The expedition set off at dawn from the cathedral city of Amiens and cycled west along the river Samara (the Somme) to join the Gaulish meridian at longitude 2.1958. Three hundred and seventy-six kilometres to the south, the Café de l’Angle on the Avenue de la République in Châteaumeillant stands on the same line of longitude and marks the middle of the Biturigan oppidum. This was in September 2009. We had been following the hypothetical line of mid-longitude towards the centre of ancient Gaul for three days – as far as this can be done without actually traversing every field and marsh – and an oddly liberating sense of disbelief had settled in. Although a few stretches of road and track adhere to the line, there is no obvious physical sign that any such meridian ever existed.
The northernmost point of the meridian, five hundred kilometres from Châteaumeillant, lies at a place disconcertingly named Loon Plage. The ‘beach’ is a desolate zone of wind-bent poplars and container trucks queuing for the cross-Channel ferry. In the late Iron Age, when sea levels were higher than they are today, Loon was an island called Lugdunum, which means ‘fortress of Lugh’, the Celtic god of light.
Lugdunum shared its name with several other important Celtic towns: Laon, Leiden, Loudun, Lyon and perhaps London. As an island joined to the mainland at low tide, it lay between the worlds of the living and the dead. (Some inhabitants of western shores still believe that the soul of a dying person waits for the tide to go out before leaving the body and beginning its final journey.) Like the tidal island of Ictis off the Cornish coast (probably St Michael’s Mount), where, according to Diodorus Siculus in the first century BC, smelted tin was carted out to merchant sailors arriving from the Mediterranean, Lugdunum may also have served as a neutral international trading post. It is better known today as a suburb of Dunkirk, the second largest French harbour on the English Channel. Perhaps the original ‘Dune Church’, first recorded in 1067, was heir to the ancient holy site, but it would take an enormous leap of faith to see the hand of Lugh in the glare of the halogen security lights that turn the sea beyond the port into a world of darkness.
14. Gold coin of the Aedui
This coin, which dates from the second or first century bc, was probably discovered at Tayac (Gironde). Medieval Irish legend talks of Lugh ‘the long-armed’. The epithet is thought to refer to the god’s spear-throwing prowess, but the same god can be seen here, ten centuries earlier, thrashing his sun-chariot across the sky with the long arms of daylight. The prototype of these coins was a gold stater of Philip II of Macedonia.
The next two days were devoted to what seemed, at first, an austere, postmodern form of tourism – visiting sites where there was nothing to see, matching drab places on the ground to their colourful equivalents on the map, pursuing a journey of discovery that would discover nothing but itself. Along the meridian between Loon and the valley of the Somme (120 kilometres), Gaulish sites and places with Gaulish names occur with statistically significant regularity: three possible Mediolana, two Equorandas, two other ‘boundary’ place names and six medieval sites called ‘La Justice’ or ‘Les Gibets’ where criminals were hanged from gibbets. These places of public execution were traditionally located on tribal boundaries, especially those that lay on ancient roads. Places called ‘La Justice’ are four times as likely to occur along the Gaulish meridian as elsewhere in the region. But statistical significance is not the same as true significance. The Roman fort of Watten, which may once have been a Celtic oppidum, two empty fields called ‘les Gallois’, and a ‘Champ de Bataille’ named after a forgotten battle or a hoard of Iron Age weapons unearthed by a bemused medieval peasant were probably no more revelatory of a Celtic sun-path than the ruined starting ramps of German V1 rockets that lie on the meridian near a field called ‘le Rideau Mollien’ (one of the possible Mediolana).
