A History of Ancient Britain (2 page)

Without the organisational genius of Dominic Bolton, Sarah Vickers, Alice Pattenden and Sue Ng, the wheels would have come off the
Ancient Britain
wagon long ago. Dominic in particular
was and is a marvel to me. How he patiently stayed on top of the mountain of arrangements – and, more importantly, the
re
-arrangements he had to make day after day and week after week
– is quite beyond my comprehension.

The epic look of the series was for the most part the work of the principal editor Martin Johnson. Thanks to him, the finished article had the feel, in my opinion, of a Hollywood
blockbuster.

Camera operators and sound recordists are special breeds of human being. While the rest of the team struggles up mountains, through caves and tunnels and across rivers and streams, the camera
and sound crew must cover the same terrain while lumbered with the heaviest and most cumbersome technical kit imaginable. Cameramen Patrick Acum, Toby Wilkinson, Neville Kidd, Ben Joiner, Justin
Ingham, Michael Pitts and John McIntyre and sound men Sam Staples and Mike Williams would surely thrive in the SAS. And then, when they arrive in the desired spot, be it summit or seabed, they are
required to be creative and adept, making everywhere look wonderful and me heroic! On top of all that they were possessed of senses of humour that didn’t just make each hard day tolerable,
but a positive pleasure. For all the laughs – almost more than anything else – a thousand thank-yous.

Sophie Laurimore, my television agent at Factual Management, and Eugenie Furniss, my literary agent at William Morris Entertainment, fight the good fight on my behalf every day. I honestly
don’t know what I would do or where I would be without them. Lots of love to both, as always.

Finally, and most importantly, I must acknowledge the biggest debt of all, to my wife, Trudi – who soaks up all the strain, takes care of the family and runs the whole show at home while I
waft around the world on the magic carpet of television. How she puts up with me and all of this, I really don’t know. But she does, and I don’t forget that either.

INTRODUCTION

There is a sequoia tree in the Sierra Nevada of California known as the Great Bonsai. The men and women of the US Forest Service are protective of their charge – as they
are with all sequoias – and prefer its precise location to remain less than well known. Sequoias grow only in the Western Sierra Nevada and are therefore something of an endangered species.
There are no sequoia forests as such – they occur only in ‘groves’ within forests of lesser, more plentiful species, a handful of giants standing here and there like members of an
exclusive clique, surrounded by hoi polloi. Their apparent disdain for the fir trees crowded around their waists is almost palpable.

A handful of celebrity sequoias like General Sherman and the Grizzly Giant are on the tourist trail and get most of the attention – which means many others are left in relative peace. That
is the way the rangers like it.

Despite having reached a height of over 200 feet, the Great Bonsai is a long way from claiming the title of tallest sequoia (the loftiest of them tower well over 300 feet high), but it is
unusually immense in the sheer volume of wood it contains. Many of its individual branches are themselves larger than full-grown trees of other species. In terms of the mass and reach of its
canopy, the Great Bonsai is one of the largest trees on Earth.

More impressive than its size, however, is its great age. Tree scientists estimate the Great Bonsai has been occupying its perch, on a rocky summit overlooking deep valleys, for at least 2,000
years. That much would already be newsworthy: a tree as old as Christianity itself, alive in California before the Romans conquered Britannia.

There is only one way even to try to calculate the age of such an ancient specimen and that is to cut it down and count the rings. No one is proposing to go to such lengths to total the years of
a character as precious as the Great Bonsai, though; and even if they did, experience suggests they might find the inner section so rotten that ring-counting would, anyway, be impossible at worst
and inconclusive at best.

Those scientists familiar with the greatest sentinels of the sequoia species will quietly confess another possibility: that the elder specimens may be much older than 2,000 years. Some will even
allow that the Great Bonsai may be over 4,000 years old. There is simply no way to be certain.

But just consider the suggestion that some of those sequoias might have been living and growing for the last four millennia and more. It would mean that while people in Britain were still making
and using bronze axes, and while the finishing touches were being put to monuments like Avebury and Stonehenge, the Great Bonsai was taking root in the high sierras of California.

The story of humankind – at least the comparatively recent chapters – may therefore have unfolded in the shadow of those trees. It might well be the case that 200 generations of
people have come and gone while a handful of sequoias reached steadily skywards, oblivious to the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires and entire civilisations. The existence of giants like the Great
Bonsai makes our species the very epitome of ephemeral. Millions of us have certainly been born, lived out our three score and ten and returned to the soil while a single tree drew water, made
oxygen and starch from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and grew.

The Scottish conservationist John Muir, who emigrated to the US with his family when he was 11 years old and spent much of his life championing and defending the wild places of the world, was
among the first to stand up for the sequoias. When he first encountered them, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, they were being felled for lumber – a pointless exercise as it
turned out, because the timber shatters into matchwood when the trees hit the ground. He was thereafter in the vanguard of those seeking to protect the remaining giants for posterity; that any
survive today is due in no small part to the efforts of one stubborn Scotsman.

