In 1936, a group of archaeologists working at Maiden Castle, near Dorchester, made a grisly discovery. Scattered near the east gate of this ancient hillfort were at least 52 Iron Age skeletons, some with horrific injuries to the head, back and shoulders. For the excavation director, Mortimer Wheeler, the cause of these terrible injuries was clear. He interpreted the skeletons as part of a war cemetery, bodies lying “in tragic profusion, displaying the marks of battle”. To him, these were the men and women of the Durotriges tribe, who had, in the first century AD, vainly defended their hilltop home against advancing Roman troops.

“What happened here was plain to see,” Wheeler was later to write. The Roman infantry, under the covering fire of missiles, had “advanced up the slope, cutting its way from rampart to rampart, tower to tower” until they got into the area of the hillfort gateway. “Confusion and massacre dominated the scene,” he went on. “Men and women, young and old, were savagely cut down, before the legionaries were called to heel and the work of systematic destruction began.”

It was a dramatic and evocative description of a battle fought 1,900 years earlier – and one that proved extraordinarily persuasive. Mortimer Wheeler’s “war cemetery” became a 1930s media sensation – one that, until recently, appeared in pretty much every account of Roman Britain. For much of the 80 years or so since Wheeler’s team entered Maiden Castle hillfort, the Durotriges have been credited with leading armed resistance to the armies of Rome, operating from a series of strongly fortified hillforts across what is now Dorset and southern Wiltshire. Their story has been presented as a bitterly contested struggle against what may have been the first professional army of the ancient world – one that ultimately saw their hillforts taken and their people killed or enslaved.

With positions such as keeper of the London Museum on his CV, Mortimer Wheeler was one of the most respected archaeologists of his generation. But recent archaeological discoveries are suggesting that, when it came to the Durotriges, his conclusions may have been incorrect. These new finds are painting a very different picture of what happened within the confines of Maiden Castle hillfort almost two millennia ago. They suggest that the Durotriges didn’t fight to the death against Rome’s legions. Instead, it seems, they had a relaxed relationship with the invaders, almost to the point of complete indifference.

Good for business

The Durotriges weren’t the first British tribe to encounter the Romans following their invasion of Britain in AD 43. When the Roman emperor Claudius ordered the assault, target number one for his legions was Camulodunum (Colchester), capital of the Trinovantes, then one of the more powerful tribes in southern Britain. Once Roman troops had eliminated all opposition, the emperor arrived to oversee the capture of Camulodunum where, as an inscription in Rome was later to note, “he received the surrender of 11 British kings”. Sadly, neither the names of these kings, nor the tribes they ruled over, was recorded.

Despite this lack of information, it’s assumed that the main tribes surrendering to Claudius were the Catuvellauni, Regni and Cantiaci, all of whose lands bordered the now defeated Trinovantes. Joining these three tribes in pledging allegiance to Rome were probably the Corieltauvi, Atrebates, Belgae and Dobunni. Their leaders must have quickly come to the realisation that Rome boasted vastly superior military forces, and that it was better to capitulate than see their people die needlessly. They must also have reflected that, with the Trinovantes, their tribal competitor, now smashed, siding with Rome would be good for business.

Certainly, when we look in the archaeological record for the period, it’s clear that the Trinovantes were the ultimate losers in the immediate aftermath of the Roman invasion, suffering the indignity of witnessing a huge fortress being built over the remains of their capital. Meanwhile, the Catuvellauni, Atrebates, Belgae, Regni and Dobunni were all provided with brand new Mediterranean-style towns. The message was clear: being with Rome was a good thing; standing against them spelt disaster. 

Further afield, the Iceni of Norfolk and the Brigantes (a tribe that occupied much of what is now Yorkshire) weren’t immediately brought into the empire, having no new towns, temples or villas built in their territory. Instead, the Roman government seems to have paid them off, offering their leaders lavish gifts in order to keep them sweet (a policy that, in the case of the Iceni, broke down in spectacular fashion in around AD 60 with Boudicca’s rebellion).

But what about the Iron Age tribes of south-western Britain – which included the Durotriges? Our understanding of their relationship with Rome’s legions is less clear, as there’s no useful written evidence to tell us exactly what happened. We do know that one legion, the II Augusta – comprising more than 5,000 heavily armed, well-trained, professional soldiers – was dispatched westwards, across an area we now recognise as Hampshire, Dorset and Devon, with orders to “conquer the rest”.

• Read more | What if Boudica had defeated the Romans?

The commander of the II Augusta was a general by the name of Vespasian and, as he later became emperor (in AD 69), the Roman biographer Suetonius recorded the early part of his career. In Britain, Suetonius tells us, Vespasian oversaw the conquest of the Isle of Wight, fighting 30 battles, capturing more than 20 towns and receiving the surrender of two powerful tribes. The location of these battles and details of the towns the Romans captured go unrecorded, but it was long believed that the Durotriges were among the powerful tribes that the legions beat into submission – and that much of the fighting probably took place in their territory.

Long time dead

Prior to the invasion, archaeology shows that the Durotriges seem to have profited little in the way of trade contact with the Roman Empire. Presumably, they would have seen few benefits in joining Rome, and would have viewed the arrival of Vespasian as a thoroughly bad thing. Given that some of the largest and most impressive Iron Age hillforts anywhere in Britain are found in Dorset – sites like Maiden Castle, Hod Hill, Hambledon Hill and Badbury Rings – it was naturally assumed that these sites formed the focus of organised resistance.

But there’s a problem with this theory, one that has been thrown into ever sharper focus as our knowledge of Mortimer Wheeler’s “war cemetery” – and Dorset’s Iron Age hillforts more generally – has improved. For a start, the skeletons that Wheeler’s team discovered in 1936 are not the product of a single event. Rather, it appears that they were buried over an extended time period – and, crucially, that the trauma they exhibited on their discovery was largely the result of executions rather than battle injuries.

Listen | Miles Russell responds to listener queries and popular search enquiries about the four centuries of Roman rule in Britain, on this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast:

Just as tellingly, the iron projectile in the spine of one skeleton – one that Wheeler believed had been fired by Roman forces – is actually an Iron Age spear. The final blow to the theory of armed conflict between Rome and the Durotriges is the discovery that the Durotriges had vacated the hillfort at least a century before the Romans arrived. In AD 43, Maiden Castle was no battle-ready fortress but an abandoned set of earthworks, its grass-covered ramparts probably undefended.

It’s been suggested that a second Dorset hillfort, Hod Hill, was also the target of a Roman attack – perhaps an artillery barrage unleashed by II Augusta. A small Roman fort was indeed built inside the Iron Age hillfort, and archaeological investigations, conducted in the 1950s, found multiple projectiles fired from a Roman device known as a ballista. However, we now know that Hod Hill, like Maiden Castle, was largely empty in AD 43, and it’s likely that the bolts found were fired from the Roman fort during a period of peace-time target practice.

Legions on the march

So it seems that the Durotriges didn’t take the fight to the Romans. And that was probably a wise decision. Ongoing archaeological investigation is showing us that the Durotriges lived in small farming communities, rather than in large groups inside strongly defended hillforts. They were probably too few in number, too widely scattered and too politically disorganised to offer any significant resistance.

• Read more | The Celts in Britain: everything you need to know

In fact, the idea that any of the various Iron Age tribes of southern Britain had the capability to truly test the Romans on the battlefield is a fantasy based on the modern misguided idea that they possessed large standing armies. Only when tribes pooled their resources, which rarely seems to have happened, or deployed guerrilla tactics, ambushing legions on the march, could they achieve anything. Faced with the superior numbers, training and equipment of a Roman legion, individual tribal warriors and poorly armed farmers could achieve little.

Does this mean that the Durotriges surrendered to the Romans – just as their counterparts in the south-east had done? Well, actually, no. Many tribes in the south-west of Britain – such as the Dumnonii of what is now Cornwall and Devon, the Silures of today’s south Wales and the Durotriges themselves – appear to have decided that neither fighting the Romans nor capitulation was the best course of action for them. With little experience of trading with the Romans, and no chance of besting them on the battlefield, they pursued a third option:
and that was to ignore them.

Disposing of the dead

Compared to their Iron Age neighbours to the east, the Durotriges were unusual in a variety of ways. They buried their dead in cemeteries, while other tribes practised cremation or disposed of their dead in places where modern archaeologists cannot find them, such as rivers or lakes. This Durotriges disposal practice has proved extremely informative for archaeologists, allowing them to better understand the tribe through their skeletal remains and associated grave goods. And, crucially, these finds suggest that the Durotriges’ settlements continued uninterrupted beyond the Roman “conquest”. Traditional forms of burial were maintained for many more generations, and grave goods, placed within native-style burial grounds, avoided all but the most basic of Roman artefacts.

