Under Another Sky (14 page)

Wheeler, remembering the excavation in
Still Digging
, described this fort as ‘celebrated’, something that seems unbelievable now. The farmer told me that there was ‘a guidebook once’, but today there was not a signpost, nor an information board, nor the merest hint that behind the swallow-nested barns of his neat farmyard there was anything of interest at all. The fort is in effect a large sheep field, set about with walls and still-fine Roman gateways. It was simply built in about
AD
80 with timber buildings, and remade in stone in the middle of the next century. A cavalry force was garrisoned here – 500 Vettones, from north-west Spain – and it was one of Wales’s most important forts, part of a network that dotted the hills between its twin fortresses of Isca (Caerleon, near Newport) and Deva (Chester), presiding over south and north respectively. Wheeler described the two summers of the dig as ‘the happiest and least anxious of all my enterprises’. Flinders Petrie, the great Egyptologist, who had famously surveyed Giza, spent his summer holiday nearby, amusing himself, recalled Wheeler, by measuring stone circles using ‘a single slender bamboo pea-stick and a visiting card’ – the visiting card to provide a right angle, and the pea-stick a line for surveying. (On one occasion, he and his wife Hilda were ‘treed’ by a bull.)

Wheeler too regarded the excavations as something of a holiday, according to Nowell Myres, one of the student diggers, later a great historian of the Anglo-Saxon period. He would begin the day by issuing instructions to the students and the ‘handful of unemployed Welsh navvies who comprised the labour force … and would then disappear, suitably equipped, in the direction of the river. In the evening he would return, not always overburdened with trophies of the chase, listen to what we told him of the day’s work on the dig, and explain to us what he thought it meant.’ It was Tessa who ‘coped with all the organisational and administrative chores that a dig entails, including the provision of enormous picnic meals’. Later, Petrie would write to Wheeler remarking on the fact that the eventual site report ‘effaced any record of the unfailing driving power of Mrs Wheeler, which seemed the back-bone of the carry-on’. It is hard to tell whether his tone is critical or approving.

At Y Gaer, it was pure pastoral. The air was filled with the plaintive baaing of the fresh-shorn sheep; a pair of red kites floated serenely on the hot summer thermals above us. The day blazed; Matthew and I picnicked under an oak, leaning on the Roman walls. It was an eclogue afternoon: made for lying, as Virgil wrote, ‘
lentus in umbra
’, leisurely in the shade.

It is a trope of Augustan Latin poetry to cast back to the distant past and imagine the thronged streets of modern Rome before it was built, when it was all meadows and bucolic. In the eighth book of Virgil’s
Aeneid
, Evander, an Arcadian who has founded a kingdom in Italy, shows Aeneas round his domain: which happens to be the future site of Rome, to be founded three centuries hence by Aeneas’s descendant Romulus. Evander points out the future Capitoline Hill, which in Virgil’s time was the site of the greatest temple of the city, dedicated to Jupiter. The tree-fringed summit and its grove cause the local people to tremble in religious awe, Evander tells Aeneas. He says: some god lives there, but we don’t know who. Virgil is giving the topography of Augustan Rome a numinous aetiology, suffusing its everyday modernity with the mythical.

The spot has its own ancient ruins, too. In tour-guide mode, Evander continues: ‘
Haec duo praeterea disiectis oppida muris,/ reliquias veterumque vides monimenta virorum
’ – ‘Here you can see two buildings with shattered walls. They are the relics and monuments of ancient men.’ The buildings, he explains, are citadels built by Janus and Saturn – deities who occupied this place in the deep past and ruled over it for ‘
aurea saecula
’, a golden age. The group approaches Evander’s lowly dwelling, ‘
passimque armenta videbant/ Romanoque foro et lautis mugire Carinis
’ – ‘and everywhere they saw herds of cattle lowing in the Roman forum and the smart Carinae’. Virgil lets time collapse here, such that for a moment his contemporary readers would have been given the head-spinning image of cattle roaming the streets of their own busy city – a kind of double exposure, past and present in the same frame. Reading these lines in the twenty-first century, there is a different frisson again: the oleander- and cyprus-fringed Forum of our day is once more empty but for tourists and old stones. For us, a visit to the Roman Forum is more like Aeneas’s tour-guided trip round Evander’s ancient realm. Time has come full circle: from pastoral ruin to pastoral ruin. But in a curious way, our modern perspective is implicit in the
passage: it is as though by conjuring the ruins of Saturn’s old city, Virgil can foresee the ruins of his own Rome. Nothing lasts for ever; empires come and go. As I lay in the shade, lulled by the breeze-shifted canopy of leaves above, I felt how eloquently and sorrowfully realised were Virgil’s lines, here in the pasture of Y Gaer.