As we cycled past the soggy allotments and fishermen’s shacks along the river Somme, the mist rose from the marshes like the charcoal smudge of history book illustrations which serve to mask the areas of ignorance. A few metres from the meridian, we tethered the bicycles and walked along a gravelled path through the woods above the river. At the top of the escarpment, a wide field offered a view of the distant spire of Amiens Cathedral silhouetted against the morning sky. Amiens is usually said to have been the town of Samarobriva (‘Bridge on the Somme’), one of the most important tribal capitals in northern Gaul. A general council of all the tribes was held there in 54 BC, and it was at Samarobriva that Caesar spent the winter after his second invasion of Britain. Yet despite the bombs and building projects that have enabled archaeologists to rummage in the foundations of Amiens for the last hundred years, nothing from the pre-Roman period has been found there, and the true location of the Celtic Samarobriva remains in doubt.
In the plains of Picardy, where a traveller’s eyes are filled with horizons, it takes some time to notice the intimate corners of the landscape. Just beneath the field, in a leafy hollow, was something resembling the back of a giant mammal slumbering in the woodland: we recognized the water-repellent roof of reed thatch and the tan-coloured daub of an Iron Age house. A path curled down into the hollow, where the tang of a turf fire hung in the air. An ancient Gaul had just completed his morning duties. Inside the house, swirls of smoke were trapped in a shaft of blue-grey sunlight slanting down from the smoke-hole. The man flung the fold of a plaid cloak over his shoulder, stooped under the lintel and the eaves, and disappeared without acknowledging our presence, which was understandable, since he would be spending most of the day trying to convince crowds of texting, tweeting schoolchildren that their Iron Age ancestors were not the unsophisticated brutes they had seen on television.
15. Parc Samara and environs
KEY (1–5 are field-names):
1. Camp César or le Grand fort.
2. Les Câtelets or Câttelets (diminutive of ‘castellum’).
3. Camp Saint-Romain (a Christianized ‘Roman’) or Champ à Luzet (‘Coffin Field’).
4. Fossé Sarrasin and Derrière le Fossé Sarrasin (‘Behind the Saracen Ditch’): ‘Saracen’ = ‘pagan’.
5. Le Petit fort.
6. Le (sic) Pierre and Chemin de Pierre: probably a paved road.
(Two modern roads have been omitted.)
There are probably fewer than a dozen reconstructed Iron Age houses in all of France, and the fact that one of them happens to stand on the Gaulish meridian seemed an amazing coincidence. This was supposed to be the first expedition in two thousand years – maybe the first expedition ever – to follow the north–south line from Lugdunum to Mediolanum Biturigum, and now it looked as though someone had not only stumbled on the secret but commemorated it with a fully functioning Iron Age habitat. But if the meridian had been rediscovered, there was no sign of this in the small museum of Parc Samara, ‘the nature park of prehistory’ (fig. 15). A sequence of illustrated panels guarded by a moustachioed Gaulish warrior on a rearing horse explained that this promontory above the river, which, like many other ancient fortified sites in France, had been known for centuries as ‘le Camp de César’, was the site of a Roman fort. Despite the unusual preponderance of coins from Massalia and a rampart in the local Gaulish style, the display suggested that ‘Caesar’s Camp’ had never been a Celtic oppidum. The Gaulish dwelling was based on an excavation at another site.
Museum displays often have a misleading air of self-confidence. ‘Caesar’s Camp’ has been a mystery from the very beginning. In the spring of 1960, a schoolteacher from Amiens called Roger Agache flew over the site and noticed geometrical patterns in the fields to the east of the fort. From the open window of his biplane, he recognized the ghostly rectangles of a sanctuary complex. Agache, who died in 2011, was also a tireless sleuth on terra firma. He interviewed local peasants in the Picard dialect and collected tales of fairies’ trysts, vanished churches, and fields where the hand-plough suddenly sank into the ground as though the earth had been recently disturbed.
The Roman fort was excavated between 1983 and 1993, and Parc Samara was opened to the public in 1988. Most of the area beyond the fort is private farmland and has remained unexcavated, but in the silence of the archaeological record, the old field-names are the captions of a treasure map. Stretching either side of the meridian and covering an area ten times the size of the Roman fort are the names that indicate the presence of a ruined Celtic oppidum.