Personal possessions are relatively simple, comprising bronze brooches, bangles, rings and occasionally decorated mirrors. The Durotriges, it seems, wanted only those Roman items, such as hair-plucking tweezers and pottery drinking cups, that fitted into their existing lifestyle. They had little interest in anything that might usher in a more Mediterranean style of living.

Durotriges customs may have differed from their Roman counterparts in another key aspect: gender relations. It’s perhaps interesting to note that greater numbers of artefacts are found in female graves, suggesting that women enjoyed a higher status. Perhaps the Durotriges were a matriarchal society, political power passing down the female line. Certainly, Roman writers of the time often observed that in the “barbarian” lands of Britain, women were just as likely to hold power as men, something the patriarchal Romans just couldn’t understand.

• Read more | The fall of Roman Britain: how life changed for Britons after the empire

In the second half of the first century AD, the Roman government created the new town of Durnovaria Durotrigum (Dorchester) for the tribe, to act as their administrative and economic centre. It was never truly successful, only really developing more than three centuries later, under the patronage of a few wealthy individuals who built a series of well-appointed private houses: a sort of Roman gated community.

All this evidence paints a picture of a tribe that had no desire to become Roman. Archaeology tells us that the Durotriges seem to have been unaware of the ideas, fashions and artefacts that best defined Rome, shunning the status symbols acquired by their Romanised tribal colleagues to the east. The “Roman project” was not for them.

It seems that the Durotriges calculated that passive resistance was the best way to preserve their customs, their culture and their way of life. And perhaps they were right. Maybe it was this apathy towards the Roman empire that both defined them and helped them to survive.

Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University

This article first appeared in the February 2022 issue of BBC History Magazine

What kind of things might you find in a prehistoric grave, and what could they reveal about the past?

Prehistory is intensely interesting to me because the only way that we can approach it is through archaeology. You are left to piece together the story through traces left in the ground – the material objects of ancient cultures, remnants of constructions and buildings, and the remains of our own ancestors.

There’s an often forensic process that goes on when you’re trying to reconstruct what life was like in the prehistoric era, and burial sites represent a treasure trove of information. Graves such as that of the [early Bronze Age] Amesbury Archer or the “Red Lady of Paviland” [actually a young man who died 33-34,000 years ago] are absolutely stuffed with cultural artefacts. They essentially act as time capsules – little microcosms of the culture of the time.

As well as the objects we find in graves, we’re able to extract ever more information from the bones themselves. For me, as a biological anthropologist, it’s been astonishing how the science around this has developed over the past 20 to 30 years.

What kind of information can we glean from bones?

If I’m presented with a skeleton, I can tell quite a lot just by looking at the bones with the naked eye. I have a background as a medical doctor and before I started learning the business of osteoarchaeology, I would have thought: “It’s just a skeleton. How much can you really tell? You can’t ask it about symptoms, you can’t do blood tests.” But I was astonished at how much you could work out. First, bone responds to disease. Some infections, such as syphilis and tuberculosis, affect bone in very distinctive ways. Osteoarthritis is also easy to identify from tiny holes on the surface of a joint.

Next you can look at teeth. People suffered from dental disease in the past, just as we do today, but most prehistoric people actually had much better teeth than ours because they didn’t have such a starchy, sugary diet. They didn’t brush their teeth as fastidiously as we do, but their teeth are nevertheless usually in surprisingly good condition.

Employing radiography techniques, such as using X-rays, allows us to uncover more clues – hidden features of the bones. And with a micro CT [computed tomography] scanner we’re able to slice up the bones virtually, allowing us to analyse them without incurring any damage.

Then there are chemical techniques that allow us to analyse the ratios of different elements in bones and teeth. Our bodies are built from what we consume, so we are essentially made out of our surroundings. That means that the signatures of the landscapes in which we grew up are written into our bodies – particularly into teeth, because tooth enamel is laid down in childhood.

For instance, your body is constantly incorporating different stable isotopes of oxygen and strontium in various ratios. We can analyse isotopes in ancient human remains, and see how these elemental ratios match those found in the geology of places in Britain or farther afield. This can be really useful for telling where somebody grew up, for instance, or where they spent the last decade of their life.

Finally, we can extract DNA from ancient bones and sequence it. That technology has come on in leaps and bounds in recent years.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

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What can we learn about ancient bodies from DNA studies?

The human genome was fully sequenced in 2003. Since then we’ve developed the ability to extract DNA from very ancient bones, and to work out how to combine separate fragments of DNA into a complete genome. By doing that, we’re able to look for rare variants that might give us clues indicating when particular groups of people moved in or out of Britain. Sometimes we’re able to reconstruct more detailed information about individuals, too. One of the prehistoric skeletons I discuss in the book is known as Cheddar Man, who was discovered in Somerset in 1903, and lived around 10,000 years ago. By analysing his genome, geneticists have revealed that he probably had an unusual combination of dark skin and bright blue eyes. Being able to work that out from just a skeleton is utterly extraordinary.

DNA can also reveal information about kinship and relationships between individuals. That’s been quite profound when it comes to looking at the communal burials found inside Neolithic chamber tombs, for instance. One theory about these chamber tombs is that they were intended to anonymise the dead, and therefore contain people from across the whole community. Another theory is that they effectively acted as family vaults – and some recent genetic analyses provide hints that this may indeed have been the case. For example, it’s been revealed that two bodies buried together in a Neolithic monument at Primrose Grange in County Sligo, Ireland are those of a father and his daughter.

Elsewhere in Ireland, DNA analysis of a man buried at Newgrange Stone Age tomb in the Boyne valley has revealed that he was the son of an incestuous union between either a parent and a child or two siblings. So we’re finding out some quite extraordinary details, some of which may not even have been public knowledge at the time of those people’s deaths.

Does genetic science have the potential to settle some major archaeological debates?

Genetic science is not a panacea. It’s not as though DNA technology somehow supersedes archaeology – in fact, it could actually leave us with more questions than answers. But it does provide important strands of new evidence with the potential to answer some big questions, especially about mobility and migration. We should view it more as a tool for archaeologists to use – one that will hopefully help us see the picture more clearly.

Genetics can certainly be disruptive. In fact, it’s probably as disruptive as radiocarbon dating was when that emerged, from the late 1940s – suddenly, archaeologists were able to pin absolute dates on organic material. I think you can see a similar effect playing out with DNA analysis at the moment.

There have been some instances of geneticists treading on archaeologists’ toes. There’s been a perception by some archaeologists that geneticists have waded into long-standing archaeological debates and simply said: “You’ve been arguing about this for ages. Well, now we’ve got the answer.” Not surprisingly, archaeologists have responded: “Hang on a minute – first you need to learn a bit about archaeology and the kinds of questions we’re asking.”

But we’ve got to capitalise on the power of genetics to help us solve archaeological conundrums. In the book, I talk about a cutting-edge new project called 1,000 Ancient British Genomes, led by Swedish geneticist Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute. This is a brilliant example of the power of collaboration between geneticists and archaeologists. Skoglund is engaging with archaeologists up and down the UK, asking them to identify questions that genetics might be able to help solve.

Your book is as much about the development of archaeological thinking as about the discoveries themselves. Which archaeologists most intrigue you?

One of the people I became quite obsessed with is Augustus Pitt-Rivers (1827–1900). He’s best known as a collector, but he also came up with some really interesting ideas about how cultures change and evolve over time, and how these transitions happened. Pitt-Rivers was very influenced by 19th-century evolutionary theory and biology, and wondered how these ideas could apply to culture. He also started to think about whether the origins of new cultures might be linked to the movement of people.

For instance, Bronze Age people in Britain obviously had a different culture from the Neolithic people who preceded them. But where did they pick up this culture from? Pitt-Rivers suggested that there had effectively been a population replacement – that Bronze Age culture was actually brought in by a whole load of new people. He tried to back up this theory by measuring skulls, arguing that there were detectable differences between the shapes of Neolithic and Bronze Age skulls. He was trying to use the study of skulls in a similar way to how we would now use DNA studies.

What’s astonishing is that DNA evidence now emerging suggests that Pitt-Rivers may have been right – that a lot of people may have arrived in Britain during the Bronze Age, largely replacing Neolithic populations. Those earlier people didn’t completely disappear, but there was a really profound turnover of population. It’s really interesting to think about the contact between these two groups, and about the ways in which their different cultures may have merged.

How did the preconceptions of archaeologists in the past influence their understanding of the discoveries they made?

