Finding Camlann (2 page)

On Badon Hill

J
ULIA GLANCES AROUND
the inside of the antique Morris Traveller, dark green with a rear section framed in honey-coloured wood, takes in the austere simplicity of its controls, the worn leather seats, the interior trim polished to a smooth dark patina. ‘This belongs in a museum,’ she says.

‘My mother had it before me,’ Donald says. ‘I suppose it’s become a kind of family heirloom.’

He turns the key in the ignition, reaches for the starter. The engine answers his muttered incantation, coughs half-heartedly into life. Shifting noisily into gear, he pulls out into the sparse Sunday afternoon traffic. Julia remains silent, picking at the ragged skin next to her thumbnail as the text of the note she left for Hugh plays itself relentlessly back to her.
I ran into an old college friend. You weren’t here, so we decided to go out for a drive.
She tries to imagine how he will interpret it, hopes he will simply shrug his shoulders, turn around and drive home; but her inadequate sentences keep returning to disturb her peace of mind. If this is an act of revenge, there will be precious little vindication in it.

Her anxiety begins to ebb away as they head out of Malmesbury to the west, joining a minor road that carries them rapidly into the farther depths of the English countryside. Soon they are crossing earthy red farmland, curving fields broken by dense stands of beech and oak whose autumn colours brighten and soften the afternoon sunlight filtering deep into the gold-shadowed recesses of the wood.

‘It’s good that you find time to spend with your father,’ Julia says. In the silence that has gathered, her words fall more abruptly than she intended.

‘We’re both on our own now, so it’s not so hard.’

Glancing across at Donald, whose attention is focused almost too fiercely on the road ahead, she considers the complexities of his statement, wonders which one of them was not on his own before. His father, presumably, at some point; and Donald as well? At the very least, she would like to ask him about his mother, but something in his expression seems to forbid the question.

‘What does your father do?’

‘He’s a geologist, retired a long time ago.’

Julia sees a diagram, complex strata with neatly lettered labels down either side. ‘It’s all about layers,’ she says, speaking the phrase that comes fully formed into her head.

Donald’s expression is amused rather than surprised. ‘I think I know what you mean,’ he says.

‘His layers in the rock, your human layers on top. It’s a connection between you.’

‘We meet somewhere in the middle, I suppose. Over the years, he’s taught me pretty much everything I know about the British landscape.’

They have c0me to a small crossroads, signs to Hullavington and Norton to the left, Tetbury and Easton Grey to the right. Donald reaches down next to his seat, pulls out a well-worn Ordnance Survey map. ‘We should probably make sure we know where we’re going.’

‘Show me,’ Julia says.

He finds a stub of pencil under the dashboard, traces out the route. They are to head south-west along the line of the Fosse Way—the old Roman road from Lincoln to Exeter—then cut off just past the Somerset border and follow the back-roads from there to their destination, a small steep-sided hill on the far side of the village of Northend.

Julia takes the map out of his hand, deftly refolds it and flattens it out on her lap. ‘I think there’s a shorter way,’ she says. ‘I suggest you turn left at the next crossroads we come to.’

Soon they are making steady progress along the western fringe of Wiltshire, following the rectilinear fragments of modern road that preserve, in spirit at least, the original line of the Fosse Way. Just beyond tse.ust beyhe Three Shire Stones, where thick slabs of rock mark the meeting point of three ancient counties, they turn on to a narrow lane, almost a tunnel beneath tall hedges on either side. Walls made of local limestone are buried deep within the foliage, slowly crumbling into pale shards that have mixed with the thick mud thrown up into a ridge along the centre of the lane. As they drop down into Northend, they meet a tractor lumbering up the hill towards them, its driver eyeing them with guarded curiosity as Donald squeezes the Morris into the hedge to make enough room for him to pass.

On the far edge of the village, they pull off the road next to a church whose grey-gold stonework glows faintly in the hazy sunlight filtering through a thickening layer of cloud. Donald turns off the ignition, brings the engine stuttering to a halt. The ensuing silence seems almost absolute, broken only by the faint pattering of the raindrops that are now beginning to fall on the windscreen. The churchyard in front of them is neglected and overgrown, gravestones tilting here and there through the weeds. Beyond the church, a tall grass-covered hill rises steeply to a flat summit.

There is a tight knot of anxiety in Julia’s stomach. By now, for sure, Hugh will have arrived at the Smoking Dog. She imagines him opening the door of the pub, breathless, expectant, to find only her terse note left with the barman.

‘We can walk up past the churchyard,’ Donald says, ‘but first I need to explain why we’re here.’ He reaches for his pencil and a scrap of paper, begins to outline a large irregular shape. ‘This is Britain, circa 500
AD
.’ He adds three large arrows, from the west, north, and east. ‘For the past century, since the Roman withdrawal, the island has been under siege from at least three different directions. Here,’ he says, stabbing at the first arrow, ‘Irish pirates have been raiding the western shores. Here, Picts from Scotland are harassing the North Britons. And here, the Saxons and other Germanic tribes are landing in increasing numbers on the eastern and southern shores. According to popular tradition, this is when Arthur emerged as the hero who roused the British defence.’

The rain has progressed to a fine drizzle, making small rivulets on the glass that soon join up to form an intricate watery landscape. There are pictures in it, too, plump grey sheep on a distant hillside, the rugged contours of a steep-sided valley. Julia thinks of home, the upper slopes of Moel Hywel above Dyffryn Farm.

‘When I was growing up near Rhayader,’ she says, ‘my father used to tell me stories about the great warriors of the past, Arthur and Llywelyn and Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r. He said they started out as pure Welsh heroes, to be spoken of in the same breath, but Arthur’s story was stolen and corrupted by the English. All the talk about round tables and magical swords was a lot of nonsense concocted as a means of legitimising the English monarchy.’

