2021/087: Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain -- Charlotte Higgins

I think of Roman Britain above all as the place where these islands were begotten in writing. In a landscape that vibrates with stories, where every crag and moor, city and suburb, wasteland and industrial tract has been written into being, the Romans were the first to mould the land in prose. If it is to medieval literature that we owe the idea of Britain as a busy and productive and domesticated land, a ‘fair field full of folk’, then it was the Romans who first made it wild, a land of sudden mists and treacherous marshes, a territory of mountains and impassable rivers. [loc. 3652]

The title comes from Tacitus' account of a speech by Boudica: 'we Britons are cut off from all other men by the Ocean such that most people believe we live in another world, under another sky' [loc. 665]. Higgins spent some time travelling around Britain in a camper van, visiting Roman ruins and reflecting on the people who lived there, and the people who have written about the Romans over the centuries since their departure.

I was moved to read this after a reread of Gillian Bradshaw's excellent and evocative novel Island of Ghosts: I've been interested in Roman Britain since I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in the school library, and am pleased to find my joy in Sutcliff shared by Higgins. ("The Eagle of the Ninth speaks deeply of its time of writing, during Britain’s post-war era of decolonisation. Reading half a century on, when the the imperial age is viewed in a more critical light, Sutcliff has Esca relate to his master in a way that we might now find troubling." [loc. 1253]) Higgins is very good at showing the past through the filters of different times and cultures: the outrage -- admittedly in the comments section of a Daily Mail article -- when a Roman woman's remains showed she'd been African; the various interpretations of grave goods by antiquarians; the stories that grew up around ruined Roman buildings.

She's an erudite and entertaining writer, and the book is replete with anecdotes about misread curse tablets, troops gathering seashells, the Roman mythologisation of Caratacus and Boudica. She discusses the Romanisation of the British, and the lack of barbarian hordes north of Hadrian's Wall. (I hadn't known that the Wall was originally thought to be the work of Severus.)

A fascinating read, containing accounts of many sites I've visited and some splendid landscape-descriptions. (For instance, the description of the oil refinery at Grangemouth: "Monstrous pipes vermiculated their way around structures made on no human scale.") It made me want to go and wander around ruins myself: it made me want to go out into a historic landscape and consider it.

Wishlisted in about 2014, when I first read reviews of the book: purchased and read this year as part of my non-fiction reading diet.

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