Archaeology is a very introspective, self-aware discipline, which I think is extremely useful. We’ve long been aware that every archaeologist always has ideas from their own time in the back of their mind whenever they approach a set of observations.

That can impact ideas about gender, for example. Take Iron Age chariot burials: not all of them contain men – we know that some, such as the site at Wetwang in East Yorkshire, definitely contain women. I think that in the past antiquarians would have very quickly jumped to a conclusion that the body was male, based on the style of the burial or perhaps artefacts that were buried with the body. This is similar to what Reverend William Buckland (1784–1856) did when he discovered the oldest skeleton yet found in Britain, on the Gower peninsula in south Wales, which he called the “Red Lady of Paviland”. The remains are clearly male, but Buckland didn’t think it could possibly be a man because the individual was buried with what looked to him like ivory jewellery. As a 19th-century antiquarian, he couldn’t stomach the idea that a man might be buried with jewellery.

And these ideas still persist. When we find an Iron Age burial with a sword, there’s often an assumption that it’s a man. Or if a mirror is excavated from a burial, there’s an assumption that the remains are that of a woman. In the book, I talk about the need to avoid seeing discoveries through our own current cultural lens – to accept that there may have been many more diverse identities in the past than perhaps we understand today, for example. We think that our society and culture is normal in the way that it defines two genders, but perhaps in the past there was a much more diverse approach to identity. Certainly, if you find an Iron Age burial with both a sword and a mirror (and one such site has been excavated), that might be telling us something quite interesting about ancient identities.

I think that new scientific technologies encourage us to move away from our current preconceptions – to look at the evidence in isolation to begin with and then to build up a bigger picture.

One of the burials you discuss is that of the Amesbury Archer, found in Wiltshire and dating to around 2,300 BC. What does his grave tell us about the early Bronze Age?

It’s a stunning discovery – the most richly furnished Copper Age burial yet found in Britain. This man was buried with almost 100 objects in his timber-lined grave, so he was certainly high status or special in some way. All sorts of things were buried with him: lots of flints and arrowheads, and stone items that we presume are wrist guards for archery – hence his name – as well as copper knives and five bell-shaped beakers. There were also gold ornaments, thought to be hair wraps or possibly earrings – the oldest gold found in Britain.

Because the Amesbury Archer was found only about three miles from Stonehenge, some have suggested that he may have had a link with that site. That may be true, but we’ll never be able to prove it. You can also speculate about who he was – his position in that society: are we looking at some kind of Bronze Age shaman or magician? And, connected with that idea, what did people think of those who first developed the ability to extract metal out of stone? It must have been amazing to see a completely new material being produced.

What I find particularly interesting about the Amesbury Archer is that analysis of the stable isotopes in his remains shows that he wasn’t a local – in fact, he grew up in or near the Alps. Graves such as his show just how far these connections stretched, and the distances that people were travelling. There’s this popular idea that in the ancient past people never travelled farther than the next village, but now we have evidence of some, such as the Amesbury Archer, travelling hundreds of miles in a lifetime.

Another of the discoveries you discuss is the Pocklington chariot burial in East Yorkshire. Why was that such an exciting find?

That burial, found in 2017, is absolutely spectacular. I was lucky enough to visit it with the team that discovered it. We don’t see many Iron Age burials across most of Britain, but in Yorkshire several very characteristic chariot burials have been found. These belonged to the Arras culture, which had connections to the near continent and possibly brought this very distinctive funerary style with them.

That Pocklington grave contains the body of a man buried within a chariot. In other similar burials, the chariots tend to have been dismantled before being put in the grave – flatpacked, essentially. This one, though, was standing up and intact, with the man placed inside in a crouching position.

Along with the grave, there’s evidence of a funeral feast. You get the impression that this funeral was a great spectacle, intended to show off the status of the deceased individual but also that of the surviving family. There are animal bones in the grave, including a rack of ribs, so it looks as if dishes from the feast were being shared with the deceased individual.

The other utterly extraordinary thing is that two pony skeletons were found standing up in the grave. That was just unbelievable. We spent quite a long time scratching our heads, wondering how on earth they got those ponies in there upright. Did they winch dead animals into the grave and then somehow support them, maybe piling up the soil underneath to hold them in a standing position? Or were the ponies led into the grave and then killed? I don’t know if we’ll ever quite get to the bottom of how it was achieved, but obviously it was extremely important to the design of the grave to have the chariot looking as though it was ready to depart, taking the dead man off, possibly to the afterlife. That is, of course, if they believed in the afterlife – we don’t know!

Do you think we learn anything about ourselves by looking at prehistoric Britain?

I think that exploring prehistory shows us just how multicultural Britain has always been. What we’ve seen is that many different groups of people have crossed the North Sea and the Channel in both directions over time, and that those cultures all enriched the others.

Although I write a lot about the power of genetics, I don’t think we should be trying to trace direct genetic links between us and people in the ancient past because, once you get back into prehistory, these connections aren’t terribly meaningful. You don’t need to have a direct genetic link with the Red Lady of Paviland or the Amesbury Archer to think about what the lives of these individuals might have been like. I’m aiming for an egalitarian approach to ancestry in the landscape. The “ancestors” I look at in the book belong to everybody.

Alice Roberts is the author of Ancestors: A Prehistory of Britain in Seven Burials (Simon & Schuster, 2021). Buy it now on Amazon, Waterstones or Bookshop.org

This article was first published in the July 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

When was the British Iron Age?

The Iron Age of the British Isles is usually dated to the period between c800 BC and the Roman invasion of AD 43, during which time knowledge of iron-working technology was brought to Britain by Europeans, later referred to as Celts. By 500–400 BC, use of iron artefacts had been adopted across the British Isles, gradually replacing the use of bronze.

How did people live?

Perhaps surprisingly, Iron Age people were closer to the men and women of today than we might think. Settlements consisting of individual stone houses with garden plots sited along a street have been found in Cornwall, while in Wessex, remains of large thatched roundhouses have been unearthed, which would have been a hub for domestic life.

• Explore 8 little-known prehistoric sites in Britain

An open-hearth fire in the centre of the house would have provided warmth, light, and a means of cooking food. The Iron Age diet itself was not unlike ours, consisting of bread, grains, a type of porridge, and meat, as well as honey and dairy products – and even beer!

Iron Age Britain was primarily agricultural, with crops and livestock providing the means of survival, as well as commodities that could be exchanged with neighbouring farms. There was even time for leisure. Glass gaming pieces discovered in Iron Age burials indicate the presence of rudimentary board games, while the use of large, upright weaving looms meant that fashion, too, played a part in daily life. Textiles were dyed bright colours, and decorative accessories, such as brooches and pins, have also been discovered.

• Read more about what life was like during the Iron Age

What do we know of their beliefs?

With farming at the heart of Iron Age society, religious festivals probably followed the agricultural year. Two celebrations we know of are Beltane, on 1 May, which welcomed the warm season and the moving of cattle to open fields, and Lughnasadh, on 1 August, which marked the ripening of crops. One festival still marked today is that of Samhain, on 1 November, a time when spirits were thought to pass between the two worlds, and the end of the Iron Age year.

There may have been as many as 400 gods and goddesses worshipped in Iron Age Britain, and weapons, animal sacrifices and other precious objects believed to have been sacrificed to the gods have been found in rivers, lakes and bogs across the British Isles.

Who were the Druids?

Little is known about the Druids, other than that they were Celtic priests who led religious ceremonies. Most of our information about them comes from later Roman descriptions, some of which refer to the druidic practice of human sacrifice.

What is some of the evidence of Iron Age Britain?

The most common and visible remains of the Iron Age are the 3,000 or so hill forts that can be found across Britain – one of the largest is Maiden Castle in Dorset, which is the size of 50 football pitches. These sites were probably only used for seasonal gatherings and trade, rather than as permanent settlements.

In 1984, the incredible discovery of a 2,000-year-old, perfectly preserved male body was made in a peat bog on Lindow Moss in Cheshire. The Iron Age find revealed much about the environment in which the ancient man had lived and died.

Thought to be about 25 years old, Lindow Man’s beard and moustache had been cut with shears, while his last meal had been burnt, unleavened bread. He had also died a very violent death – struck on the head twice with a heavy object and possibly strangled in what may have been an elaborate religious sacrifice.

What ended the Iron Age?

The Iron Age did not end overnight with the invasion of the Romans in AD 43, and many Iron Age beliefs and practices continued, particularly in parts of the British Isles where Roman rule was weak or non-existent. Contact with the Roman world had been established well before the invasion, with luxury goods such as wine traded for grains, slaves and minerals. Rome also seems to have established diplomatic relations with Iron Age tribes, which helped spread its influence in the aftermath of the invasion of AD 43.