Parc Samara may be more important than it thinks. The medieval Peutinger Map, which shows staging posts on Roman itineraries of the fourth century AD (and perhaps also the first century AD), records a distance of ten Gaulish leagues between the previous staging post and Samarobriva, which is supposed to be the city of Amiens. But a traveller following this route – as Caesar and his legions would have done in 57 BC – reaches the future site of Amiens after only about half that distance.17 After the full ten leagues, the legions would have come to a Celtic promontory fort on the site of the future Parc Samara. This is the next place after Amiens that might have been called ‘Bridge on the Somme’, and it is far more likely to have been the tribal capital than the place now called Amiens, where nothing pre-Roman has been discovered.
The siting of roads and bridges changed so little between the days of the Gauls and the French Revolution that the eighteenth-century maps are a useful guide even to this remote age. Here, at the site of Parc Samara, the Cassini map of 1757 shows a road heading southwest across the floodplain. The bridge, which may have been a wooden causeway like the jetties used by local anglers, crossed the Somme a few metres from the meridian, beyond the south-east corner of the settlement. At this level of detail, modern maps which claim to depict ‘the Roman road system’ are of little use: their convincingly coherent patterns are the effect of a tidying instinct and an overestimation of Roman precision which makes all the roads point directly at the Roman town of Amiens. If the surviving sections of ancient road are plotted precisely, the map looks more like a puzzle of footprints at a crime scene. It shows not one system, but two. The road from Caesaromagus (Beauvais) heads straight for the Roman town of Amiens, but several other roads are distantly attracted, not to Amiens, but to the oppidum above the river Somme.
These apparently chaotic lines are evidence of the great upheaval in the late first century BC. The capital that was imposed on each tribe by the Roman conquerors was rarely the same as the original chief oppidum. The Roman capitals usually lie several kilometres from the traditional tribal site and in a more convenient, less defensible location (see here and here). Shortly after the Gallic War, Amiens became the capital of the defeated Ambiani. The old oppidum was left to rot away until nothing remained of it but ditches, coins and boot-nails. Its name, Samarobriva, may then have been transferred to the new Roman town upstream.
16. ‘Roman’ roads of northern France
The surviving sections of road marked with arrows are oriented on the Celtic oppidum at Parc Samara (the original Samarobriva?) rather than on the Roman town of Amiens.
Of all the places where Caesar is said to have spent the night, Parc Samara has one of the strongest claims. The oppidum of four hundred hectares on the Gaulish meridian would have been one of the largest Celtic sites in Gaul – a worthy setting for the council of the tribes and of Caesar’s headquarters. A day’s sail downriver was the port of Leuconaus (Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme). A road to the north led to the lands of the Morini and the shortest crossing of the Oceanus Britannicus. The Roman fort was implanted in a corner of the settlement like the fort at the oppidum of Hod Hill in Dorset. It was there, in the tribal capital of the Ambiani, that Caesar recovered from his invasion of Britain and waited to hear that his legions had reached their winter quarters.
A fortnight passed before he received news of a tribal uprising in the east – time enough to make preliminary notes for his history of the Gallic War and his account of Celtic customs and religion. ‘They worship above all the god Mercury’ (to a Roman eye, Mercury was the closest match for Lugh): ‘They consider him the inventor of all the arts and the guide of their paths and journeys.’ Caesar would not have known that the place in which he spent that long winter was bisected by one of the pathways of the god. Intelligence gathering was hampered by a conspiracy of silence – it had taken the best part of a year to discover the most convenient crossing of the Channel – and in any case, the information would have been of purely ethnological interest. For Caesar, the gods belonged in a separate chapter. He had seen pictures and carvings of Lugh all over Gaul (‘huius sunt plurima simulacra’), but they mattered little more to him than the face of a farmer or an innkeeper glimpsed from a carriage window. By then (54 BC), a new, secular age had dawned, and military strategy was proving more effective than divinatory wisdom. As the freezing fog rose from the Samara, he settled in to his temporary home and planned his savage response to the uprising, perhaps on the very spot where a fire still burns in a Gaulish house.