For much of the twentieth century the US Forest Service battled valiantly to protect the sequoia groves from what they considered the greatest threat to the species’ continuing existence:
wild fire. They were very successful, and kept the flames away from the giants for many years – until someone realised the trees actually depended upon fire as a key element of their
reproductive cycle. Sequoia wood is naturally saturated with a chemical the foresters call tannin – which, as well as repelling insects and other parasites, also makes it virtually fireproof.
Blazes that will clear away all other species like so much tinder generally leave little more than a few patches of charring on the lower parts of the sequoias. The heat also serves to encourage
the tiny sequoia seeds to pop from the otherwise tightly clenched fists of their pine cones; these then fall into freshly cleared soil that is newly bathed in life-giving sunlight and free from any
competing plants. Some people call the sequoias ‘fire trees’.

A person could be forgiven for thinking all the advantages are stacked in favour of that one species – a species that has evolved to thrive in conditions that destroy the competition.

One other characteristic of sequoias, however, is worth bearing in mind: despite their massive girth and great height, they have extremely shallow root systems, and the prime cause of death
among them is simply falling over. Their huge bulk actually works against them whenever a high wind blows through the sierras – and when one giant falls it usually takes a neighbour or two
down with it.

Within the story of the Giant Sequoias, therefore, lies a warning for humankind. For long we believed we too had grown high and mighty – that our own long, long history was proof of our
invincibility. We had come through it all. Some or other ancestor of the mammals had emerged from the shadow of the dinosaurs, evolving and learning for millions of years until an ancient, distant
relative straightened its spine and stood up on two legs. Thereafter a series of trials and errors laid a path leading all the way to the first people, and beyond.

It seemed to many that our seeds had been sown by the fires of creation itself and that we had grown and grown until we were head and shoulders above all others. Masters of nature, we were
therefore beyond its reach, we thought – fireproof, so to speak.

But the truth is altogether different and far less reassuring.
Homo sapiens sapiens
has been alive and conscious on Earth for no more than 200,000 years. Born and bred in Africa, we found
the need to leave that continent’s warmth just a few tens of thousands of years ago. We spread north first, and then east into Asia. Some of those adventurous souls crafted boats and made the
sea crossing from the land that would be south-eastern Asia to the continent that would be Australia, something like 50,000 years ago. While all that was happening yet more made inroads into
Europe; others continued into north-eastern Asia and from there found their way to the continent of North America. Sea levels were lower and what is now the Bering Strait was then a land bridge
– indeed an entire landmass – known to geologists as Beringia. Between perhaps 40,000 and 20,000 years ago those farthest-flung of the pioneers penetrated all the way down into South
America and on to Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire at the ends of the Earth.

A person might be forgiven for thinking that if we were a plant we would be some sort of smothering ivy, crawling across the face of the planet until our tendrils threatened to throttle the very
life out of the place. When astronauts take pictures of the globe from space, after all, the artificial lights conjured by humankind are seen glowing from every nook and cranny.

But Earth is four and a half billion years old – and for all the miles we have travelled as a species during the last 60,000 years or so, we are effectively as new to the place as this
year’s swarms of mosquitos. Our spread has certainly been astonishing – in terms of its speed if nothing else. There are more than six billion of us now – more people alive at
once than at any other time in history. But for all that we are more numerous than before and reaching levels of population density that may one day bring about our own extinction, in some respects
we are of no more consequence than a sprinkling of dust. The truth is that every last one of us – all six billion and more – would fit, neatly stacked like lumber, into the space
currently occupied by Windermere, England’s largest lake.

While the sequoias – and the rest of the Redwood family to which they belong – are nowadays restricted to the Western Sierra Nevada, they are relics of another time entirely. It was
during the Jurassic period, which began 200 million years ago, that the first of them put down their roots. Once upon a time they were represented on every continent on Earth and it is only in the
relatively recent past that their territory has become restricted to one small part of California.

So while we human beings have been tenants of the Earth for 200 millennia, those giant trees have been here a thousand times as long. In terms of the history of the planet we squat upon, our
roots are shallower by far than those of any sequoia. We need not look for a John Muir to save us either. The next big gust of wind – global warming, climate change, sea level rise or
whatever – might bring about our downfall.

In
The World Without Us
American journalist Alan Weisman wrote about what would happen in a world suddenly devoid of human beings. Plants quickly sprout through roads and motorways,
turning them from grey to green within years. River water flows unchecked through the tunnels beneath the cities, undermining foundations so that homes and buildings are toppled. Within decades, or
a few centuries at most, towns and neighbourhoods are swallowed up by forests. Time sees to it all, until even the bundled copper wires of our telecommunications networks and the lead, steel and
iron pipes that carried everything else, are crushed by geology – turned back into metallic veins running through rocks. Our radioactive waste and our plastic bags may well last longest of
all – but eventually the world will quietly deal with that mess too.

Long before then the books, CDs, DVDs – as well as every last hard drive of every last computer server – will be dust in the wind. Our recorded history will not outlive us. To all
intents and purposes it will be gone in the same instant the last of us closes our eyes.

And if our species falls, deep in the forest of years, not one of the other creatures that walk or crawl, swim or fly will care a jot.

We matter only to ourselves and that is no bad thing; this is why our history must be central to our understanding of the world and our time upon it. Its dependence upon our attention, and ours
alone, should remind us that our past is something immediate, fragile and fleeting as a flash of inspiration – and as potent. We must pay it heed now – not because it has been long but
because in the scheme of things it has been the stuff of moments. The accomplishment of many years is this way turned into an hour glass, as the Bard said. We must watch the play.