• The Roman invasion: whose side were the Britons on?

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed

Gwrych Castle, a 19th-century country house near Abergele in North Wales, might be about to become one of the most famous historical sites of 2020, thanks to its new role as the home of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here. But in the 1990s, the castle was fading fast, stripped of its wealth, crumbling and forgotten.

It was in this state that the site first caught the attention of Mark Baker, when he was 11 years old. His curiosity would lead him to establish the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust – a charity dedicated to protecting the castle’s heritage and history – all the more remarkable considering Baker was still just 12 years old.

“I used to pass it every day to and from school, and I would look up at the castle from my parents’ car,” explains Baker. “I witnessed it slowly disappearing into the hillside, into a mass of overgrowth. I began to notice there was light coming through parts of the building that hadn’t done so before; the roof had been stolen, windows smashed and anything of value taken away.” When Baker ventured up to the site, he found “a scene of devastation”. The place had been ransacked by asset strippers, who took everything from its artwork to its fireplaces.

“I could see remnants of what had been there in terms of its former glory,” Baker says. “There were still vestiges of the past, and it caught my imagination to try and rescue it.”

• From magnificent ruins to imposing forts: 10 must-visit British castles

Undaunted and helped by what Baker calls “the naivete of youth”, he started to research the castle at the libraries at school and in the town of Abergele. “I came across so many discrepancies in the castle’s narrative that no one really knew who owned it, or how old it was.”

Curiosity in full gear, Baker wrote to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Prince Charles about the castle, ultimately meeting them to discuss what actions could be taken. “The Prince of Wales was most supportive and made an off-the-cuff comment that I should write a book about the castle and its history. So that’s what I ended up doing, and I set up a charitable trust at the same time. That is how it all started.”

Since his work setting up the trust, Baker completed his doctoral thesis on The Development of the Welsh Country House in 2015, and has worked with the National Trust and Welsh government agency Cadw on the preservation of historical sites.

The history of Gwrych Castle

The 19th-century castle embodies what has happened to many country  houses in the 20th and early part of the 21st century, says Baker. “It was a private house that was requisitioned in the Second World War and then sold, as the family could not afford to repair it. Fortunately, the next owner was an entrepreneur who it opened as a tourist attraction. Sadly, like many of these vast properties, maintenance slipped and then it fell into disrepair.”

There have been forts on the site since the Iron Age, when the hills around the castle were mined for lead and silver, also used by the Romans. During the 11th and 12th centuries, at a time when Wales was still a collection of different kingdoms, according to legend, Gwrych played its part in the defence against invading Norman and English forces. Owain ap Gruffydd(c1100–70), the king of Gwynedd and the first ruler known to have experimented with the title ‘Prince of Wales’, fortified Gwrych against the forces of King Henry II of England in the mid-12th century.

• History explorer: The conquest of Wales
• 8 must-visit castles with Tudor connections

Later, during the 14th-century power struggle between ruling monarch Richard II and Henry Bolingbroke (whose father was John of Gaunt, fourth son of Edward III), the site would play a part in the royal history of the British Isles. Richard had refused to grant Bolingbroke the lands left to him by his father, and when the king returned to England following a campaign in Ireland in 1399, he was captured by Bolingbroke in the area near Gwrych Castle. Richard was forced to abdicate, and Bolingbroke assumed the throne, styling himself Henry IV.

The castle itself, completed in the 1820s by Lloyd Hesketh Bamford-Hesketh, has since been through many iterations. In the 1939, the castle housed 200 Jewish refugees from (then) Czechoslovakia during WW2. “They were on one of the last trains out of Nazi Germany before trains were diverted to go to the concentration camps,” says Baker. “Gwrych really was a lifeline for all of those children. Most of them never saw their families again; you can’t really underestimate how pivotal a role Gwrych Castle played in safeguarding their lives.”

• Remembering the Kindertransport

In the 1970s, the castle became a medieval entertainment centre with attractions including jousting and banquets. “And then,” says Baker, “it became a cause célèbre on how not to look after a historic building, when it became a ruin. It has hit these different points in the national consciousness. It’s got an amazing story to tell, and amazing people attached to that story.”

One of these figures in Gwrych’s past is the Countess of Dundonald (1859–1924), a key player in a personal dispute that had a significant impact on the castle’s history. Winifred, Countess of Dundonald, inherited Gwrych, the seat of the Bamford-Hesketh family on the death of her father in 1894. “Her family had lived there nearly a thousand years, in the earlier house,” explains Baker. “And then Winifred’s grandfather built the castle as a monument to their ancestors, the Lloyds of Gwrych.”

• A brief history of Wales: the resilient nation

The countess was, says Baker, “very ahead of her time”. She was involved in the suffrage movement and a prominent patron of Welsh art, music and literature during the early 20th century, as well as an owner and manager of her own land at a time when this was rare for women.

“Unfortunately, she had quite an unhappy marriage,” says Baker. This became significant when she tried to leave the castle to the nation in her will; when the countess died in 1924, Gwrych was left to King George V and the Prince of Wales.

“She was very publicly-minded and thought about what could be done to help the preservation of the castle in the long term. It was a great tragedy that her plans fell apart; her husband came out of the woodwork, not very pleased with how his wife had disinherited him, and he ultimately bought the castle back, which ruined her vision.”

Is Gwrych Castle haunted?

As the celebrities signed on for this year’s series of I’m A Celebrity might be encouraged to discover, there are plenty of legends connected to the castle.

“In Wales, tales of myth and legend go back to the Mabinogion and Iron Age Wales,” Baker explains, referring to the tales of Celtic mythology that were written in the 12th–13th centuries and based on older oral stories. “Gwrych Castle has all of these references in its history, as well as its own storytelling and myths,” says Baker. “It’s set of caves,” he explains, “were often referred to as being ‘the home of the fairy folk’, and a way to access ‘the Celtic other world’.”

Ghosts and spirits are said to haunt the forests surrounding Gwrych. One ‘Lady in Red’, seen by champion boxer Randolph Turpin in the early 1950s whilst he was out training in the park, is said to be the ghost of the Countess of Dundonald. “The castle is a palimpsest ­– the ghosts add another layer to its rich history,” says Baker. “There are people who are interested in life after death and whether there is another world beyond ours. This is part of mystique of Gwrych where the past merges with the present.”

I’m A Celebrity, and the future of Gwrych Castle

The castle’s new role as the UK home of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity, says Baker, is “the next chapter in the thousand years of the castle’s story.

“It is all about engaging people in new and innovative ways with their heritage. The filming demonstrates that historic places do not necessarily need to remain static as the narrative is constantly evolving with time. I really hope that I’m A Celebrity is an enabler for this process, so we can get more people coming to visit, to enjoy the place and also to learn to respect our historic assets.

In a world affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is a particularly welcome spotlight as many heritage properties in the UK struggle to adjust and survive. “We’re in the middle of putting together a phase 1 application to the Heritage Lottery for a £10,000,000,” says Baker, “The plan is that the castle will be reroofed and brought back into use, because what’s really important to us as a grass roots charity is to provide opportunities for local people.” The castle has a part to play, says Baker, in stemming the so-called “Brain Drain” from North Wales. “It would be amazing if we can play a role in preventing this. The estate has provided employment and fostered local talent for hundreds of years; we want to continue that trend and take it to the next chapter of history.” Baker is even optimistic that the enhanced publicity and extra income for the site could lead to some of the assets that were stripped in the 1990s being identified and returned.

The celebrities will be the first guests in a while to stay in the castle, and Baker is excited to see how they interact with the place (and also whether they get to see ghosts as well, adding that he hopes they will have a “nice time”). When its suggested that ‘nice’ isn’t always what the producers of the show might have in mind, he laughs and says, “Okay, hopefully they will survive, and have fond memories”.

Whatever the celebrities make of their stay at Gwrych, the opportunity presented by the show is a huge one. “A casual visit to historic sites such as the castle can often be an opportunity for people to become more engaged by igniting an interest,” says Baker. “To know that’s going to happen, through the prism of I’m A Celebrity, showing that we’ve got such a rich history every night on the TV for two or three weeks in November and December. It’s incredibly exciting.”

The new series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, is airing on ITV from Sunday 15 November 2020

Find out more about the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust

Q: Who were the Celts?

