Smaller Than You Thought

In fact all the Easter services went rather well apart from a confusion about hymn numbers on Sunday ('I feel like a bingo caller', said Il Rettore as he tried to read out the correct one), but having also had to pop to the hospital to take communion to a congregation member on Easter afternoon as all the chaplains were off sick I was very glad to observe 'Bank Holiday Order' on Monday and only do the work I absolutely had to. This was complete early enough in the day to allow me to take advantage of the weather and zoom to Uffington. Algorithms had thoughtfully brought to my attention a new display at the museum there and as I'd never seen either Wayland's Smithy or the White Horse of Uffington I decided to go. 

Apart from the distance I ended up walking (further than anticipated) things being on the small side was the theme of the day. The Neolithic long barrow of Wayland's Smithy has two massive sarsens guarding its entrance but the proof that it was made by fairies is that only the Wee Folk could have fitted inside the burial chamber. I'd thought it was like the West Kennet Long Barrow which has space for visitors to wander around inside but no, it's only tall enough for an adult to crouch in. At the foot of a tree I found what were clearly 'cremated remains', reinforcing how important the place is for some people.

The Horse, too, I had imagined ranging over perhaps a hundred yards of a broad hillside, and P Newman in Lost Gods of Albion says that's how long it is, but I wouldn't have put it much bigger than 50 feet! Curiously that made the figure all the more moving to me - to think firstly that our remote ancestors made this effigy that they wouldn't even have been able to see properly, and also that it has survived three thousand years or more, just a fragile, delicate thing, an absence more than a presence, turf removed to reveal the chalk beneath. 

I did know that Uffington Museum was going to be tiny. It started out as a 17th-century schoolroom, and Bank Holidays are one of the few times it's open. There is basically one room, with a mezzanine forming a separate display area; that 'exhibition' that tempted me there was a small display about mythological landscapes, and I was very pleased with it. Very good graphics and information, a video with an Anglo-Saxon poem being recited against a background of spooky trees, and items left by visitors at Wayland's Smithy, from dreamcatchers to decorated stones. Easily the eeriest is a white-painted plaster ram's head deposited in the chamber itself. Most odd. I'm glad I wasn't the one who found it. 

Appropriate Culture

‘What was all that Egyptian stuff?’ Ruby asks the Doctor in the middle of Empire of Death, a messy, nonsensical Dr Who story I didn’t enjoy at all, but we’ll put that to one side. They’re referring back to The Pyramids of Mars, the Tom Baker tale broadcast in 1975 and whose appalling first-episode cliffhanger is one of my childhood landmarks, where Sutekh, the death-god who is their adversary of the moment, first appears. There, he was trapped in an Ancient Egyptian tomb by an opponent of his own race named Horus, constructed robots that looked like mummies, and prepared a pyramidal spaceship. ‘Cultural appropriation’, the Doctor answers. It’s quite an odd statement: as a comment, albeit a smug and self-congratulatory one, by writer Russell T Davies on his predecessors from 1975, it's fair enough; the great Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes were very capable of making effective TV out of material we wouldn’t dare to use now, and Pyramids isn’t the most egregious example. But as a diegetic utterance within the story itself, it makes little sense. Back in Pyramids the Doctor is clear that Ancient Egyptian religion and art was organised around memories of the struggles of the alien Osirans, not the other way around, and it would have been very odd for an immensely powerful race of alien beings to restructure their activities around a less advanced culture they encountered on a world they happened to drop onto in the middle of their own civil war.

Ruby and the Doctor discuss all this further in one of the little sequences of midrash the BBC occasionally puts out around the main TV story. ‘An Englishman was looting the tombs of the Pharaohs and disturbing the dead’, he explains. I wondered whether that’s how we think of the early Egyptologists now, whether this is the now-established summary of a century of exploration within the context of the old European empires?

For centuries the Egyptians paid little attention to their heritage of antiquities. Neither Copts nor Muslims had any more interest in the culture that preceded them than medieval European Christians had in the monuments of their own pagan past. Occasionally an Arabic travel writer would describe the statues and temples, but they were relics of a world that was long gone, interesting exactly because they felt no connection with it. When Omm Sety first lived in Egypt in the 1930s, she found that, even then, pregnant women in Abydos would touch the belly of a statue of Isis for luck – not that they had a clear idea who Isis was. It was folklore, magic, not a source of national pride. Historically Egypt was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled over by foreign governors who had absolutely no interest in encouraging the population to identify with their national past, even had they thought of such a thing.