In the sixteenth century, a Roman tombstone was found near the farm. In the Wheelers’ day it was on the Roman road leading away from Y Gaer into the valley; now it is in the sleepy, agreeably tatty Brecknock Museum at Brecon (outside which stands a bronze sculpture, by John Thomas, of Boudica brandishing a sword as her daughters huddle in her skirts, which pre-dates Thornycroft’s group at Westminster Bridge by almost half a century). Although the Roman tombstone is much worn and weathered, we could still clearly see the subject of the carved relief. R. G. Collingwood, the great authority on the inscriptions of Roman Britain, wrote it up for Mortimer’s archaeological report on Y Gaer thus: ‘Above, full-length figures of a man and his wife are cut in relief. The woman’s left arm rests on her husband’s shoulder, while her right arm seems to cross her body so that she may clasp her husband’s right hand, but the weathering and flaking of the stone obscures all details and only permits us to see that the group has been a dignified and well-designed composition … The local name, Maen y Morwynion (Maidens’ Stone) betrays the impression made by the group on the minds of passers by.’ Of the inscription beneath, only the words ‘
coniunx eius h. s. e
.’ can be made out – meaning ‘her husband put this up’. (The abbreviated letters are short for ‘
hic situs est
’, or ‘put this up’.) Though the image is worn almost to complete smoothness, there is something ineffably touching about it, as Collingwood betrays even through his objective epigrapher’s description.

In July 1926, the summer after the Wheelers finished work at Y Gaer, Mortimer took up a new job, as the director of the then embryonic Museum of London. The
South Wales News
covered the leaving-party speeches: ‘In Mrs Wheeler Dr Wheeler had a wonderful chief of staff … Mrs Wheeler, in replying, said she had always endeavoured to be a part of the shadow behind her husband.’ Notwithstanding Mortimer’s new job, there was still unfinished business to be attended to in Wales: he had already laid plans for another excavation, this time near the mouth of the Usk at Caerleon.

Caerleon had been the garrison of the 2nd Legion; now it is a small, pretty town, despite being jammed up against the motorway and the sprawl of Newport. The twelfth-century cleric Gerald of Wales described in his
Itinerarium Kambriae
, or
Journey Around Wales
, what he saw there. ‘Caerleon is of unquestioned antiquity. It was constructed with great care by the Romans, the walls being built of brick. You can still see many vestiges of its one-time splendour. There are immense palaces, which, with the gilded gables of their roofs, once rivalled the magnificence of ancient Rome. They were set up in the first place by some of the most eminent men of the Roman state, and they were therefore embellished with every architectural conceit. There is a lofty tower, and beside it remarkable hot baths, the remains of temples and an amphitheatre. All this is enclosed within impressive walls, parts of which still remain standing. Wherever you look, both within and without the circuit of these walls, you can see constructions dug deep into the earth, conduits for water, underground passages and air vents.’