After an informative hour with a young archaeologist from Amiens disguised as a Neolithic farmer, the expedition returned to its bicycles, dislodged a cat that had curled up to sleep under the chain-rings, and left the lost city of Samarobriva with the sun standing high in the south. For the next week, the shining road and the light in the sky would be constant reminders that this was, despite appearances, a rational and time-honoured direction of travel. The shadows of rider and wheels raced over the stubble of the wheat fields, first to the west, then to the east; on either side of midday, they contracted into the form of a goblin that ran alongside the bicycle before eventually emaciating itself in the attempt to reach the horizon before sunset. As the days passed, our slightly crooked journey along a straight path seemed increasingly unlike a research trip and more like an unconscious form of pilgrimage.
One hour south of Samarobriva, the meridian bisects the village of Nampty. Nampty was once a ‘nemeton’. Its small white chapel is still a shrine and a place of pilgrimage. When the local monastery closed in 1206, a miracle-working statue of the Virgin was left behind and remained active at least until the First World War, when she persuaded the German army to take a different route to Amiens. Now, the floor of her temple is strewn with petals, and the wooden door, as legend states, is always miraculously open. (The nave itself is barricaded by an unmiraculous iron grille.)
Thousands of people still walk out from Amiens every year to give thanks to Our Lady of the Virtues. Sometimes, pilgrims bound for one of the great shrines of Christendom – Santiago de Compostela – pass through Nampty on their way to Beauvais Cathedral and the Midi. They follow the same guiding light as migrating animals and sun-seeking tourists. Far to the south, beyond the Pyrenees, where one of the Compostela routes crosses the lands that were ravaged by Hannibal, the pilgrims turn west towards the setting sun. Many of them pursue their journey beyond the shrine of St James to the edge of the Continent where a Celtic ‘ara solis’ (a sun-altar) stood at Fisterra or Finisterre. The Romans knew the place as Promontorium Celticum. On the site of the ara solis at this End of the Earth, modern pilgrims burn the clothes and shoes in which they made the journey, but this is not considered orthodox or even Christian: the Catholic Church warns pilgrims that if they continue to Fisterra, they must do so only as tourists, to bathe in the ocean or to admire the long sunsets over the Atlantic.
It is hard to say exactly when one age of humanity ends and another begins, when Nampty became a shrine instead of a nemeton, or when Lugh and other gods replaced the prehistoric deities, and when those gods in turn were supplanted by saints. In the twenty-first century, the Church has no doubt that the incineration of road-soiled garments at Fisterra and the YouTubed commemoration of the offering constitute a form of pagan ‘sun-worship’. The same war on paganism was being waged at the end of the Roman empire, when the Church rewrote the histories of Celtic shrines. Along with thousands of other holy sites, Nampty was said to have been a wilderness where outlaws butchered innocent travellers. Like broken pots thrown onto a midden, the old beliefs were relegated to the fields beyond the sacred enclosure. Now, they survive only as names on the meridian nearby: ‘le Grez-Qui-Tourne’ (‘the Turning Stone’), ‘Fosse aux Bardes’ (‘Bards’ Grave’), ‘le Bosquet du Diable’ (‘the Devil’s Wood’).
At Loon, the Iron Age had seemed entirely absent, but after three days of following the meridian, the present was wearing thin and the past becoming ever more populous. South of Nampty, a ‘Chaussée Brunehaut’ (a medieval name applied to Roman or prehistoric roads) runs along the meridian for four kilometres. Near the village of Cormeilles, the hilltop chapel of St Martin overlooks the stony track. The wooden doors were locked. Kneeling down, I peered through the keyhole and saw, above the altar, what appeared to be the Celtic horse goddess Epona. Magnified on the camera screen, this proved to be a painted image of St Martin, the Roman cavalry officer who met Jesus at the gates of Amiens in AD 334 and devoted the rest of his life to smashing pagan temples and bringing Christianity to Gaul. Many of St Martin’s shrines stand by the side of roads on which the new religion arrived. When the Church decreed a more conciliatory approach to pagans, refurbishing temples instead of demolishing them and turning blood sacrifices into Christian feasts, images of Epona were converted into icons of St Martin on his horse.