I don’t know whether anything’s been written about how the Egyptians themselves picked up the significance of their astonishing archaeological inheritance from the Europeans who started investigating them from the early 1800s, but it took a while, that’s clear. The governors of Egypt had as proprietorial a view of antiquities as any rapacious Imperial tomb-digger: there had been an Egyptian Museum since 1835, but in 1855 governor Mohammed Said Pasha gave the entire collection as a present to the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, which is how all that stuff ended up in Vienna. In the heroic age of Egyptology, the epoch of Giovani Belzoni, Wallis Budge and Flinders Petrie, the exploration of Egyptian antiquities may have been marred by Imperial competition played out as rivalries between museums and universities, but the front-line commanders in that effort were also serious scholars who believed in the relevance of the past, not mere tomb-robbers, and it was from them that the Egyptians learned how important their heritage was.

Aida, I thought, there’s a clear example of cultural appropriation, an opera in Ancient Egyptian fancy dress written by an Italian. Except that, I didn’t realise, it was commissioned from Verdi by the Egyptian ruler Ismail Pasha, in response to a suggestion by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette who acted as the opera’s artistic consultant. Although he came from an Albanian dynasty of Ottoman officials, Ismail was keen to stress the independence of the country he governed. Four years after he took over in 1863, the Empire agreed to give him the title Khedive, ‘viceroy’, much classier than a mere governor. Ismail was an ardent moderniser and built a state opera house in Cairo – Aida ended up not being the very first performance there because all the costumes and sets were stuck in Paris while the Prussians besieged the city, but when it finally played in 1871 it was the first great celebration of Egyptian national identity that drew in Pharaonic Egypt. It was Khedive Ismail saying to his people, ‘this is who we are’ – an aspirant modern nation, but one which had given the world its first great civilization too.

Of course, from that point on, it became quite important that Europeans stopped carting everything off to museums in London, Paris and Berlin, or to private collections. The Egyptian Antiquities Department was supposed to control the whole business of excavations and removals, though the Egyptian Museum (under both French and Egyptian directors) derived a valuable income from flogging ‘unimportant’ artefacts in its sale room all the way to 1979, and wasn’t able to stop Howard Carter apparently slipping the odd bit into his pocket while he was cataloguing Tutankhamun’s tomb. Anyway, we carry on with the Egyptians taking more and more charge over their own past until the process culminated in the Golden Parade of the Pharaohs in 2021: 22 royal mummies from the caches of Deir-el-Bahari and the tomb of Amenhotep II were moved in tank-like atmosphere-controlled vehicles from the old Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation (a telling title) in a procession of jaw-dropping splendour. You can watch a cinematic treatment of this event on Youtube, simultaneously moving, and slightly terrifying, as these papery bits of desiccated human in their battered sarcophagi are invested with so much grand significance. ‘I cried when I saw Queen Hatshepsut’, says one viewer, ‘because her enemies tried to erase her existence, and this is the glory she deserved’ – and funnily enough I got a bit tearful too, even though we know they didn’t, that Hatshepsut isn’t the star of this show, and she wasn’t even the only female Pharaoh as she was once believed to be: still, she’s not just an Egyptian now, but a feminist as well, a Woman Wronged. The monarchs’ names appear in English and Arabic script, but in hieroglyphic cartouches, while the choir sings in Ancient Egyptian, and the not-terribly-impressive President El-Sisi tries not to look completely out of place amidst the colossal, eclipsing charisma of the dead.

That is the positive story, of how European scholarship rescued the past of an ancient civilisation and ended up giving it back to the people who are its true heirs. It's not untrue, but it is incomplete. Those careful scholars all felt that if they’d dug stuff up it was only logical that they should take it back home with them. That was simply part of the mindset. There was a time when that wasn’t completely unreasonable because nowhere in Egypt could have looked after delicate artefacts very securely, but that wasn’t the justification, and it carried on being the assumption long after the Egyptians did begin developing credible archaeological institutions of their own. Just as Britain and France ended up carving up Africa between them not really because gigantic swathes of African territory were of any use to them, but just to stop each other getting it, the process of acquisition, of tens and hundreds of thousands of objects flowing into great museums, was driven by that rivalry, played out through the work of whiskered scholars scratching trowels in sandy pits. When Howard Carter pilfered the odd pendant from the Valley of the Kings, it’s hard to decide whether the acquisitiveness that made him do it was his own human moral failing situated within the prejudice of Empire, or conversely whether the Imperial looting of Egyptian artefacts was a case of that ordinary, petty greed writ large.

And, in any case, not all the diggers were careful scholars. Some were just opportunists and collectors: the sheer mind-boggling quantity of antiquities in Egypt made ransacking seem less consequential. Looking back at The Pyramids of Mars, perhaps Marcus Scarman, the linen-suited excavator who curses his superstitious native labourers and stumbles into Sutekh’s tomb, is just that: I’ve always thought his Egyptology must be pretty ropey if he thinks the structure is First Dynasty as he claims. Maybe he is nothing more than ‘an Englishman looting tombs and disturbing the dead’.