These pan-European tribes were seen by the classical world as the ‘enemy at the gates’

The Greeks called them ‘Keltoi’ or ‘Galatians’, while the Romans knew them as ‘Celtae’ or ‘Gauls’. They were frequently depicted as savage, warlike and dangerous; a very real threat to the survival of Mediterranean culture. Archaeology, however, has shown them to be one of the most important and influential of all ancient civilisations, with their artistic and cultural influence, which spread from Spain to Turkey and Italy to Scotland, still affecting us today.

The ‘Celts’ were not, in fact, a single race, but a series of distinct tribes, albeit bound by common ties of art, custom and religion. Celtic groups existed throughout central Europe, on the fringes of the classical world, from the 4th century BC. For Greece and Rome, they represented the archetypal ‘enemy at the gates’; the ultimate barbarian whose way of life was incomprehensible and completely at odds with their own.

Given that both the Romans and the Greeks used the word ‘Celt’ in an inconsistent – and frequently quite derogatory – way to cover those who lived beyond ‘civilisation’, it can be difficult to see how the term was originally applied and what precisely it meant.

Matters are not helped by the way in which the word ‘Celtic’ has taken on a more political dimension in recent years, being linked with concepts of Welsh, Scottish, Cornish and Irish independence and self-determination. This, of course, causes further confusion, given that both Britain and Ireland were not considered, by contemporary Roman historians and geographers, to be part of the Celtic world.

If, however, we use the words ‘Celt’ and ‘Celtic’ to cover the distinctive cultural, religious, linguistic and artistic styles common across large swathes of pre-Roman Europe, then it is apparent that not only was Britain part of this greater Celtic inheritance, but also that the Celtic style that developed here represented the final flourish of a rich, varied and dynamic culture. Unfortunately the Celts themselves did not write anything down, so their history and identity can only be pieced together from archaeological excavation, combined with the written testimony of their sworn enemy: the Roman empire.

• Want to know more about the origins of the Celts? Barry Cunliffe investigates…

Q: How and where did the Celts live?

Most Celts in Britain lived in roundhouses, either clustered together in small farms or enclosed settlements, or within large hillforts. With their conical, thatched roofs and wattle-and-daub walls, roundhouses offered substantial family accommodation, and are usually found together with timber granaries, animal pens and work sheds, all surrounded by ploughed fields and pasture. Farming was the main source of food production. Celtic families or clans belonged to larger tribes, each led by an elite to whom the farmers and food producers pledged their allegiance.

Hillforts

With their substantial banks and ditches that enclosed vast areas of land, hillforts are the most awe-inspiring Celtic features of Britain, with hundreds being constructed between 600 and 100 BC. They were political, economic and religious centres which probably also served as refuges at times of war.

With capacity often exceeding population requirements, large parts of hillforts were given over to storing food. Significant evidence for religious activity can also be found, usually in the form of human burial, animal sacrifice and the widespread deposition of precious metalwork, such as spears, swords and mirrors.

We know very little about the ways in which tribes were organised, but some of the larger ones were governed from the hillforts by powerful ruling monarchies. Wealth came from trade or war, with the elite, protected by a warrior class, presumably controlling all key resources and redistribution networks. Other privileged classes would have included artisans (those who made exquisite artefacts), priests/ priestesses and bards. Below these were the farming families and their workers, all of whom would have come to the hillforts to pay tribute to the leaders and fulfill their spiritual and economic obligations. The complex nature of hillfort defences, especially at the entrances, ensured that only those invited to participate could enter in safety, while those who were excluded could not easily force their way in.

Farming

The Celtic way of life was essentially rural and centred upon the farm. Herds were tended and protected, families raised, houses built and pasture maintained, while fields were routinely ploughed and crops harvested. Hunting was a sport for the wealthy, the bulk of the population relying on the fruits of their own agricultural labour. Animals, especially cows, pigs and sheep, were kept within the area of the farm and there were usually large granaries and pits to store grain and other food close at hand, with any surplus being paid to the ruling elite.

Farming communities engaged in trade for exotic items. The Romans tell us that the Celts loved wine and decorative furnishings, but were mainly self-sufficient, producing pottery and metal objects to suit their own need. Feasts were important social occasions – the provision of excess food and drink together with entertainment in the form of story-telling and singing – and essential in order to maintain alliances and fulfil religious and social obligations between clans and family groups. Generally, life was peaceful, although the complex nature of tribal allegiances may sometimes have led to disputes and feuds. These could range from simple acts of raiding, instigated by a handful of warriors seeking prestige, to longer periods of sustained war in which much blood was spilt.

Food

British Celts relied on a number of key cereal crops, notably wheat and barley to make both bread and beer, as well as peas, lentils and locally sourced fruit and berries. The high number of granaries and storage pits found in Celtic settlements suggests that most farming communities produced a substantial grain surplus. Farm livestock, namely pigs, sheep and cattle, were exploited for their meat and, in the case of sheep and cattle, also for milk and cheese. Horse, although an elite, much-treasured animal in Celtic society, also appears to have been eaten on occasion, as were new and exotic foreign imports such as the chicken. Generally speaking, thanks to their outdoor agricultural life, people were relatively healthy. An overreliance upon meat, however, probably did little to help obesity and coronary heart disease. According to the Romans, the Celts also loved beer and wine, which they drank to excess, many feasts degenerating into drunken brawls.

Q: Did the Celts have an egalitarian society?

Whereas Rome was a strongly patriarchal society, in which women were expected to occupy a secondary role, the Celts were more egalitarian, with both men and women able to rule tribes in their own right. At all levels of Celtic society, women appear to have had greater freedom than in Rome, possessing more of a partnership with men when it came to marriage, business, land ownership and the home.

Ironically, the Romans viewed equality between the sexes as evidence of the ‘barbarian’ and deeply primitive nature of the Celts. According to Julius Caesar, husbands and wives shared their wealth; there are certainly just as many rich male burials from the British Iron Age as female. When, in the 3rd century, the Roman empress Julia Domna commented on the independent, free-spirited nature of Celtic women to the (sadly unnamed) wife of Caledonian king Argentocoxus, the British queen replied contemptuously that “we may consort openly with the finest men, but you Roman women let yourselves be debauched in private by the vilest”.

• The Celts: were they friends or foes of the Romans?

Who were Boudica and Cartimandua?

Two of the most powerful Celtic leaders in Britain were both women, but their lives and relationship with Rome were very different. Boudica was a queen of the Iceni in what is now East Anglia. She and her husband, King Prasutagus, were allies of Rome following the invasion, signing a treaty with the emperor Claudius which supposedly guaranteed the safety of their tribe. With the death of Prasutagus sometime before AD 60, Rome took control of Iceni land and property, treating the queen and her people as slaves. Incensed by this brutal behaviour, Boudica led a rebellion – which defeated a Roman legion and destroyed three Roman towns and their associated villas – before finally being crushed in battle, whereupon she reportedly took her own life.

Cartimandua was queen of the Brigantes, one of the largest tribes in Britain occupying what is now northern England. She too signed a treaty with Rome and, when Caratacus, leader of the British resistance war came to her for help, she betrayed him to Rome. As a consequence, she found herself at odds with a large anti-Roman faction, led by her husband Venutius. Brought down in a palace coup, Cartimandua fled to the protection of her Mediterranean allies.

• What if… Boudica had defeated the Romans?

Q: Did the Celts really sacrifice humans?

The discovery of well-preserved bodies suggests this was common practice

The sacrifice, or deliberate discard, of precious metal objects, such as spears, swords, helmets and shields, was a common practice within Celtic society. Large numbers of prized artefacts have subsequently been found within the bogs, springs, lakes and rivers of Britain and Western Europe. Animals too seem to have been sacrificed, rather more violently, individual body parts often being reassembled in a curious order within the pits and ditches of Iron Age settlements.

Mediterranean writers were keen to emphasise that the Celts practiced human sacrifice, something Romans found particularly abhorrent, and suggested that Celtic priests consulted human entrails for messages from the gods. Were it not for the archaeological evidence recovered from the bogs of northwestern Europe, we could explain all this as negative propaganda, examples of the Romans demonising their enemy. However, a variety of prehistoric bodies that have been dredged from the wetlands of Ireland, Denmark and southern Scandinavia have shown that human sacrifice was indeed carried out at times; the broad similarity of injuries recorded suggest that these executions were all part of the same ritual practice.

• The genius of the Celts

Comparison of these so-called ‘bog bodies’ has indicated a form of execution which is sometimes referred to as the threefold death. A good example from Britain is that of a young man found preserved in Lindow Moss in Cheshire. Here, the individual had, at some point in the first century AD, been struck violently across the head, before being strangled with a tightly wound cord and having his throat cut. Finally, his lifeless body was deposited face down in the bog.