It is not quite as splendid now as Gerald described it 900 years ago, and his ‘gilded gables’ were surely something of a fantasy, but when Matthew and I visited, we still could see a fragment of the great baths with their swimming pool, and a portion of the pillared, naved exercise hall, once the size of a cathedral. And out on the town’s edge was the great amphitheatre, traditionally known as King Arthur’s Round Table, grassy-bottomed and high-banked. On the hot June day when we met my brother and his family here, boys were kicking a ball around the sheltered green enclosure. We walked in through the Roman gates and, like other visiting families, laid out a picnic, crowding into the sparse shade cast by the stone-supported seating banks. Tilda and Eleanor, my nieces, ranged around the amphitheatre, mapping the hunks and hollows of the structure as they made it their playground; we lazier adults dozed in the sun. Before he had accepted the job in London, Wheeler had announced his plans for excavating the amphitheatre, using the Arthurian associations as a hook to tempt the newspapers. The ploy worked. The
Daily Mail
was down in a flash, and offered to pay £1,000 towards the cost of the excavation in return for exclusive news from the dig. Archaeology had – as Wheeler wrote – ‘acquired a new market value’. That was surely down to the sensational discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb three years before. South
Wales was not Egypt: but Wheeler, a journalist’s son, was learning how to harness the power of the press.

By the time the dig was due to start, Mortimer was busy in London, so it was Tessa who excavated the amphitheatre at Caerleon, shuttling back and forth between the site and London, helped by her young friend and admirer, Nowell Myres. There is a to-do list in Verney Wheeler’s firm, competent hand from that excavation, in which she notes the day’s tasks – everything from archaeological matters on which to consult her husband, to ‘draft an appeal’, ‘consider post-cards’ and ‘write to Archbishop’. It was in excavating Caerleon’s amphitheatre that Verney Wheeler came of age as an archaeologist and scholar in her own right. On this project she published solo for the first time, and afterwards was elected one of the first female fellows of the Society of Antiquaries.

Two years later, in the summer of 1928, the Wheelers came west again to dig, at Lydney Park in the Forest of Dean – a tract of land in that stretch of Gloucestershire on the west side of the Severn estuary that seems to belong properly to Wales. The late-nineteenth-century house of the Bathurst family, the viscounts Bledisloe, is tucked into a little fold of its own deer park; and each spring its gardens are opened to the public to show off its exotic plantings of azaleas and magnolias – and its exquisite Roman-temple ruins. On the day I visited, a motley gang of us, children outnumbering grown-ups, drifted round the glades and avenues. The grass was carpeted with the downcast heads of early English bluebells; ferns unwound their new leaves. Through the grass nodded the slim, erect stalks of pink candelabra primulas, which grow wild in the Himalayas. My nieces and their friends lay in the thick grass on the banks of a pool to study the tadpoles squirming in the water. It was an unseasonably hot April day. Opposite the shrubbery of candy-coloured rhododendrons, the ground rose sharply.

I left the others eating cake on the lawn and climbed up the rise – Dwarf’s Hill, as it was once known. Here, between the canopies of beeches, one with palest green leaves, the other a fiery copper, I came upon the remains of a late-Roman temple, dedicated to an otherwise unknown god called Nodens. Nearby were the fragments of a little bathhouse, and further along the hilltop, deep square holes in the turf: Roman mineshafts where men had dug for iron ore. Perhaps in some
distant imagination the dwarves of the hill had toiled in these mines. When the Wheelers excavated the site in 1928, Mortimer was excited to see the marks of ancient picks on the stone walls of these shafts. From the low mossy stonework of the temple remains, the view opened out, down to the Severn. The excavation report – authored jointly by the Wheelers – called it ‘a vista of luxuriant forest and spacious estuary which can scarcely be matched for beauty even in a county of pleasant park-lands’.

Back down the hill, in the old-fashioned little museum attached to the house, a room of which is devoted to shells and ethnographic objects collected by the Bathursts in New Zealand in the 1930s, I studied the finds from the temple. So many little canine statues have been found here that it is thought Nodens was particularly associated with dogs. The god remains something of a mystery: it was a young Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon called J. R. R. Tolkien who was commissioned to speculate on the origins of the name for the Wheelers’ report. He thought it might have parallels to words meaning ‘catcher’ or ‘snarer’ in ancient Germanic languages. My eye was drawn by an imperfect, slightly damaged figurine in milky-ambery alabaster: a hunting dog, elegant and leggy. It was lying down, its front forelegs folded underneath it, and I felt I could sense that utter gentleness and looseness that a large dog’s paw has in repose. But its head was high and alert, its ears pricked and eager, its nose practically quivering, as if it had just been roused to wakefulness.