History books This article is more than 10 years oldReviewThe Ancient Paths by Graham Robb – review
This article is more than 10 years oldTom Shippey on a 15,000-mile bike tour that unearthed the skilled engineers of pre‑Roman EuropeBeing shown round the underground ruins of the horreum, or warehouse, beneath Narbonne in southern France, Graham Robb listened to his guide expressing her admiration for the achievements of the Roman engineers. Or, perhaps, Gaulish engineers, suggested Robb delicately. His guide shrieked with laughter: "Oh, oui, les ingénieurs Gaulois!"
What, Robb asks throughout The Ancient Paths, is so laughable about the idea of Gaulish or Celtic engineers? To which the obvious answer is: "No viaducts. No aqueducts. No Colosseum. No roads." But when it comes to the last item, Robb is convinced the obvious answer is wrong. The idea of Celtic incompetence is so firmly ingrained as to trump the evidence. Looking at the wheel of a chariot found at Blair Drummond in Perthshire, one archaeologist noted its narrow tread, calculated the probable weight of the chariot itself as several hundred kilos, and concluded that the wheel was useless: on a muddy trackway the chariot would have got bogged down immediately. Either the long-dead wheelwright didn't think of that – or else early Pictland had gravelled roads.
Again, a number of four-sided Celtic enclosures have been found in England and in France, and none of them is square, or even regular . The Celts just couldn't get anything right, not even simple surveying! But no, the enclosures are actually all definable within an ellipse, the pattern easily created with the help of two poles and a length of rope. And the purpose of the ellipse, Robb suggests, is to imitate the course of the sun.
Robb's real argument is not that the pre-Roman inhabitants of Celtic Europe were skilled engineers, but that they were skilled surveyors and astronomers, laying out a great network of roads, town centres and sacred places, still discoverable on the map. His starting point is the Via Heraklea, or Way of Hercules, which runs from the south-west tip of Europe, the "Sacred Promontory" (Sagres) in Portugal, and continues straight as an arrow through the mountain pass of the Pyrenees in Andorra and on to the Alpine pass of Montgenèvre, the path Hannibal took with his war-elephants. The line (NE to SW) exactly follows the bearing of the rising sun at summer solstice.
If at Montgenèvre, the Pass of Matrona, you stand on the Via Heraklea and turn 90 degrees west, you're looking at Semur-en-Auxois, said to have been founded by Herakles and close by Alesia, where Vercingetorix the Gaul (c 82BC-46BC) chose to make his last stand against Julius Caesar. Turn due north and you are looking at the sanctuary of Deneuvre, where 100 statues of Herakles were unearthed in 1974. Coincidences all the time. They glint like gold coins on the edge of a ploughed field, says Robb – or like the Cyrenean gold coin of c 320BC found among his lettuces by a man in a tiny village on the Breton coast. Facts fit together "with the sound of an iron key turning in a lock".
One certainly has to admire the perseverance Robb has shown, not just researching in libraries and map rooms, but also following trails on the ground. Fifteen thousand miles on a bike, very often to places that no tourist or researcher has ever visited or even inquired about before. The hardest part seems to have been tracing the many places once called "Mediolanum" (or "town in the middle of the plain"). The most famous of them is Milan, but there are six of them along the line of the Via Heraklea, 29 more known for certain, and as many as 101 others where the modern place-name suggests a "Mediolanum" original.
Most of them are in awkward locations, places "of no earthly interest", and again and again Robb on his bike found incredulity that anyone should ask for directions to Les Miolans or Le Mayollant, Maulain, or Montmeillant. Nor are they, mostly, in the middle of anything. So what were these places?
Robb's belief is that they were, so to speak, the "trig points" of the Celtic survey system. Another placename of which he finds many examples is "Equorandas", surviving as Les Ingarands, Aigurande, Ingrandes etc. These, he thinks, mark way-stations (so to speak, again) on the Celtic "vocal telegraph", a system of passing messages by shouting from one "echo-point" or "call-line" to another. Caesar mentions it, but wastes no time on the considerable powers of organisation it must have required. But then, Robb argues, organisation was what the pre-Roman scientists of Gaul were good at.
In particular, what they laid out was a gridwork of astronomically derived lines, the "ancient paths" of Robb's title. These include solstice lines, oriented both on summer solstice and winter solstice sunrise. Another north-south/ east-west grid centred on Mediolanum Biturigum, now Châteaumeillant, but formerly the capital of the Bituriges, who, according to Livy, had the privilege of providing the Celts with their king. A village now, but once the omphalos or navel of Gaul, its old importance was confirmed by another vegetable-patch discovery: a retired postman digging a plot for endives felt the earth give way beneath him to reveal a giant cache of 350 amphorae.
These grids, these sacred centres, Robb concludes, do much to explain Celtic history. The sites where Caesar fought his battles (sites chosen by his Celtic enemies) are all on the solar network, which may explain some seemingly curious strategic decisions.
The network was perhaps extended to Britain, our critical "Mediolanum" being Whitchurch in Shropshire, again on the long meridian of Britain. A similar calculation identifies the Hill of Uisneach, once accepted as the mythical and geographic omphalos of Ireland. Part of Robb's argument is that his ancient scientists could not only draw ellipses, and plot the path of the sun, but understood how to calculate bearings, and even the value of pi, on not impossibly difficult Pythagorean principles. Engineers they may not have been, but mathematicians, yes.
If you accept Robb's complex arguments, drawn from astronomy, philology, archaeology and history, you do indeed get a new view of an ancient civilisation, bulldozed into oblivion (like the Celtic-Gaulish language) by Rome. But there are weak points to his argument.
One is too ready a belief in druids. Druids have become very much a feature of the modern imagination, from the rites at Stonehenge (almost certainly held at the wrong time and facing the wrong way), to Astérix the Gaul's mentor "Getafix" (or Panoramix), with his white robe, sickle and mistletoe. But the truth is we know little about them, and nearly all of that is from second-hand or hostile sources. They should not be appealed to as an all-purpose explanation.
There certainly was some powerful organisation behind the many henges of England, often demanding many hundreds of thousands of man-hours, and following plans carried out over decades. Something similar could have persuaded millions of Gauls, over centuries, to build their capitals and set up their trig points. But we are just guessing at who the organisers were.
Coincidences, too, do exist. As Robb admits early on, look at lines on a map and a pattern will emerge, just like fate in a fortune-teller's teacup. Too many coincidences, furthermore, erode belief rather than reinforcing it. Culloden Moor was fought in 1746 on a line bisected by the Dinas Emrys meridian, where King Lludd buried the dragons. But one doubts whether any of Bonnie Prince Charlie's men knew that. The summer solstice line from Dinas Emrys takes you straight to Camelot – Camelot theme park, that is, now closed. I doubt Excalibur ever was thrown into Martin Mere close by, even if there is a local legend about it. One has to be aware, as Robb admits, of "the ruthless ingenuity of the unconscious mind".
And yet – all those miles on the bike. All those archaeological discoveries pointed out. If nothing else, The Ancient Paths creates a new respect for the ancient Gauls, and the ancient Britons. Whatever Caesar may have said, they weren't all woad and moustaches.
Tom Shippey's JRR Tolkien: Author of the Century is published by HarperCollins.
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