The goddess and the saint are often almost indistinguishable. Sometimes, all that separates Celtic from Christian religion is a change of clothes and gender. The Three Mother Goddesses of the Celts appear as the three Marys or as Jesus flanked by two angels. In their hasty disguises, the Celtic gods are everywhere. Near the end of the same section of Chaussée Brunehaut, after Cormeilles, where another Christianized Epona stands in a niche, there was a familiar, smiling creature with a large club and a broken nose above the west door of the church at Hardivillers. He looked like a retired peasant on a visit to the farm he had known many years before. It was Ogmios, the Gaulish Hercules, only half-transmuted into his Christian avatar, St Christopher.
Just as Caesar recognized the Roman pantheon in the deities of the Celts, a reincarnated Druid entering certain chapels on the meridian would find himself among familiar figures. He would see a human heart dripping blood and a partially eviscerated man nailed to planks of wood. In the lonely chapel of Condé, he would see cringing sinners impaled by a skeleton and a figure in painted plaster (St Denis) offering its bloodless head to the visitor like a gruesome Sunday roast. In the late Roman empire, when Druids were still guarding some remote rural temples, certain shrines were renamed after saints who were supposed to have wandered all over Gaul, carrying their own severed heads. The original Celtic temples had contained stone pillars carved with niches from which human heads stared out. Sacrificial victims had been hung on the walls so that birds of prey could take their rotting flesh to heaven; others had been left to ferment in ‘hollow altars’.
Celtic historians refer to these bloody practices as ‘the Cult of the Severed Head’. At Ribemont in Picardy, in the early third century BC, Celtic tribes from the east won a great battle against tribes from the west. After the battle, according to their custom, they raised a gigantic panoply of headless human corpses, exposing victors and vanquished to the elements and the birds of prey. As one observer points out, those gory shrines must have had ‘a rather peculiar aesthetic effect’. On the section of the meridian that crosses the swampy forests of the Sologne, the observation was confirmed. At the side of the narrow road, someone had erected a tall wooden structure resembling the front of an open barn or a lychgate at the entrance to a churchyard. Almost every inch of its wooden beams was covered with the nailed skulls of slaughtered animals. To one side, a long wall had been painstakingly adorned with hundreds of leg-bones, exactly reminiscent of the panoply at Ribemont. A hunter who spends whole days in the silence of the forest tracking wild boar and deer had accidentally recreated a Gaulish shrine, as though the old gods had secretly commissioned a new private sanctuary of their own.
The relocation of tribal capitals by the Roman conquerors has an unfortunate consequence for visitors to the Iron Age, who often find themselves forsaking the glories of a Roman and medieval city for a deserted heap of rubble somewhere beyond the suburbs. The expedition crossed the busy roads that converge on Caesaromagus (Beauvais), leaving its Gothic cathedral six kilometres to the west, and arrived instead at the hill called Mont César near Bailleul-sur-Thérain.
‘Mount Caesar’ was a major oppidum of the Bellovaci tribe and almost certainly the tribal capital: its geographical relationship to the nearby Roman capital of Beauvais is typical of a post-conquest tribal resettlement. The meridian passes through the hamlet of Hez on the hill facing the oppidum and within a stone’s throw of a prehistoric dolmen called ‘la Pierre des Fées’ (‘the Fairies’ Stone’), the likely site of a Celtic necropolis. The two plateaux on either side of the river Thérain were joined by a paved ‘Chaussée Brunehaut’. They probably belonged to the same settlement, which may be the place mentioned by Caesar: ‘The Bellovaci conveyed themselves and all their possessions into the oppidum called Bratuspantium.’