Celts were also well-known head-hunters, taking the skulls of both honoured ancestors and enemies killed in battle to display them in their homes and to decorate their horses. At both Danebury in England and Ribemont in France, evidence of the decapitation of young men, probably warriors, is clear to see. However, we cannot be sure whether these poor individuals died in combat or were the victims of sacrifice. No less a Roman than Julius Caesar himself described the mass burning to death of criminals within a giant wickerman, although it should be stressed that no archaeological evidence has yet been found for such a practice.

• Read more | A brief history of Hadrian’s Wall

Q: What religion were the Celts?

We know next to nothing about the gods and goddesses of the Celts. Unlike the Greeks and Romans, the Celts had no single pantheon or divine ‘family’ of deities. Gods were apparently specific to particular tribes, or were connected to important features in the landscape, such as a river, spring, forest or mountain. The association of gods with watery places may explain why so many examples of high-status Celtic metalwork have been found in the rivers, streams, lakes and bogs of Britain. Communication with the gods, and control over the sacrifices made to them, was in the hands of a class of priests and priestesses that the Romans called druids. Sadly nothing is really known about the nature of the druids and what their precise role was in Celtic society.

Some British gods were combined with their classical equivalent when Celtic lands were conquered by the pragmatic and deeply superstitious Roman empire. The Romans were only too keen to combine their gods and goddesses with native ones in order to keep the natives happy. Hence we hear of the goddess Sulis, Celtic deity of the hot springs at Bath, who was merged with Minerva, the Roman goddess of healing, in order to create the super-deity ‘Sulis-Minerva’. Elsewhere we find examples of the merging together of Celtic and Roman war gods like ‘Mars-Toutatis’ or ‘Mars-Camulos’.

Q: What happened to the Celts?

The Celtic way of life didn’t disappear with the dawn of Roman Britain

Celtic Britain was a patchwork of tribes, each with their own traditions, culture and individual identities. Our understanding of these tribes is incomplete, although their names – such as the Atrebates, Durotriges, Catuvellauni and Iceni – were recorded by the Romans. Britain was invaded by the Roman empire in AD 43, the southern half of the island being controlled by Rome until the 5th century. Under Roman jurisdiction, new Mediterranean-style towns flourished; some of the Celtic elite bought in to the Roman way of life, with many developing their farms into more luxurious accommodation. The native British power structure of kings, queens and landowners was largely retained by the new government as a useful way of devolving power to existing leaders, encouraging them to join the Roman-citizenship ‘club’.

• Everything you wanted to know about Roman Britain – but were afraid to ask

The bulk of the rural population, however, were largely unaffected by the arrival of Rome, their way of life continuing in broadly the same way, the only minor changes being the gradual introduction of new artefacts and fashions. In northern England and north Wales, where Roman garrisons were maintained, Roman influence did not extend far from the ‘bubble’ of Mediterranean culture contained within individual military bases. The influence of Celtic Britain, especially in art, can be seen right through the Roman occupation, while the absence of Rome in northern Britain and Ireland meant that Celtic tradition continued unaffected.

After the Romans

Celtic Britain was a valuable asset to Rome, producing significant amounts of grain and beef to feed the military. Its mineral reserves, especially iron, lead, tin, gold and copper, were also successfully exploited. From a social perspective, however, the occupation was a failure, as only a minority of the population adopted a Roman lifestyle. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that little of the Roman way of life survived to influence the later development of England, Scotland and Wales.

By the 5th century AD, eastern Britain was being affected by Germanic (English) forms of art, language and culture brought over by a new wave of migrants, whilst the west was reverting to more ‘Celtic’ influences.

Numerous British kingdoms evolved in the years following the collapse of Roman rule. Some may have been loosely based upon old Celtic tribal identities, others were wholly new, created by powerful warlords. The history of these kingdoms is lost to us, but the chaos that forged them provided us with the heroic King Arthur, whose semi-mythical exploits still resonate today. Real or not, Arthur represents the Celtic ideal: a powerful warrior who fought bravely and died in the heat of battle.

It is difficult to answer the question ‘what happened to the Celts?’ because they never really went anywhere. The people – and their art, culture and DNA – were absorbed into other empires, kingdoms and societies. Some areas of Britain, such as what is now Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, remained largely free of Roman influence, while Ireland was never part of the Roman empire. All later helped to reintroduce Celtic art and tradition back into what was once the province of Britannia. Elsewhere, Celtic culture fused with English, Danish and Norman influences to create a distinctive style all of its own.

It is only really within the last few centuries that the term ‘Celtic’ has taken on a more political dimension, being linked with concepts of Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Cornish, Gallician or Breton independence in the face of perceived English, Spanish or French political domination.

• Geoffrey of Monmouth: the lost voice of ancient Britain

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Celtic art, culture, language and tradition have been resuscitated and used, not only as symbols of resistance, but also of identity and common ancestry, especially among those descended from emigrant groups in the USA, Canada, South America and Australia.

Although this new form of Celtic identity is far removed from its prehistoric origins, it is surely testament to the powerful nature of this most distinctive and magnificent of ancient civilisations.

Dr Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University and the author of 15 books.

This article was first published in the June 2016 issue of BBC History Revealed

It’s all about Picts, logboats and the crusades this week, plus the small matter of our virtual Medieval Life and Death Festival.

First up, logboats, which are – as the name suggests – boats made out of logs, otherwise known as dug-out canoes. There have been a fair few such craft found in archaeological contexts, with dated examples back to the Mesolithic and Neolithic.

Because they are hewn out of single logs, they are limited in size and girth, but they would have been perfectly serviceable boats. I actually did my undergraduate dissertation on the possibility of prehistoric logboat navigation on the River Exe. Quite a few people have made replicas to prove what they were capable of, and I’ve seen modern examples being used on pretty large and fast-flowing rivers in Nepal (as I paddled past in a much less elegant modern plastic kayak).

Nevertheless, you don’t necessarily think of Vikings and logboats in the same breath. Vikings travelled around in much grander longships didn’t they?

Well, yes, and no. A week or so ago, Bristol University archaeologist Dr Cat Jarman posted on Twitter about a new potential find of a Viking Age logboat, which I thought was rather exciting, so I asked her for a bit more information.

Exciting new boat discovery in Norway! This time, an almost perfectly preserved LOG BOAT. Why is this exciting? And does it relate to the Vikings? Repton? And the Silk Roads? Maybe.... bear with me: #riverkings /1

Photos: Leon Arne Kleiva via Facebook/Arkeologi i Norge pic.twitter.com/PtUcxWRtkf

— Dr Cat Jarman FSA💀 (@CatJarman) May 11, 2020

She explains: “The logboat was found at the edge of a small lake on a farm in Agder, southern Norway. The farmer, Frode Øina Andreassen, was recutting boggy ground near an old channel when he accidentally came across the boat and lifted it out.

“His great-grandfather had found two very similar boats nearby on the same property in 1932, and those have been dated to 600-900 AD, so Viking Age or just before. Because of that, it’s likely that this dates to the same period too and an expert from the Norwegian Maritime Museum has estimated a date of 500-1000 AD.

“They’ve now taken samples for radiocarbon dating. A Viking Age date would be exciting because it would add to what we know about transport by small vessels in this period.

“Logboats would have been used for hunting and fishing, or for transport of people and goods. Learning more about boats like this is particularly important for understanding the use of rivers and inland waterways, where Viking ships and other boats would be too big or inconvenient.

“In inland parts of Norway, there were important resources like iron, firs, and soapstone that were traded far and wide in exchange for exotic goods.

“We don’t have many logboats that securely date to the Viking Age, but historical sources from eastern Europe tell us these boats were used by the Rus (eastern Vikings).

“Using and controlling rivers was a key part of the Vikings’ success across Europe, so understanding the mechanisms that made this possible gives us vital new information about the Viking worlds.”

Cat Jarman has a book out called River Kings next year (February 2021), which is going to be looking at Viking river transport, among other things, so we’ll hopefully be going back to her for a podcast when that is out.

A remarkable Pictish hillfort

Someone who I’m planning to have a chat with sooner than that is Professor Gordon Noble, the archaeologist behind the project that has just revealed that a hillfort in Aberdeenshire, Tap o’ Noth, was both huge (housing perhaps 4,000 people) and Pictish (5th–6th centuries AD, maybe back to the 3rd century AD) in date.

That’s a pretty remarkable find, and one that’s going to force a bit of a rethink about Pictish society. This follows hard on the heels of the story that sent me off into a fishing frenzy last week about the Pictish diet.