The respect of the dead, rather than their living descendants, is a separate matter from imperialist looting, material or cultural. I’m the first person to regard how we treat the remains of the dead as an analogue for our attitude towards the living: a dead person – the phrase we often automatically use – is honoured because they represent the individual they were before death, and the web of relationships they were part of. But who do they belong to once they have no identifiable living relatives?

I haven’t been to Maidstone Museum; I must go some time. But in common with many large and not-even-all-that-large museums in Britain, they have a mummy. She is ‘the Lady of the House, Ta-Kush, Daughter of Osiris’, a 25^th-Dynasty woman whose remains came to Britain in the 1820s and eventually found their way via a private collector to the Museum. Once thought to have died at about 14, research in the 2010s showed that she was likely to have been 40 or so, and of Nubian origin. She had poor teeth and osteoporosis. We have a good idea of what she may have looked like thanks to facial reconstruction. Ta-Kush was not well treated when she first arrived here, and whoever owned her waited twenty years before she was even looked at by anyone with any expertise; but now she gazes at us across 2700 years or so, and, to my mind, works more for human sympathy and understanding than she would ever have done undisturbed in the sands of her homeland. An ambassador for fellowship and compassion from the long-distant past: really, that’s not a bad fate to have.

Leave Miscellanea

Although I'm not really posting about things that don't relate to the church, my post-Easter leave this week did take me to Dorset and St Catherine's Chapel at Abbotsbury, which I found still a bit forlorn as its west window remains boarded up awaiting repair by English Heritage. For the first time in about twenty years there was no votive deposit at all apart from a few candle stubs and a bundle of dry flowers and the prayer I left on a scrap of paper was the sole offering. 

On Tuesday I had a trip to Rochester having not seen the Cathedral since I left the area in 1997. Not a single image of St Catherine there: in fact there are very few female saints represented at all, and most of the holy figures are military, fitting in with the martial tone of much of the cathedral. I walked along the road to Chatham, checking the house where I used to live (which looks exactly the same) and St John's Church where I once worshipped. When I left the town the congregation was on the brink of decamping to Emmaus, the United Reform Church on the right side of the ring road which had left the poor Anglican church isolated from the town centre, and St John's spent a while derelict before the Diocese of Rochester decided they wanted to reopen it. Now apparently the congregation is moving out to Emmaus yet again - but only temporarily, while the church is refurbished.

Yesterday I was in London and found another tiny St Catherine hiding on some Netherlandish stained glass in Sir John Soane's Museum. I doubt anyone else has ever noticed her!

I was in town to see the Cult of Beauty exhibition at the Wellcome with Lady Wildwood before we both went to hear Bettany Hughes speak about the Seven Wonders of the World, but strangely what caught my interest most was her incidental remark about Karahan Tepe in Turkey, 'a city in a time and place where there shouldn't be one'. She's overstating slightly it being a 'city', but it certainly does seem to be a permanent settlement with sophisticated monuments (including a ritual chamber of gigantic penis pillars) dating back over 11,000 years and possibly more. The carvings show lots of people with six fingers on their hands, and the whole site was deliberately buried after a couple of millennia. I'm mortified I had never heard of this! 

More about Karahan Tepe here.

Marcher Land Adventures 5

For this final stage in the journey we stretch the definition of 'Marches' a bit to include the land well into Gloucestershire! But as I made my way home from Rose Cottage I called in at Welsh Newton parish church, to which the term still definitely applies. It has an original stone rood screen dating from about 1320, a most unusual feature for a little village church, and also the grave of St John Kemble, one of the Roman Catholic Forty Martyrs of England & Wales: although he was found to have nothing to do with the Titus Oates conspiracy (not hard to have no connection with something which hadn't happened) he was executed anyway. This is all mentioned in the church. What they don't mention is another grave within a yard or two of St John's which I spotted from a distance. Is that the Jake Thackray, Yorkshire songster and humourist, I thought? He died in Monmouth, and it is. 

I'd visited Gloucester Cathedral, but many years ago, so it was time to return. St Catherine appears in glass twice, once in a medieval treatment, once in a Victorian.

Gloucester's museums carried on the pattern of not being open. The City Museum was - a nice ground floor of palaeontology and archaeology accompanied by medieval music, which becomes a rather fragmented and bitty account of later times on the upper storey - but the Folk Museum, which is the social-history branch, appears to have erratic opening times at the moment and the staff at the City Museum couldn't even confirm when they were despite being part of the same setup.

