I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (3 page)

This was what kept the dedicated re-enactor going back for more: the quest for that elusive, almost mystical moment – Will called it a 'period rush' – when all those elapsed centuries slipped away, when then became now. 'It might only be ten minutes, it might be a whole week,' he said, with studied intensity. 'Last time it happened was at an Iron Age village in West Wales – I just suddenly knew that if I'd looked over at the fire and seen a couple of bona fide Iron Age guys sitting there, I wouldn't have been surprised. Just for that brief moment I completely understood their world, their outlook.' He gazed blankly through the fag smoke and jostle. 'Next morning it was gone. I'd blown it.'

Regrettably, the settlement in question was no more, but as we parted Will described a nearby surviving rival that he thought might offer what I wanted. Cinderbury Iron Age Village comprised a clutch of roundhouses built on a hill near the Forest of Dean's Welsh border. The area was apparently a focal point of Iron Age Britain – Will held forth at breathless length on the village's authenticity, both in terms of location and construction.

As a tourist attraction, however, and therefore a model for Will's own project, Cinderbury had yet to prove itself. The pair of Iron Age enthusiasts who'd built the place with borrowed money had over-estimated its appeal to drive-by holidaymakers, and after a period of bankrupt abandonment the site had recently been acquired by a local man who, as an accountant named Wayne, one might have thought an unlikely proprietor.

'Taste history, feel history, be history.' Laid bare on the website, Wayne's vision had a captivating and ambitious ring. Under his aegis, Cinderbury aimed to offer visitors a uniquely immersive experience of British daily life as it was led 2,000 years ago. Though a drop-in day visit remained an option, the stated hope was that most would book in for a week. Dressed in authentic costume, guests would sleep in a communal roundhouse, learn period skills from iron smelting to animal husbandry, eat authentic food and spend fireside evenings drinking 'historically accurate fruit juices' amid tales of heroes, demons, myth and legend. 'You may bring a toothbrush,' advised a footnote, 'which can be stored out of sight in your roundhouse. Make-up, jewellery and perfumes are however strongly discouraged and may be mocked.'

Wayne had seemed a little distracted when I phoned him to arrange a little time travel. Having been contracted to work in London three days a week, he wasn't presently able to attend Cinderbury as often as he had. As we falteringly cobbled together an itinerary – with a whole week currently unfeasible, he could only offer me four days in July – I struggled to imagine Wayne's curious double life, commuting between neck-tied financial consultancy and woad-daubed animal husbandry. Then he asked if £150 sounded all right, and I found it slightly easier.

I drove into the Forest of Dean halfway through the hottest July day in recorded British history. Serene and fecund, it wasn't hard to see what had made this area one of the great heartlands of Iron Age Britain. Or rather it was, because at 55mph you don't tend to get a good view of small-scale surface ore deposits.

Bronze, the copper/tin amalgam that lent its name to the previous 1,500 years of British life, had been a rare and shiny rich-man's alloy. Strong, crude and cheap, iron was a more democratic metal. Its raw material was a humble orange rock found in surface seams throughout the known world, and the end product's versatility was to revolutionise every aspect of prehistoric life. Before its arrival in around 500 BC, the vast majority of Britons still went out hunting with a bag of rocks, and struggled to master the rudiments of agriculture by scraping away at the soil with flint hand tools. Iron pulled us out of the Stone Age, and bequeathed the technology that would characterise daily life right up to the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, considering the metallurgical basis of the steel that underpins modern industrial society, the Iron Age lives on today.

The problem for our prehistoric forebears was that this miracle metal's grubby, utilitarian appearance belied a production process considerably more complex than anything they had previously mastered. The temperatures required to coax liquid metal from the rocky ore were stupendous, and procured only a hopeless, spongy material whose impurities had to be wearyingly hammered out. Even then you had a substance that remained a poor match for bronze until reheated, and in a precise manner that caused charcoal to combine with the iron to produce a bar of crude but highly resilient carburised steel. Take that, and after several further hours of highly skilled red-hot battering, you might finally have a knife.