‘That’s not very far from the truth,’ Donald says.

There is something vexing to Julia in the guarded way he says this. ‘I think it’s precisely the truth. The English were not content with taking our land—they had to steal our favourite stories as well.’

‘I’m so sorry.’ Donald puts his hands up in self-defence. ‘I didn’t steal them.’

She laughs at him now, at the wry expression on his face. ‘You mustn’t get upset at me. I’m my father’s daughter, that’s all. How did you get to be so interested in Arththisted inur, anyway?’

‘I suppose it started when I went up to Bangor to do my Ph.D. My thesis advisor was a terrifying Welsh bulldog by the name of John Evans. He wanted me to write about the archaeology of the famous dark-age citadels of the Cambrian mountains, but I was much more interested in the mythical traditions connected with those sites. Before I knew it, I was making a full-blown study of the legendary heroes of Wales, including Arthur and Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r. Evans thought it was a frivolous topic for a student of archaeology, and told me to stop. He threatened to throw me out of his research group, which made me all the more determined.’

‘What happened in the end?’

‘We came to an agreement. I got to write what I wanted to write, but I had to put in a lot of gritty archaeology as well. I spent two years digging trenches on the top of Dinas Emrys.’

It is a place Julia knows well, from visits with her father. She smiles at this image of a youthful Donald stranded in a ditch on the fog-bound hilltop. ‘Shall we go for our walk? You can tell me more on the way up.’

On the far side of the church, they find a steep muddy track that takes them on a zigzag path between thick clumps of scratching gorse. The rain has backed off, though threatening to return in full force. Ahead of them, the path opens up to a long gentle upward sweep over close-cropped turf towards the summit. In the distance, to the east and south, waves of rounded hills spread out to the horizon. To the south-west, the Georgian city of Bath makes a dramatic splash of cream-coloured stone that fills the valley and spills up the surrounding slopes.

At the brow of the hill, they find a small sign put up by the National Trust:
Little Solsbury Hill, Ancient Monument
. A modest earthwork rampart, all that remains of the iron-age fort that once occupied the hilltop, encloses a broad grassy space grazed by half a dozen lugubrious dairy cows.

‘It’s a lovely view,’ Julia says. ‘But I’m still not quite sure why we’ve come here.’

There is something charmingly professorial in the way Donald walks away a few paces, then turns back to face her, using his hands for emphasis as he talks. ‘Do you remember the Arthurian battle-listing I told you about? It was written down in the ninth century, in a book called the
Historia Brittonum
. The manuscript includes a list of twelve battles in which Arthur supposedly took part, including one at a place called Mount Badon.’

‘Is that where we are now? On Mount Badon?’

‘I’d like to think it was here. This is one of several sites that have been proposed, and I think it’s a plausible location.’ Donald shrugs, defensive or perhaps dismissive, she cannot tell. ‘The archaeologist in me wants to know for sure, but the precise geography doesn’t really matter. The more interesting question is whether a warrior known as Arthur was the leader of the Britons that day.’

The afternoon has descended into a chilly gloom, the sun now lost behind swirling cloudbanks driven from west to east by a freshening breeze. Bowing their heads into the wind, they walk on to the farther edge of the hill and stand there for a while looking down a long slope studded with small birch trees and dense thickets of the dark-green gorse. It must be four o’clock at least, no more than a couple of hours until sunset.

‘Is there more to the story?’ Julia says.

‘Yes, there is a little more.’ Donald motions for her to sit down next to him on the grass-covered bank, and she cannot help liking the bold, casual quality of this gesture, as if they were truly old friends rather than people who once spent half an afternoon together. She wonders what Hugh would think, if he could see her now. Of all the people in the world, he is the first to leap to a jealous conclusion.

Donald takes out his hand-drawn map, flattens it across his knee to protect it from the breeze, taps a finger on the south coast of Wales. ‘Somewhere here, in about 540
AD
, a monk called Gildas the Wise wrote a chronicle of the events of his time. According to Gildas, the Britons had some success in defending themselves against the Saxon invaders. They probably held the line roughly here.’ He traces an arc across the south-western corner of Britain. ‘Some time near the end of the fifth century, as Gildas tells the story, a British force defeated the Saxons at Mount Badon, and the battle led to a peace that lasted for over fifty years. The problem is, Gildas doesn’t say who actually fought in the battle, and he doesn’t mention Arthur at all, either in his description of Badon or anywhere else in his writings. This might lead us to think that no one of that name played a major role in the events of the time.’

‘So that’s your answer, I assume? Arthur wasn’t there—someone made that part up.’

Donald smiles grimly, folds the sheet of paper and puts it back in his pocket. ‘That could be true. But if Arthur was not the hero of Mount Badon, I need to find out who he really was.’

For Julia, there is a certain audacity in this challenge that Donald has set for himself, but also a flaw in his logic. ‘It doesn’t seem surprising to me that the historical Arthur is beyond our reach,’ she says. ‘My father would say he is purely a hero of the imagination. He’s sleeping somewhere in the otherworld, ready to awake in the Welshman’s hour of need.’

Donald stands up, takes a few steps away, picks up a narrow rounded stone lying half-buried in the grass. ‘Even in Gildas’s time, I think it’s probably true that Arthur was more an idea than a real person. He was seen as a peerless mythical hero against whom contemporary warriors might be compared.’

‘But that still doesn’t really answer the question?’

‘No, you’re quite right, it doesn’t.’

By now, the rain has gathered itself into a steady, chilling drizzle. Julia stands next to Donald, shivering faintly, watching as he hefts his stone and launches it on a long, low trajectory along the flank of the hill and into the trees beyond.

She pushes the damp hair back from her forehead, takes gentle hold of his arm. ‘Let’s get back to the car,’ she says.