Two wells to finish with. Nobody seems quite sure how the Crocodile Spring at Compton Abdale came to be, though Historic England says a local builder, 'George Curtis of Hazleton', made it in the mid-1800s. Its crocodile-snout spout was a bit obscured when I saw it, but it was flowing very merrily indeed. I met a woman washing in the water. A little further on is a very important site to the history of well-reverence in the British Isles, the Roman Villa at Chedworth. The octagonal spring-fed pool in its Nymphaeum seems, from nearby finds, to have been converted to Christian use at some point, and then converted back again. Recent excavations have uncovered mosaics that appear to have been laid down in the villa as late as the mid-400s, which rather changes our view of sub-Roman Britain. Unfortunately when the Victorian excavators originally dug the place up they not only stuck a little shooting lodge right in the middle of it, but also preserved the Roman walls with twee little tiled roofs that don't help when you're trying to envisage what the two-storey buildings would have looked like. 

That got me back home, but I still had a week of holiday to go so there are more travels to come!

Marcher Land Adventures 2

It's my custom, if possible, to spend a day on holiday without using the car, but to go for a long-ish walk instead. The weather was set fairest last Tuesday, so that was walk-day. I was glad I took my stick as the very first stretch required a detour off what seemed to be the path and then beating aside brambles and ferns to find the steep stone steps leading down to the A466 opposite Boundary Cottage. Apart from the rather nice little barn, the first 'sight' was St Swithun's Church, Ganarew. There's not much to Ganarew, but the service register handily left lying on a cupboard in the church showed that there were 39 souls at the last offering of the Holy Eucharist, which is not at all bad and must have made the building pretty crowded. 

From here the way took me to the northern outskirts of the Forest of Dean, a maze of footpaths and roads that presumably once were footpaths, linking cottages that cling to the side of Doward Hill, their associated cars usually kept elsewhere in whatever layby scratched from the hill their owners can find. I scrambled through several hedges and a bit of undergrowth to find the White Well at Symonds Yat; at least, I hope this was it, so nobody else ever has to bother to look. The owner of one garden I passed was getting into the folly spirit with a decorative stone wall.

The farthest point of the journey was Yat Rock, where the River Wye bends back on itself such that it almost meets, and one day, millennia hence, will. There are two hostelries on either side of the river, the Old Ferry Inn on the west bank and the Saracen's Head on the east, and there are very few crossing points: Huntsham Bridge to the north of both, and the Biblins Footbridge to their south; equidistant between the two, a hand-ferry rows you across to the Saracen's Head and back. I arrived at the ferry-quay along with an older couple, and we stood for a couple of minutes gazing across the river at patrons of the pub enjoying drinks and food, and eventually concluded that nobody was coming to row us across, so it was down to the footbridge and then back, adding about three miles to my journey at any rate. It was then my turn to sit by the river and watch people staring from the west bank wondering where the ferry was (it had been cancelled due to high water, it turned out). 

Yat Rock is a steep climb up the hill but the thirty-mile views are worth while. Everyone has said so since the Wye Valley tour got going in the 1750s. The café there is equally pleasing, and it would have been much cheaper to eat than the Saracen's Head at the bottom. 

From there I retraced my steps to the footbridge, past the towering Seven Sisters Rocks and sadly ignoring the Dropping Wells which lay in impenetrable undergrowth to the north, and then cut up an exhausting trail to King Arthur's Cave. Stone Age humans definitely spent time here, though it's unfortunate that the 'giant' skeleton found in 1700 was eventually lost at sea; the Cave is just along from a Bronze Age hillfort which was landscaped in the 1800s by Lord Blakemore to include a Hermitage, Grotto and Iron Tower, all of which are long since gone. I did find what the OS describes as a Well, but which English Heritage insists was just a mine shaft. There's a lonely Trig. pillar, sitting on the edge of the trees. 

By now I was pretty footsore, and the last few miles back past Ganarew were merely a preparation for the relief I felt to catch sight of Rose Cottage once again.

Back to the Caves

My last visit to Chislehurst Caves in 2008 was under the auspices of London Gothic. Yesterday's wasn't, though it included a lot of the same people and, as we all agreed, was pretty much the same as the earlier one except that we were all fifteen years older. 

There's a lot of history in Chislehurst Caves, though perhaps not quite as much as the attraction itself claims. It was WJ Nichols of the British Archaeological Association who came up with the theory that the Caves had been excavated by Druids, extended under the Roman occupation of Britain, and then further exploited by the local Anglo-Saxons. None of these ideas is actually impossible, but equally they aren't very likely, and certainly haven't been proven: there's no actual archaeological material that might solve the question one way or the other. I can't find anything online about William Nichols apart from his theories on the Caves, but he published them in the BAA journal in 1903, a time when, says the Wikipedia article on the organisation, it was 'at a low ebb'. It certainly wasn't an academic association, more a collection of amateurs who liked dibbing about in the mud and telling one another what they'd found as a prelude to a good dinner in a provincial town; already, by the early 1900s, it was something of a relic of the age when it was founded, long before archaeology was anything like a learned discipline. Our guide yesterday evening referred to him as 'Dr' Nichols, but I wonder whether he wasn't a Dr in the same way Dr Johnson was.

