel around England, Wales and Scotland to see the ruins of the Romans; the narrative includes stories of the characters who were also fascinated by the traces of Roman Britain. Her journey is geographical but also chronological: she starts in Kent where Julius Caesar landed, moving to Colchester and London, she ends back in East Anglia (“We drive through the outskirts of the town [Great Yarmouth], past endless rows of static caravans poised for occupation by those with a taste for the bleak.”; C 12) with relics of the departure of the Romans in or around AD 408.

I learned many interesting things:

• The first record of Kent, Cantium, is in a book by Diodorus Siculus written in the 1st century BC. (C 1)
• Romans weren't the first road builders! A road in Shropshire thought to be Roman was found to have wooden foundations dated to the second century BC (C 1)
• The first image of Britannia is found on a relief panel on a building in the city of Aphrodisias in modern Turkey. (C 1)
• Shakespeare's Cymbeline is based on the real Iron Age King Cunobelinus. (C 2)
• “The borders of Londonium still, more or less, mark the borders of the City of London, because the Roman walls became the mediaeval city’s boundaries, entered and exited by those long-perished portals that have a ghostly presence through their mediaeval names: Cripplegate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Bishops Gate, Aldgate, Ludgate. All these were Roman gates; only the seventh, Moorgate, was a medieval newcomer.” (C 3)
• London’s Roman forum, near where Fenchurch Street crosses Gracechurch Street included a three-storey basilica “which was the biggest building this side of the Alps” (C 3)
• The early Anglo-Saxons abandoned London and settled in “Croydon, Battersea, Tulse Hill, Kingston, Upper Norwood.” (C 3)
• “The colour of sunlight gleaming off a sword will change, depending on whether it's a warm sky or not.” (C 4, quoting Rosemary Sutcliff)
• At Hadrian’s wall inscriptions mentioned the word ‘cervesa’ (usually translated as Celtic beer) “which is surely the ancestor of the Spanish cerveza.” (C 7)
• The English mountains the Pennines were so named because they were likened to the Italian Appenines in a forged Roman manuscript which was believed to be authentic for many years. (C 7)
• “Dido builds herself a funeral pyre, takes Aeneas’s sword, which he has left behind him, and stabs herself ... It is a cruelly symbolic suicide, penetrated by her lover’s weapon.” (C 11)

I was particularly interested in those who were interested in Roman Britain.

• Archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler seemed to rely on his wife to do more of the unsung management of his archaeological digs. She was quoted by a newspaper as saying "she had always endeavoured to be a part of the shadow behind her husband.” (C 5) Meanwhile Mortimer enjoyed multiple affairs. He was returning from one foreign dig to which he had taken his latest girlfriend when, in a railway carriage, he read his wife's obituary in the newspaper.
• Poet Wilfred Owen as a lad in Shropshire used to cycle to the Roman ruins at Wroxeter to search for coins. 
• R G Collingwood made his name as a major philosopher but he was also a keen academic archaeologist. When he was living near Coniston he met Arthur Ransome whose Swallows and Amazons tales were based on boating adventures with Collingwood's family. Collingwood offered Ransome his savings when Ransome was sued by Lord Alfred Doublas over the former's biography of Orcar Wilde. Wilfred Owen visited here as well.

An interesting selection of anecdotes about Roman Britain.

October 2019; 230 pages