Watling Street
Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past
Travels Through Britain and Its Ever-Present Past
A journey along one of Britain's oldest roads, from Dover to Anglesey, in search of the hidden history that makes us who we are today. Long ago a path was created by the passage of feet tramping through endless forests. Gradually that path became a track, and the track became a road. It connected the White Cliffs of Dover to the Druid groves of the Welsh island of Anglesey, across a land that was first called Albion then Britain, Mercia and eventually England and Wales. Armies from Rome arrived and straightened this 444 kilometres of meandering track, which in the Dark Ages gained the name Watling Street. Today, this ancient road goes by many different names: the A2, the A5 and the M6 Toll. It is a palimpsest that is always being rewritten. Watling Street is a road of witches and ghosts, of queens and highwaymen, of history and myth, of Chaucer, Dickens and James Bond. Along this route Boudicca met her end, the Battle of Bosworth changed royal history, Bletchley Park code breakers cracked Nazi transmissions and Capability Brown remodelled the English landscape. The myriad people who use this road every day might think it unremarkable, but, as John Higgs shows, it hides its secrets in plain sight. Watling Street is not just the story of a route across our island, but an acutely observed, unexpected exploration of Britain and who we are today, told with wit and flair, and an unerring eye for the curious and surprising.
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If you've read this far, you'll know what Watling Street is, so I won't rehash that. John Higgs travelled this road in summer 2016, when the idea of British identity was much on our minds. This ancient track becomes the setting for a mix of travelogue, social history, personal memoir and political musing. It's tempting to view him as a sort of countercultural Bill Bryson, and there is indeed that brand of obscure and entertaining facts and stories throughout this book, but also a kind of philosophical objective. He uses the conceit of a noosphere, a concatenation of myth, history, legend and fact that creates our own image of who we are, a sort of British Dreamtime.Through this he finds the ancient in the modern, as in the striking and surprising prologue, which links Stonehenge and Milton Keynes, to reveal our country as layer upon layer of stories, traditions, influences and ghosts that are still present in the here and now. It's a vision of Britain that celebrates Alan Moore as much as Churchill, that gives equal weight to Thomas Becket and the Winchester Geese, and one that struck much more of a chord with me than a thousand frothing Daily Express front pages.