It was evidently a cosmopolitan town: hundreds of Celtic coins have been found at Mont César. They came from all over northern Gaul and even Britain, and far more would have been found if the ravages of time had not been accelerated by motocross bikes, metal-detectorists and waste-disposal engineers. The Roman conquest plunged the oppidum into insignificance and Mont César was abandoned – except, perhaps, by some of the reclusive pagans referred to in early ecclesiastical documents as Druids – until twelve Christian monks built a hermitage there in 1134. Two years later, they moved into a new building at the foot of the oppidum and founded one of the earliest Cistercian abbeys in France. The hermitage became a farm called ‘la Vieille Abbaye’. The final degradation of the Bellovacian capital occurred a few years ago, when the Old Abbey was engulfed by the Mont César Sanitary Landfill.
From Mont César, it was a day’s ride to what can now be identified as the predecessor of Paris, the capital of the Bellovaci’s neighbours, the Parisii. To the west of Paris, beyond the Bois de Boulogne, stood the vast river port of Nemetoduron. The town was divided into residential, industrial and religious quarters. Channels dug through its narrow streets of wattle-and-daub houses brought the rainwater down from Mont Valérien, where a fortress still stands – the nineteenth-century Fort du Mont Valérien. From the summit, one hundred and thirty metres above the Seine, Paris is a distant patch of grey, a vision of its own protohistoric past: there are no signs of Celtic life in the capital of France before the Romans, and archaeologists now believe that the ‘island in the river Sequana’ where Caesar held an assembly of the Gaulish tribes in 53 BC was not the Île de la Cité. The cathedral of Notre-Dame is part of a comparatively recent development. Its flat little island would have been an odd choice of capital in any case, dominated by surrounding hills and without even a spit of land to connect it to the rest of the world.
Mont Valérien is now considered to be one of the three or four likeliest locations of the Parisii’s capital. At that time, the Seine formed a tighter curve and may have given the Romans the impression that the town was on an ‘insula’ rather than a peninsula; or perhaps Caesar used the word loosely to refer to the kind of promontory fort or éperon barre that was favoured by the Celts – a piece of high ground with natural defences on three sides and an artificial barrier on the fourth. On Mont Valérien, above the boundless sea of urban infrastructure, the sky unfurls itself for the first time since the plains of Picardy, and the solar meridian, which bisects the necropolis under the streets of Nanterre, seemed plausible once again. Until this point in the journey, I had resisted the temptation to use the meridian as an infallible detector of ancient sites, but now its predictive potential was undeniable. Other north–south lines drawn experimentally along randomly chosen degrees of longitude passed through notably fewer places of Celtic significance. At Nemetoduron, above the distant and future city of Paris, the divine pattern seemed as clear as the white clouds sailing for the coast and all the other long-distance arcs and tangents of motorway lighting, power lines and vapour trails.
There was something almost miraculously coherent about these configurations of Celtic locations, occurring conveniently on the same line of longitude like towns on an American interstate. The meridian was not a literal road that carved its way through every accident of topography, yet it led straight to the tribal capitals of the three most powerful tribes of northern Gaul. And on the printout of what had seemed an abstract imposition on the map of Europe, there were signs of the same deliberate coordination with solar pathways stretching far beyond the lands of the Belgic tribes: the equinoctial line from west to east and the transcontinental Via Heraklea are dotted with tribal capitals, and perhaps there are others that have yet to be rediscovered . . .
The more coherent the arrangement, the more mysterious it seems. The Via Heraklea dates back to the earliest days of the Celts in Gaul, while the two lines centred on Châteaumeillant belong to the Biturigan hegemony of the fourth or fifth centuries BC. Yet the tribal capitals that occur on these lines did not exist, or were not inhabited, until the late-second century BC. Until then, there was almost nothing north of the Mediterranean that might be called a town. The locations of these capitals had apparently been established independently of population.