So the Picts are having a bit of a moment – and I’m going to talk to Gordon, and his colleague Dr Nicholas Evans, in the next week or so, to record a podcast on what we now know about this fascinating late Iron Age/early medieval Scottish civilisation (they have a book on the topic). I did have a bit of an email exchange with him straight away after the news of his Tap o’ Noth research was released, asking what link there was between the huge, and well-defended, hillfort and the contemporary nearby high-status valley site at Rhynie (where the famous Rhynie Man Pictish symbol stone was found, and where the similarly notable Craw Stone still stands).

Here’s what he told me…

“We have three contemporary sites in the valley now – Tap, Barflat (Rhynie) and a ringfort at Cairnmore.

It is possible that Tap was occupied seasonally, and that is an idea we will work on – we are applying to dig more house platforms to address how many are contemporary and questions surrounding seasonality etc. We have only really dug one platform in detail [on Tap o’ Noth] and we had imported Roman pottery (of probable third century date) and metalworking moulds (of the fifth to sixth centuries).

“So, [there is] reasonable evidence of relatively high status occupation of Tap too. And given the investment in platforms and the rampart, I would suspect this was a permanently occupied site – at least for some of the population. My best guess is that Tap is the main settlement whereas the Barflat complex is one for feasting and ritual activities, but may have had a residential component too – for the elites and given the placename (Rhynie derives from the early Celtic word for king – rig) perhaps an elite royal lineage.

“The Rhynie Man carries an axe type linked to animal sacrifice and there is a warrior carving from the cemetery near to the village – so we can see ritual and a warrior ethos part of the symbolism of power down in the lowland sites. But those are just working ideas – we really don’t have any parallels for these sites so it is all cutting edge research on this period and the Picts.”

Dr Nick Evans adds: “Tap O’ Noth is so exciting because the period from the Third to Sixth century AD is one where the textual evidence on the Picts is pretty poor, so we have very little idea about social structure and politics in this period. For instance, in the Fourth Century the raids on Roman Britain might indicate that some larger scale political units existed among the Picts. However, that is uncertain, and we don’t know what effects the end of Roman rule further south had on those in Britain to their north. We’ve tended to assume that large kingdoms would have disappeared for a while, until perhaps the late sixth or seventh centuries, but Tap O’ Noth, through further investigation, might indicate that our assumption that there were only relatively small-scale kingdoms in that period is mistaken.”

If you want to see more about Prof Noble’s research in Rhynie and surrounds, there is a great 3-minute video on the Northern Picts Project home page, and Nick Evans has delivered an online lecture about the Picts too. Also, since publishing this blog, I’ve seen a great tweet of a 3D model rendering of the Tap O’ Noth fort, which is worth a look.

I promised a 3D model of Tap o' Noth #hillfort, in #Aberdeenshire, #Scotland when I read the news about discoveries of 800 roundhouses inside of a hillfort by @aberdeenuni. And here it is in all its beauty! 2D map and 3D screenshots in the second tweet. #HillfortsWednesday pic.twitter.com/FEKI8rof9H

— Jošt Hobič (@jost_hobic) May 20, 2020

Back to Braveheart

Given all this news on the Picts, I wonder if anyone is planning a feature film on them? It is, after all, 25 years this month (in the US, later in the UK) that another rather famous Hollywood blockbuster on Scottish medieval history came out. I couldn’t secure an interview with Mel Gibson to talk about Braveheart and William Wallace, but you can read a round-up of historically inaccurate films on this very website. If you want to know more about the historical Braveheart, the current issue of BBC History Revealed also has a feature on Wallace, so have a read of that too.

Last year we had another film, Outlaw King, which was more about Robert the Bruce than William Wallace, but in both films, England’s King Edward I is very much the bad guy. Read this piece on the Hammer of the Scots to help you get to grips with what sort of man Edward really was.

Before his Scottish expeditions and indeed before he was king, Edward went on crusade to the Holy Land in 1270. He started for home when he heard of the death of his father Henry III in 1272 (and look out for an upcoming feature in July’s BBC History Magazine and podcast from Professor David Carpenter on Henry III). Edward’s expedition is sometimes called the Ninth Crusade, but Prof Rebecca Rist, who I’ve interviewed for this Sunday’s ‘Everything you want to know’ podcast on the Crusades, didn’t count that in the list of main crusades when I asked her the question ‘How many crusades were there?’. Listen to the podcast to find out why, and much more besides. It should be live on Sunday lunchtime. In the meantime, we have loads of other great Crusades podcasts in our back catalogue.

Finally, we are right in the thick of our Virtual Medieval Life and Death week. We’ve had some great talks already and a lot of you have already watched the lectures on medieval violence, food, and religion. And we still have love and medicine to come. Don’t worry if you’ve missed them – you can still watch them all on the website. I hope you’ve enjoyed the talks and the virtual festival feel – I’d love to hear what you thought of them, or any of my witterings – tweet me.

David Musgrove is content director at HistoryExtra. He tweets @DJMusgrove

What’s new in the Middle Ages? As the most medievally-inclined member of the HistoryExtra team, I’m going to start a weekly round-up of what I’ve been enjoying in the world of medieval history. I’m going to take a broad view of what medieval means, so anything from late Roman up to the late 15th century will be fair game. And actually, I’ll probably allow myself an occasional interlude into prehistory too. If anyone reads this, I’m going to cajole my colleagues to do similar round-ups for later periods and genres of history.

My plan is to highlight what’s been happening on HistoryExtra from a medieval perspective, on our podcast, and in our print magazines BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. Plus, I’ll generally be keeping an eye open for anything else that’s going on medieval-wise.

So, first up, it’s been a big week for Anglo-Saxon and Viking aficionados because Netflix has dropped the entire 10 episodes of the fourth season of the Bernard Cornwell-penned The Last Kingdom. King Alfred is dead and we’ve got Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed front and centre in the action. I don’t know what viewer figures have been like but I’m guessing a lot of people have been bingeing, given the state of the world right now. Certainly a lot of you have been enjoying our The Last Kingdom content on the site – if you’ve not seen it yet, this page is a good place to start. Ryan Lavelle, historical advisor to the series, has been blogging his way through all ten episodes for us too, giving us the lowdown on what to look out for from a historian’s perspective. Check it out here.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, pandemics are unsurprisingly still big news, and we’ve seen lots of people reading over our Black Death content on the site.

In the current issue of BBC History Magazine, there’s loads of great stuff, including a feature by Catherine Rider on medieval magic. She did a great piece for the site at the start of the year on medieval ways to look ahead to the new year.  I’m not sure anyone would have predicted 2020 would have shaped up quite as it has though.

I’ve been having fun recording lectures over Zoom with speakers from our sadly Corona-cancelled Medieval Life and Death Day. We’re going to run the event virtually in the next couple of weeks, so I’ve already had a preview of Hannah Skoda’s talk on medieval violence (see here for a piece she did for us a while back on the topic), and Chris Woolgar’s on medieval food. We’ll have the rest of them recording by the end of this week I hope, so keep checking the site for when we put them live.

There are a couple of podcasts I’ve been working on to mark your diaries for. I’ve had a fascinating chat with Dr Remy Ambuhl about prisoners of war in the Hundred Years’ War, and today I’ve been talking to Professor Judith Jesch about the Viking Age for our lockdown ‘Everything you want to know’ podcast series. I had some great questions to put to her from our social media followers, but I didn’t quiz her on Viking warrior women, because she’s already written about it for us . Those are for the future, but we’ve had some podcasts go out over the last week that might pique your interest: Sam Willis and James Daybell on The Unexpected Vikings (it’s been quite a Viking-y few days), and last Sunday’s ‘Everything you want to know’ episode on British prehistory (I warned you I’d allow myself to dip back earlier than the Middle Ages).

What else? I watched Robin Hood (the Kevin Costner) version with my kids last weekend. They hated it, and I didn’t find it as gripping as first time round, but it sparked a bit of a debate about the best Robin Hood film when I mentioned it on Twitter. I’m reminded that we picked some great Robin Hood films to watch here, and we’ve separately explored cultural representations of Robin Hood too.

Just watched Kevin Costner robin hood for the first time in like 30 years. It's not aged well, or I haven't

— David Musgrove (@DJMusgrove) April 24, 2020

The latest medieval news

In other news, researchers in Portugal have been trying to replicate medieval monastic inks and in Scotland, plans are afoot to try to build a replica Iron Age broch (prehistoric again, but they were sometimes reused in the Viking period). Brochs are brilliant. If you have a chance to visit one ever (after lockdown obviously), the Broch of Gurness is spellbinding. I’ve been chatting to the people behind the Broch replica project on twitter and might well come back to this story in the future. Everyone should have a browse around the British Museum’s newly launched Online Collection  – it’s a fabulous resource with loads of great images of medieval artefacts and beyond. Check out the Lewis Chessmen close-up.

