Book Review: Under Another Sky

Keeping Up with the RomansUnder Another Sky:Journeys in Roman Britainby Charlotte HigginsThe Overlook Press, 2015The Romans were a vital, dominant part of British history for four hundred years, from the initial invasion by Julius Caesar in 55 BC to the withdrawal of Roman military forces in AD 410 – a long time as imperial occupations go, in other words, and an intermingling of foreign and native that was usually profitable, sometimes tense, and occasionally volcanic. And since the Romans, in Britain and everywhere else, were prolific builders, those four centuries have left a thick silt of ruins from one end of the country to the other.Those ruins tell countless individual stories and, collectively, one enormously fascinating story, and there've been hundred of books about sunken old roads, funeral monuments, crumbling temples and baths, and of course the island-bisecting wall the emperor Hadrian caused to be build early in the second century. Since Rome's most durable foreign architecture almost always worked as a vector of the machinery of state, the ruins not only tell separate stories about an occupied people but also a larger story about an occupation. It's for this reason that many of those Roman ruin guidebooks have also functioned as histories of the Roman conquest of Britain.Charlotte Higgins, in her excellent new book Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain, pays a richly-deserved quick tribute to one of the best of those old guidebooks, Roger Wilson's A Guide to the Roman Remains in Britain (she's entirely right to say it's puzzling and a bit scandalous that Wilson's book is currently out of print). And in the course of her own book, she proceeds to give readers a classic fit to be placed on the same shelf as Wilson.Her approach is simultaneously scholarly and impressionistic. She tours the physical ruins in a VW van and fills her narrative with stories of the people she meets, the various traveler's adventures she has, and the non-Roman heritages of the places she visits, whether it takes the form of a passionate and too-brief appreciation of novelist (and best-selling dramatist of Roman Britain) Rosemary Sutcliff or a studied and richly sympathetic brief biographical sketch of historian R. G. Collingwood. This grounding of the grand in the quotidian is mirrored in her deeper love of her subject in general, since the thing she loves about Roman Britain is the way its vast documentary evidence-trove works to bring its everyday people alive:

What makes Roman Britain, to me, such a rich place is that it was literate. People in Britain – certainly not a vast proportion of the population, but clearly plenty of them – read poems, and wrote letters, and recorded on stone their devotion to their gods, and their loved ones' deaths. Because of the splendid preservative powers of the damp British sod, hundreds of letters, documents and memoranda written by perfectly ordinary Romans survive.

In addition to her ability to re-imagine these perfectly ordinary Romans, Higgins also has the even more valuable ability (by no means common in the writers of the aforementioned hordes of books on Roman ruins) to re-imagine the physical world where they lived, a world at once similar and jarringly different from the one visible to the tourist eye in 2015. And our author is right in her implication that this split-vision is at its most profound where it's at its least visible, in the city of London itself:

Unlike Rome, where antique, medieval, Renaissance and modern buildings jostle each other, where past and present are in energetic, fractious conversation, Roman Londinium lies buried beneath modern London. The borders of Londinium still, more or less, mark the borders of the City of London, because the Roman walls became the medieval city's boundaries, entered and exited by those long-perished portals that have a ghostly presence through their medieval names: Cripplegate, Newgate, Aldersgate, Bishopsgate, Aldgate, Ludgate. All these were Roman gates: only the seventh, Moorgate, was a medieval newcomer. The Thames – wider then than it is now – was crossed almost exactly where our London Bridge is, over to marshy, island-dotted Southward with its mudflats and creeks, its gardens and baths and inns.

As she makes her way from ruin to ruin, a strange and very appealing mosaic of past and present begins to take shape, resulting in a book that's as much a traveler's tale as a researcher's account, with a bracing literary element added in, since Higgins searches for Roman Britain not only in buried letters and ruined walls but also in the writings of all later centuries – writings she quotes with a discerning eye. Throughout her book, she's sensitive to the many great turning points in the history of Rome's occupation of Britain, including the one that started it all:

If you stand at the end of the modernist concrete pier in the Kentish town of Deal, you can lean into the sea breeze, as fresh to the face as a dousing of cold water, and look back to the shoreline, where toffee-coloured waves crackle against the pebbled beach. It was between this point and Walmer, a few hundred metres south on Kent's blunt, east-facing edge, that Julius Caesar is thought to have landed. And so, with its first securely dated and recorded event, the story of Britain slipped from prehistory into history.

Readers glancing at Under Another Sky and thinking of it as a simple checklist of monuments – or even as a simple history of Roman Britain – will be depriving themselves of a superb reading experience that manages to be more than either of those elements, a book that reads like the best of Jan Morris combined with lots of poor forgotten Roger Wilson. Whether you've been to the many faces of Roman Britain, plan to go, or only dream of going, don't miss this book.