What we know is that the Caves appear in the historical record in a 9th-century charter; that they've had incarnations as chalk and flint mines, a WWI ammunition store, mushroom production centre, film location and music venue, and, most notably, refuge - especially for the 15,000 southeast London residents who sheltered here during the Blitz, creating a self-managed underground town complete with its own chapel blessed by the Bishop of Rochester (and which remains a consecrated space). That a variety of desperate souls and ne'er-do-wells might also have found their way here over the centuries is also not essentially impossible, providing some justification for the various tall tales the guides like to tell and visitors like to hear. 

Many of those tales are, not unnaturally, ghost stories. The Caves have been open as a tourist attraction since the 1950s, and such places develop an institutional culture in which people tell stories to process their relationship with them (I know, I've worked in them). This performs two functions. First, it develops the sense of ownership and commitment among the people who work there, cementing their status of 'guardianship' as they welcome visitors to come and look round. Second - especially where the site history may well have involved suffering and sorrow - the ghosts encode those experiences and provide us with a way of negotiating with them, of working out what we feel. Our guide yesterday told us that many years ago he used to hear the voice of a small girl laughing when he was in the tunnels alone, and, after an older colleague told him about a child who had died while playing in a far-flung part of the Caves during the War, concluded it was her: 'I got into the habit of saying hello to her when I started work in the morning', he said, 'and eventually I didn't hear her anymore'.

I wish I'd asked the context for the proud statements on the original entrance signs, visible in photos around the building, informing visitors their ticket prices went to support 'The Sanitary Fund'. I also wish my photos had come out better: this was the only half-decent one, and even it's pretty rubbish. Not a single ghost on any of them (I think). 

Secrets of the Pharoahs

This is a propos of nothing, but it was where my mental travels took me yesterday. My fascination with Ancient Egypt goes back to my childhood where there was a half-shelf of books on the subject in our local library where (as a special privilege) I had an adult reader’s ticket from the age of about 9. I was captivated by them, even as I was slightly terrified by the photographs of mummies. The spell has never quite been broken.

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy Eady who fell down stairs at her home in about 1907 and was taken as dead before reviving, and thereafter increasingly identified with the Egypt of Seti I, the pharoah who came to visit her in her teenage dreams. It is worth saying that there was never any independent witness of any of these events so we will never know the truth of them. Dorothy became an entirely self-taught Egyptologist, and moved there in 1931, eventually living in a tiny adobe house in Abydos, worshipping the ancient gods, dreaming of encounters with Seti whose lover she was convinced she had been in a past life, and acting as a consultant to more orthodox students of the subject. She had a son who she insisted on calling Seti, hence her adopted name of Omm Sety, ‘Seti’s mother’. Despite being clearly quite odd, she had an unerring feel for Egyptian folkways and habits and her predictions of what features might be found in a particular place usually proved uncannily accurate when a dig was eventually carried out.

Omm Sety reserved an abiding hatred for the ‘heretic pharoah’ Akhenaten who had turned the kingdom away from the old gods she and her spectral lover revered. She claimed that she knew where Akhenaten's queen Nefertiti was buried, and that it was ‘in a very obvious place, yet where nobody would think of looking’. But why wouldn’t she reveal it? Although Omm Sety conceded that Nefertiti must have been ‘a very courageous woman’ for sticking to her principles, however misguided, she quoted what her beloved Seti had told her - ‘We don’t want anything more of that family known’. The location was near the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings, she maintained (against all opinion at the time, that no tombs remained to be found there), and that was the most she would give away: ‘you’d never believe it if I told you’, she chuckled to her collaborator Hanny el Zeini.

It was known since 1976 – when Omm Sety was still alive – that there were two anomalies, empty spaces, beyond the north wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber; a radar scan in 2000 suggested that these were rooms, and five years later an unrelated excavation broke into one, finding mummification equipment relating to the period, but no human remains. So what is the other void space?