Finally, I’ve decided to have a crack at learning how to read Old Norse while in lockdown. I’ve got a beginner’s guide that’s been glowering unopened at me from my bookshelf for a while now, so it seems like a good time to give it a go.

Right. This book has been on my shelf for too long so I'm going in. How hard can Old Norse be? (quite hard I expect) pic.twitter.com/xnYRkVPSXV

— David Musgrove (@DJMusgrove) April 26, 2020

I glibly put out a tweet announcing my intentions and Old Norse scholars Dr Jóhanna Katrín Friðriksdóttir (who inspired me to try after I chatted to her on the podcast about her book on Viking women a while back) and Chris Callow offered some words of encouragement. Chris pointed me to some very useful resources on the website of the Viking Society for Northern Research  with a free downloadable textbook there too, along with a very helpful quick chart to basic grammar here  So suddenly I’ve got a wealth of resources at my fingertips, and no excuses really. I’ll report back on how that’s going next week. I’ve also been trying to learn how to do a handstand, but that’s not going too well either.

David Musgrove is content director of HistoryExtra, plus its sister print magazines BBC History Magazine, BBC World Histories and BBC History Revealed

Dover is one of Britain’s greatest castles. Its clifftop location, overlooking the shortest crossing between England and France, has given it an immense strategic importance, and as a result its defences have been rebuilt and adapted over the centuries to meet the changing needs of warfare. Spend a day there and you’ll discover 2,000 years of military building, from Iron Age earthworks to Cold War tunnels.

The importance of the site wasn’t lost on the Romans, and the lighthouse they built on the heights to guide their ships into the harbour below still stands within the castle walls. It’s the most complete standing Roman building in England. The upper part dates from the 13th century, when it served as a bell tower for the adjacent Anglo­-Saxon church. The church was heavily restored in Victorian times but some Saxon features remain, notably the now­blocked south door.

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Although William the Conqueror built a wooden castle at Dover, the first major construction in stone dates from the reign of Henry II, who spent a vast amount of money building the curtain walls and the huge Great Tower. Clearly this monumental 25 metre high structure could have been used as a place of refuge in the event of attack but it was also a statement of royal power, a comfortable lodging and an impressive place in which to entertain. English Heritage has recreated the lavish interiors and brightly coloured decorations that would have greeted visitors at the time. Other buildings did have a purely military purpose – the remarkable Avranches Tower on the eastern battlements was constructed in the 1180s to cover a relatively weak spot in the castle perimeter, and features over 50 crossbow loops in two tiers.

These defences would soon be put to the test. When King John (who also spent money on the castle) reneged on Magna Carta, many of his barons rebelled and invited Prince Louis of France to replace him. But Dover remained loyal to John and successfully held out against Louis, even though the French succeeded in undermining the castle’s main gatehouse. After the siege it was blocked and replaced by the Constable’s Gate, now the castle’s main entrance. Note how the approach to this runs parallel to the main defences, exposing an attacker to flanking fire from the castle walls. Meanwhile additional defences were built outside the old gate, linked to the main castle by a tunnel you can still explore.

When troops were massed here to guard against the threat of a French invasion at the end of the 18th century, further tunnels were dug to serve as barracks. These tunnels were used again during the Second World War to house a hospital and it was also from here that Vice­-Admiral Ramsay organised Operation Dynamo, the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk in 1940. During the Cold War, the tunnels were secretly converted into a regional seat of government, tasked with the unenviable job of organising life in the event of a nuclear attack. You can visit the tunnels by joining one of the regular guided tours. One takes you into the underground hospital, which has been faithfully recreated, while the other tells the story of Dunkirk through special effects and film, and incorporates visits to wartime operations rooms and a telephone exchange.

Julian Humphrys is a historian and author specialising in battlefields. His books include Enemies at the Gate (English Heritage, 2007)

Plan your visit to Dover Castle and book tickets with English Heritage

This article was first published in the September 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine

St Fagans was seen as a radical venture, and not only because it tells the story of ordinary Welsh people rather than royalty or nobility. It’s also outside. Open-air museums simply didn’t exist in Britain until it came along.

St Fagan’s National Museum of History, which Celebrating its 70th birthday this summer charts Welsh culture from the Iron Age through to the present day. Renowned 
as Wales’s most popular 
heritage attraction, it’s set in 
the majestic grounds of a 
16th-century manor house.

Opened to the public in 1948, it was originally called the Welsh Folk Museum. The idea was to create a lasting legacy of traditional rural life, which was disappearing. The original collection, including a farmhouse kitchen, came from the Welsh Bygones Gallery at the National Museum Cardiff.

Development continued during the 1950s with reconstructions of a traditional farmhouse and wool mill. So anticipated was the project that £50,000 was raised for it by the Welsh populace.

After World War II, the number of Welsh speakers declined greatly, as English workers had moved to the industrial Welsh cities. And 
so St Fagans began to record traditional folk tales, songs and regional dialects to preserve this dwindling aspect of Welsh culture.

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Brick by brick

Another method of preserving traditions is the translocation of buildings – the brick-by-brick movement of a structure from 
its original location. In the 
1960s, Llainfadyn, a traditional 18th-century slate quarryman’s cottage, was opened in the museum after being moved from North Wales.

Preserving skills is also a key aspect of St Fagans, with wood turning and traditional cooking still practiced. As a living museum, native breeds of livestock can be found in the fields and the resident blacksmith forges decorative items using traditional tools.

The 1980s saw the industrial communities of Wales threatened in the same way that rural communities had been in the 1940s, with mine closures and jobs lost to mechanisation. Ironworkers’ cottages were relocated to the museum in 1987 – putting, for the first time, periods within living memory on display.

St Fagans Castle, in the grounds of the museum, is a Grade I Elizabethan mansion, built in 
the 1580s on the site of a former medieval castle that had been left in ruins. It was bought in 1616 by Sir Edward Lewis of the Van, and much of the interior décor dates from that time.

It later became the summer residence of the wealthy Windsor-Clive family and subsequently part of the grand estate of the Earl of Plymouth. Harriet Windsor-Clive, Baroness Windsor, inherited the house in 1833 and restored the building and gardens to their former splendour.

During World War I, the banqueting hall – which has 
since burnt down – was used 
as a convalescing ward for soldiers. Recent discoveries from the museum archives show that the local community, including the Earl of Plymouth’s family, continued to support soldiers long after the war, hosting reunion dinners for veterans as late as the 1930s. The Windsor-Clives gave the house and its surrounding 
18 acres of land to the Amgueddfa Cymru–National Museum 
Wales in 1946.

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A major redevelopment to celebrate the museum’s 70th anniversary will be completed in October. New galleries will tell the story of the people of Wales, and a reconstruction of a Welsh medieval court will be unveiled – allowing visitors to step back 800 years to experience how Llywelyn the Great would have lived and ruled.

6 things to look for on your visit

Much of the interior of the castle was redesigned in the early 20th century – however, you can still see the original, 17th-century fireplace. There are also well-kept gardens.

Believed to have been built in the 12th or 13th century, St Teilo’s was relocated from Swansea and restored to how it would have looked before the Reformation.

This late 17th-century stone farmhouse was moved to the museum from the Gower and includes a raised area for smoking meat above the fireplace.

Maestir School would have taught generations of Welsh children from the ages of five through to 14. It’s been arranged as it was in 1900 and hosts Victorian school lessons.

Based on roundhouses found on Anglesey, these clay dwellings were the most common form of home for Iron Age Britons.

Brought to St Fagans from Haverfordwest, this house has been decorated in the style it would have been as the home 
of a merchant circa 1580.

Why not visit…

Three more Welsh wonders in the vicinity of St Fagans

Castell Coch
Although this fairytale castle looks medieval, it comes from the imaginations of the 
Gothic-obsessed Victorians. cadw.gov.wales

Dyffryn Gardens
One of the most visited 
gardens in the UK, set within the grounds of an impressive Victorian mansion. nationaltrust.org.uk/dyffryn-gardens

Caerleon
Once home to one of only three permanent Roman fortresses in Britain, excavations here have uncovered an amphitheatre, barracks and baths. museum.wales/roman

This article first appeared in the July 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed Magazine

Professor Stephen Rippon of the University of Exeter explores the changing nature of England’s landscape, from the Iron Age until the Anglo-Saxon period

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