Producing decent iron was a royal pain in the ancient behind, but less so than trying to skin a boar with a pebble. The widespread availability of decent hand tools, heatproof cookware and above all agricultural equipment – principally the iron-tipped ploughshare – had a profound impact on daily life. And in a strangely circular manner, so did the arduous complexity of the iron-making process itself. Once your tribe or extended family had pitched up near a supply of ore, and set up its forges and furnaces, you'd want to stay put. You'd clear woodland to make charcoal, and plant crops in the space left behind. The itinerant lifestyles still prominent in Bronze Age Britain became gradually redundant: after centuries of having to supplement their diets and lifestyles through trade or plunder, communities around Britain found they could co-exist in self-sufficient agricultural harmony.

Not that they always did, of course. Immigration was by no means a recent phenomenon – isotope analysis of teeth found near Stonehenge has shown that many of those buried there were born in what is now Switzerland – but during the early Iron Age, Britain's population was swollen by a steady influx of continental Celts: some of them economic migrants or refugees, others determined invaders with conquest in mind. (On behalf of all those irked by the global spread of the Irish pub, I'd like here to emphasise that the word 'Celt' was coined only in the eighteenth century, and the concept of a united Celtic culture contrived only in the nineteenth, partly to endow the very German Prince Albert with some sort of ancestral link to Britain. In fact, beyond vague similarities in language and religious ritual, there's little to connect what are commonly described as 'Celtic' peoples.)

This was the era of the great hill forts – I'd driven past one at Lydney Camp, just down the road from Cinderbury – though rather uselessly, no one is sure whether these were built by encroaching 'Celts' or retreating native Britons. It seems, though, that by about 300 BC the shakedown had endowed most of Britain with a largely integrated populace, albeit one generally under the aegis of regional warlords.

A modest, ring-fenced farmstead such as Cinderbury, generally home to a single extended family, was the default Iron Age settlement. The small, ordered fields the inhabitants worked – such a distinctive feature of the English countryside even then that Caesar commented on them after his abortive invasions in 55 and 54 BC – would have produced enough oats and barley and hay to subsist on, with a modest surplus for trading. There would be pasture for sheep and cattle, and maybe a couple of pigs.

By 100 BC these first permanent farming communities were well established, and the template set for a rural way of life that would see us through the next millennium. The late Iron Age was an era of unparalleled peace and relative prosperity – historians have estimated that Britain's population at the time of Claudius's invasion in 43 AD was as high as 2.5 million, roughly what it would be 1,300 years later once the Black Death had done its worst.

An enhanced respect for the achievements of a neglected age – and the heady anticipation of recreating them in person – propelled me with windows-down, whistling enthusiasm through the Forest of Dean's shaded byways and surprisingly ugly market towns. The settlements thinned, the trees encroached, the traffic dwindled; by the time I swished past a mildewed billposter promoting The Wurzels, the whole isolated, overlooked, land-that-time-forgot vibe had long since silenced my cheery tootling. Just a few miles over the Welsh border, I recalled, a rambler had recently blundered across a ghost town in the woods: two dozen cottages, a bakery and even a public convenience, all laid out along a half-mile high street and entirely forgotten for 150 years.

And then there I was, pulling off the B4228 and crunching to a halt before a banner that relayed an evocative but strangely sinister message: 'The holiday of a lifetime – just not this lifetime!'

Flat on his back beneath this was the jauntily handpainted image of a Celtic warrior, his woad daubings and droopy moustache streaked and faded by the elements. 'Welcome to Cinderbury,' proclaimed the legend encircling his tangled blond hair. I got out, hauled the sign upright, then continued bumpily along a dusty path that passed a padlocked, plank-clad Portakabin starkly labelled 'SHOP' on its way up a low green hill. At the brow, beyond a rank of timbered public conveniences, the track ended before an Alamo-type palisade, behind which poked a trio of pointy, turf-capped roofs. My heart leapt. Then sank a little as I got out of the car and detected the unmistakable sound of a strimmer at work.