Nicholas Reeves, late of the British Museum and many other places, adamantly holds that that space is the tomb of Nefertiti. In 2015 he wrote a paper arguing that newly-released high-resolution photographs of the north wall of the tomb suggested that it was at least partially not natural rock but a construct to close off whatever lay, and still lies, beyond it, and that the form of Tutankhamun’s tomb is one more associated with a queen than a king; he also argued that the most charismatic artefact we have from Ancient Egypt, Tutankhamun’s great gold burial mask, was in fact made for Nefertiti. Then there is the decoration of the tomb’s north wall. The traditional interpretation of the figures is that they show Ay, Tutankhamun’s successor, performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth on the boy king’s mummy; not surprisingly, because this is what the hieroglyphs on the wall say is going on. But it’s always been a bit funny. Ay was a man in later middle age when he succeeded, and this figure is very youthful: even by the stylised standards of Ancient Egyptian art, that’s odd. Dr Reeves points out that the subtle distinctive features of these figures suggest that what we think is Tutankhamun is in fact Nefertiti, in male garb as a female pharoah would be, and what we have taken to be Ay is Tutankhamun. The strongest argument against all this is that it requires we assume Nefertiti did reign, jointly with Akhenaten and then as pharoah in her own right, disguised beneath the name of the hazy Smenkhkare, a title in the king-lists and little else. That’s a plausible interpretation of what we know, but not the only one.

Of course, he may just be seeing things that aren’t there, convinced by his own conviction. A crack in a wall, a different sort of plaster here or there, the curve of the jawline of a painting, the shadowy hint of pictures beneath pictures: it’s not a watertight case, and never will be proved until that void space behind Tutankhamun’s north wall is opened. And you can only open it by burrowing down through the rock from behind. In 2018 another radar study reported there wasn't a space behind the wall at all. Despite conceding right from the start that he could well be wrong, Nicholas Reeves isn't ready to give up yet; late last year there was a bit of a flurry of media coverage when he announced that close examination of the names of the figures showed that they’d been repainted, confirming his identifications. We're all a little like this: we start out open-minded about our ideas, and gradually they become part of who we think we are.

Yet what a thing it would be if the heretic Queen is there, waiting beyond a few inches of wall, wrapped perhaps in her thirty-two-century-undisturbed splendour: as Omm Sety hinted, hidden in plain sight? I don’t think it’s just the glint of gold that’s so attractive in that idea, nor even the romance of what she was and stood for, but that suggestion that something very powerful is just a tiny distance out of reach. At any moment, we could break through a wall into a different reading of what is real.

Crooksbury Hill & Waverley Abbey

My days off being absorbed by record office work, I haven't been on a proper walk for a long time. Apart from a desperate attempt to escape the Clergy Triennial Conference, and an excursion around follies near Dorking in May (neither of which really count), it's been April since I ventured out for a stroll. Today's walk was more of a stroll-ette as a) I was working this morning and b) I'm afflicted by a bout of plantar-fasciitis at the moment which makes a lot of walking a bit of a strain. So I didn't go anywhere I hadn't seen before, though I followed slightly different paths to the trig. pillar on the top of Crooksbury Hill and then down to Waverley Abbey. The paths were surprisingly busy with Bank Holiday business, but the Soldier's Ring in the woods north of the Abbey was strangely calm - and calmly strange, even if you wouldn't have noticed you were walking across a hillfort unless you knew it was there. I continue to be surprised by Waverley Abbey's ruins: I've been there innumerable times, but always find new views and angles to enjoy.

Who Peeps From The Unhewn Dolmen Arch?

A long while ago I posted about my interactions with Ms V, the historical ultra-sceptic whose shifting beliefs about the origins of Cerne Abbey and various other Dark Age issues gradually reduced me to incredulity. I concluded that to justify those ideas, someone would have to dispose of the entire corpus of Anglo-Saxon writing. Yesterday, as a result of a similar discussion about what may or may not have happened at Beckery just west of Glastonbury in the 5^th century (archaeological opinion at the moment is that it was a very early monastic settlement of some kind), I spent far too long discovering that yes, that is indeed exactly the proposition. Every document claiming to be prior to the 12^th century is a forgery. 

At this point, because it would be impossible not to, I will name Ms V fully as Harriet Vered. Her main claim to public notice is The Megalithic Empire (2012), a book arguing that the stone monuments of western Europe were markers in a vast system of trading routes. This is quite a fun suggestion taking advantage of the fact that we don’t really know what most of these places were, even if it doesn’t work in detail (a mystical earth-mysteries site, no less, has a nice review pointing out the gaps in the argument, especially when it cavalierly sweeps aside the possibility of water-based transport in prehistory). Meanwhile, this elderly website promoting the book does so in rather a light-hearted way, suggesting that it is, if not exactly satire as some have guessed, aimed modestly at injecting some new ideas into a field devoid of them; and who could object to that, even if one of the ideas is that modern humans originated not in Africa but the Arctic. It’s positive to have insights coming into the discipline of history from outside, even if they turn out not to have legs.

