"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

"The sea on our left" by Shally Hunt

Shally and her husband John walked clockwise (ie in the opposite direction to most of the long-distance guides) around the coast of Britain. They weren't the first or the second although they are probably the only husband and wife pair to have completed this 4,300 mile trek. But they did occasionally cheat, taking the bus and once a lift.

I should love this book. I adore long distance walking although I have never attempted anything on this scale.  I have walked half the Thames path (Greenwich to Windsor) and Oxford to Cambridge, and St Paul's to Canterbury, and the Lea, and Brighton to Folkestone, each walking lasting about a week and travelling about eighty miles. Shally and John regularly walked twenty mile days. They lost a lot of weight. They each used three pairs of shoes. Whereas I insist on a B&B they did rough camping. So I admire them so much and I would love to do something epic like this. But...

I know how intense a walk can be. Even though your sore feet and your aching shoulders often distract you, because you are travelling so slowly, you have the opportunity to observe more. And she doesn't. I understand her problem. A three hundred day walk cannot be adequately described in three hundred pages. And this frustrated me immensely because I lost that feeling of intensity.

I learned a little about the places they passed through. She describes the Pocahontas statue in Gravesend but she doesn't explain why it is there. To be fair, I felt she would have liked to learn more about the places but their demanding itinerary meant they could rarely spare the time. (And I know how it can be when your flagging energy means that you can't be bothered to find out something that at any other time would be fascinating.) But I often felt that she actually didn't like the places she walked through or the people who lived there.

I learned more about the bird life of the coast. Her husband is a keen ornithologist and she describes birds very well.

I learned a great deal about the frustrations and near-disasters they experienced. I learned about the campsites that were poorly equipped, and the many times she felt ill, or exhausted. There was a lot about the rows they had as John walked ahead and she limped behind. A lot of the book seemed to be a long complaint.

April 2013; 312 pages

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

Links to other books on travel, exploration and explorers, reviewed in this blog can be found here.