Its operator was a few-toothed young man who spotted me as I scaled the goods pallet that served as a gate. In between parched guzzles of Lucozade – the bottling plant was up the road, he revealed with a wink – he told me that Wayne, who lived nearby with his family, had asked him to spruce the place up for a film crew scheduled to arrive the following morning. Slightly unsettled, I asked where I might find Cinderbury's current residents. He responded with a look of sweaty bemusement. 'Here? Been no one here for a bit. Odd school party, couple of passers-by.' A glance around the fenced compound gave weight to his words. The unstrimmed areas lay knee-high in straggly weeds, and the magnificence of the two adobe-walled roundhouses that dominated the enclosure was compromised by the careworn third, whose sagging, desiccated turf roof had partly fallen away to reveal an inner sheathing of black polythene.

The groundsman inclined himself into the welcome shade of a thatched lean-to, home to a noticeboard detailing period pottery techniques, and the remnants of childish attempts to replicate them. 'Yes, always nice and quiet up here,' he said, shielding his red face from the sun. 'Fantastic reception, too,' he added, and tilted his chin at a mobile-phone mast that towered above the furthest roundhouse.

I left him to his work, and climbed back over the pallet gate in a state of confusion. Wandering the palisade's external perimeter I accepted that the bustling Iron Age community I'd pictured owed more to my hopes than Wayne's words. But was I really to do this utterly alone, and be filmed doing it? Maybe even followed around and prodded by daytrippers, for the ambience-soiling signs and weed-skirted information placards suggested a half-baked tourist attraction rather than a hardcore, bona fide living-history experience. Hard to imagine capturing that elusive 'period rush' wearing Gap shorts in the shadow of a telecommunications mast.

Round the back, amidst a nettle-crowned mess of builders' rubble, I refreshed myself from a standpipe; I relieved myself in the sawdust hell-pit of an earth-closet outhouse. Where were my Celtic clothes? What would I eat? This latter worry intensified as I passed a board that described the importance of fruit, nuts, herbs and vegetables in the Iron Age diet, and which presided over a patch of bald scrub whose solitary living resident was a thistle.

A path of recent construction led away from the settlement, heading down through the yews and hazels to a sun-dappled labyrinth of peculiar rocky hollows. These, as the relevant information board informed me, were an example of the local feature known as scowles, host to the region's iron-ore deposits, and an apparent inspiration to Tolkien, who came here to partici pate at an archaeological dig in the late twenties. This might have been
The Hobbit
's birthplace, but it was also Cinderbury's death knell. In a poignantly literal manner, you could see where the village's founders had come to the end of the road: having impressively bridged a couple of deep holes, the path came to an abrupt, taped-off halt at the lip of a third.

The strimmer fell silent as I was halfway back, and when I returned Cinderbury was mine and mine alone. I'd earmarked the roundhouse nearest the gate; ducking in through the low entrance I found myself in a cool, earth-floored gloom redolent of woodsmoke, caves and pee. Once my eyes had adjusted I took stock of my new home. It was larger than it seemed from the outside, perhaps fifteen foot across, its circular wall flanked with sheepskin-topped haybales. At the hut's centre a cauldron hung from a tripod over a well-used open hearth, beside it a low, earthen half-dome that could have been a beehive but was more realistically some sort of oven. A pair of rectangular shields decorated with brass bosses and Celtic-type swirls stood propped against a wooden chest. Sitting down on a bale, I began to feel more positive about my forthcoming experience. In here, away from the clunking anachronisms that intruded into every external vista, I at last felt just a little bit ancient.

The roundhouse, as I knew even before yet another information board told me, was the hub of Iron Age life. When the villagers weren't out in the fields, they were in here – eating, talking, sleeping. Each of these impressively functional living units was an open-plan family home, focused around a fire that was kept going twenty-four hours a day, for cooking, warmth and light.

I recalled Will's account of the first archaeological attempts to recreate a roundhouse, extrapolated from foundations excavated across Europe. On commonsense grounds, the academics incorporated a chimney-hole in the straw roof; when the inaugural fire was lit in the open hearth beneath, the upward current drew embers into the thatch and in minutes the entire structure was ablaze. Only by trial and error did they realise a chimney was unnecessary: in a closed-roof house, the smoke rose to a layer conveniently just above head height, then filtered out gently through the thatch of its own accord. The archaeologists established that this process also kept the roof fumigated against insect damage, and created an airless upper atmosphere that extinguished any errant sparks and embers, as well as offering the perfect conditions for smoking meat and fish.