The Megalithic Empire’s co-author is Michael J Harper, a far more challenging figure, it turns out, than Ms Vered. His other books include 2003’s The History of Britain Revealed, which champions the idea that the inhabitants of the British Isles have always spoken English (not Old English, mind you, but modern English, the stuff I’m typing) and that French and German are derived from it; 2014’s Meetings With Remarkable Forgeries, arguing that ten axial historical texts from Caesar’s De Bello Gallico to Voltaire’s Candide are fakes; and the latest, Revisionist Historiography, which was only published last year and hasn’t received any reviews. It’s a bit expensive for me to try out, especially given the amount I’ve been spending recently.

I grappled with all this rather more than I should have done, but then much of my approach to the world has manuscripts and their implications at its heart. I’m used to people attacking the credibility of the Gospels, and have often made the point that compared to many other ancient texts their credentials are actually rather good, but at least Mr Harper is fair in asserting that virtually every important text historians rely on is fake.

As far as English historical documents are concerned, the Harper-Vered thesis is that there were two great campaigns of forgery, in the 12^th century and the 16^th, both politically-motivated: the first to cement the rule of the Norman kings and the Church they brought with them, and the second to bolster the Tudors and their pet Church as they justified a national identity separate from that of Europe and Rome. This is, I feel, not remotely likely: such initiatives were unnecessary, and the theory requires assuming, contrary to what we know, that texts are no older than the oldest datable copy: that inevitably leads you to look for fakes and forgeries regardless of the circumstances surrounding the texts themselves. Cast an eye towards this interview with Harriet Vered. The interviewer is generally very sympathetic to her ideas, but when (at 0.59) he asks why, given their absolute control over land, the Norman kings couldn’t just give their new abbeys and churches anything they wanted without engaging in an elaborate fraud involving inventing an entire fake history for a country, Ms Vered can’t answer, merely repeating that that’s what happened. At 1.09-1.10, discussing Samuel Pepys’s diary, she clearly thinks it’s prima facie absurd that such a document could have existed for 150 years without being published, and therefore that too must be a much later fake.

Because these assertions don't rest on evidence, I thought there must be a set of beliefs behind them, and so there is. Mr Harper and those he associates with call it Applied Epistemology, though it bears only a remote relationship to the philosophical study which goes under that title. In the account of The Applied Epistemology Library, this is translated into a set of rules to govern enquiry, to which a set of people are committed: AEists, they call themselves. The rules boil down thus:

- If the truth is not simple, prove it!

- If what was differs from what is, prove it!

- If different inputs will produce the same outcome, prove it!

I’m not clear where these dicta come from, and I’m not sure I can think of practical meanings for the last one, but on the face of it these are not particularly objectionable guides to thinking in a variety of disciplines. The AEists don’t often stick to them, though, because there are other motivations operating. It must surely be simpler to believe that English history is real, and its core texts genuine, than to assume they were all produced in two completely otiose campaigns of fraud.

In fact, the bigger rule and the one which clearly excites the AEists more than the stated ones, is the injunction to come up with interesting, unorthodox ideas, even if they involve contradicting yourself. Mr Harper says:

    an orthodoxy is established as soon as two people are agreed on something. This is the origin of the Applied Epistemological mantra 'Everything you say must be original to you (or it isn't worth saying)'.
    To an extremist, and all AE-ists are extremists, if you say something completely original except that you said it last week, an orthodoxy has been formed, and you shouldn't say it. But this is a counsel of perfection and, so as long as you feel a little uncomfortable spouting something you said last week, that is usually enough since it will force the brain to put a slight spin (even a literary flourish) on such a hackneyed thought.
    Obviously you would rip your own tongue out rather than repeat what somebody else said last week. … As long as you get your brain used to constantly 'diving down' you will eventually bottom out ie actually start being compulsively original.

This is, of course, an ideology – a counter-orthodoxy, if you will – and where it takes you is, for instance, claiming (as Mr Harper implied on well-known alternative historian Graham Hancock’s website in 2003), that the Ancient Egyptians created Lakes Victoria and Tanganyika as reservoirs and the northern course of the Nile is due to artificial engineering. One might counter that this is explanation is a lot less ‘simple’ than the Nile not flowing into the Indian Ocean or west to the Atlantic because there are bloody great mountains in the way, or that Lake Victoria doesn’t look ‘squarish’ at all, but one suspects Mr Harper is just saying something plainly ludicrous for the sake of it. Should you be tempted to believe any of this, consider the 14 species of Mastacembelus spiny eels unique to Lake Tanganyika, which would have taken longer than 5000 years to develop.

No, the root of AEism, if such a thing can be said to exist, lies not in high-minded rationalistic principles, but rather in the belief that people are largely liars or fools, and those who expose them should consider themselves superior. You will recognise this as the same energies that drive conspiracy theories. It produces ideas that dissipate when actual data are applied to them, but you have to wonder how much their proponents actually believe in them: perhaps they just find reality a bit dull. It's hard to tell. In Harriet Vered’s interview on Adzcast, she insists that ‘we don’t have a single Anglo-Saxon church in this country’ (which will be news to the good parishioners of Wing, Brixworth, or St Peter’s Monkwearmouth), ‘you can’t date a stone cross’ (pity poor Rosemary Cramp, then, who devoted her entire life to dating Dark Age sculpture), and alleges that orthodox archaeologists force their unsubstantiated ideas on the general public. In fact, for instance, English Heritage who own Stonehenge are quite open in stating that nobody knows what it was for (though they speculate, quite reasonably). Is she ignorant, malicious, or mischievous?

My contrary experience is that people, no matter their degree of ignorance about facts, are generally neither liars nor fools, though they might be either on occasion. And this is probably where my unconscionable credulity arises.

Cumbria 3: Castles and Ruins

Like South Wales, the Borderlands of Scotland and England were violent and debated, so there’s a good supply of castles and similar fortifications, although I went in virtually none of them. Durham Castle is part of the University so you have to book a tour, and at Carlisle I was wincing from being overcharged for postcards at Tullie House Museum (already an expensive enough visit) so I kept outside that one too; while Clifton Hall, incongruously sited next to a working farmyard, was shut. Penrith Castle is a shell; I glimpsed the private Naworth Castle and Langley Castle (the latter rebuilt in the 19^th century) from the roadside.

Hexham’s Old Gaol is like a little castle, but in fact is a purpose-built judicial prison built by the Archbishops of York. The Old Keep at Newcastle is a proper fortification, linked to its Black Gate by a walkway, so that was the closest to an ordinary castle visit I got.

The mighty Lowther Castle just south of Penrith is a different matter. This is a largely ruinous neo-Gothic mansion from the early 1800s, once the seat of the Lowther Earls of Lonsdale. The First Earl, ‘Wicked Jimmy’, was so notoriously miserly that when his heir took over the estate in 1802 he advertised for anyone who believed they’d been cheated or owed money by the Earl to make a claim. Hugh, the 6^th Earl, inherited his family’s colossal wealth derived from coal and land and managed to get rid of most of it thanks to extravagances such as spending £3000 per annum on cigars, insisting that his dogs travel first-class in their own rail carriage, and taking a 24-piece orchestra with him on trips. Three years after Hugh’s death in 1944, his brother and heir Lancelot sold off the contents of the massive Castle, though it was another ten before the 8^th Earl, James, despairing of finding any other use for the wreck, took its roof off, and transformed it into what amounts to a colossal garden ornament, which is what it now is. You can walk through what were once enormous halls and reception rooms and gulp as you realise quite how much money the Lowthers must have had to construct this fantasy building.

Lanercost Priory was the only ruined abbey I could easily get to.

Cumbria and Northumberland have an older stratum of ruin, of course: fragmentary but still charismatic, Hadrian’s Wall runs across the neck of Britain, punctuated by Roman forts and waystations. I went to Chesters, where local landowner James Clayton excavated the huge fortress after realising the importance of the walls his workers kept turning up just beneath the soil. The remains are now a strange intrusion in the gentle, sloping fields west of the North Tyne River. The soldiers stationed here were a largely Spanish cavalry regiment: five hundred men and as many horses, a bath house, a multi-storey headquarters building, gate towers and a commandant’s house. What must the Britons have made of it? A couple of miles further along the Wall is Carrawburgh – Brocolitia – with its Mithraeum. I was startled by its small scale: its aisles can only have accommodated eight people at once, watching as a new member was brought in to be initiated into the cult of Mithras. This is an even odder thing to find in the Northumbrian fields than a cavalry fort, a dark, secretive religious building, overlooked by sheep.

Finally, even before the Romans arrived, there was Long Meg and Her Daughters: the third-largest stone circle in England, and fully as odd as any of the Roman remains. There’s a farm close to the circle, and comfortable trees, but the stone ring itself seems resolutely undomesticated. This has a lot to do with Long Meg herself, a tall, narrow monolith of red sandstone standing outside the circle of dumpy grey limestone blocks. She is so clearly separate and different that you can’t help ascribing personality to her, and an eerie one at that. The story goes that Colonel Lacy of The Caves (who we will discuss later) tried to have the stones blown up with gunpowder so the field could be usefully ploughed, but after sudden and inexplicable thunderstorms while the explosives were being laid, the locals refused to co-operate. And so the circle stands.