Between Nemetoduron and the Biturigan frontier, the meridian runs through some quiet regions where the archaeological record is almost silent. Châteauneuf-sur-Loire and Mehun-sur-Yèvre (once called Magodunon or ‘fortified market’) have some of the classic features of oppida, but at the time of writing, their Celtic histories are blank. There are other places on the meridian that might once have been nemetons: another early Cistercian abbey (la Cour Dieu), another Gallo-Roman shrine (Pithiviers-le-Vieil), and a ‘Temple’ that was a property of the Knights Templar (the second such site on the meridian). At different points, a roadside cross, a field and a forest track all bear the name ‘Merlin’, which, like the ‘Champ Merlin’ at Châteaumeillant, may be remnants of ‘Mediolanum’ . . . Sooner or later, a traveller on the meridian enters a realm of meditative unease in which either everything or nothing is significant. The sense of being watched by something from the past is heightened by the fact that many of these sites are privately owned and involve a certain amount of tactful trespassing and creeping through undergrowth.
17. Tribal capitals and the solar network
Tribal capitals on the meridian, the equinoctial line and the Via Heraklea.
It was, therefore, with some relief that on the morning of the ninth day after leaving Loon, we crossed the brow of a hill and saw, crouching in the wooded valley of two tiny rivers, the most unlikely oppidum in central France. This, the goal of the expedition, was the hypothetical centre of Gaul, and the only Mediolanum with a visible pre-Roman past.
Apart from a musty basilica of the eleventh century which lies on one of the Compostela pilgrim routes, the town of Châteaumeillant (population: 2082) has little to attract a visitor. The antiquated municipal website, which stubbornly indicates ‘1 visiteur actuellement sur ce site’, situates the town ‘on one of the axes that join Switzerland to the Atlantic Ocean’. This may have been true ten centuries ago, when carts were still trundling along the dilapidated Roman road from Lyon, but now, the only long-distance travellers are foot-weary pilgrims bound for the Pyrenees and Spain. In cycling twenty-six thousand kilometres in France, I had never once happened to pass through Châteaumeillant. My edition of the Guide Michelin ignores it completely. Its only geographical distinction is the fact that it lies ‘at the heart of France’, though, as the website admits, ‘there are already several other “centres of France” in the vicinity’.
Châteaumeillant once belonged to the medieval province of Berry, which, like the nearby city of Bourges, owes its name to the Bituriges tribe. ‘Bitu-riges’ means ‘Kings of the World’. In that self-effacing landscape of pasture and hedgerows, it seems a wonderfully immodest name, another sign that the Celts of that distant age inhabited a parallel universe whose lost majesty could be conjured up only with the aid of computer-generated images. Châteaumeillant no longer has a château: one was demolished in the early twentieth century; the other is unrecognizable as the new gendarmerie. A stone tower, said to have been built by Julius Caesar, once stood near the dismally hygienic ‘Merlin’s Pond’ campground. It was crowned with a gilded statue of the serpent-tailed fairy Mélusine, who was the medieval descendant of a Celtic goddess. The fairy and her tower vanished long ago, but behind almost every gateway there are piles of ivy-strangled rubble and decaying buildings of vastly different eras. Perched on what looks like an unlevelled spoil heap, the lanes of Châteaumeillant seem to have been ravaged by a war of time-zones in which the 1950s won a narrow victory over the late Middle Ages.
Only two events stand out in the modern history of Châteaumeillant. Its frost-haunted vineyards were first planted in the sixth century AD, when the collapse of the Roman empire robbed the Gauls of their red nectar. In 2010, the vin gris of Châteaumeillant – a slightly metallic and surprisingly potent rosé – received the accolade of an ‘Appellation d’origine contrôlée’, and for the first time since the Middle Ages, the name of Châteaumeillant is not entirely unknown beyond its provincial boundaries.
The other notable event occurred in 1972 when a retired postman went out to his back garden to plant some endives and felt the earth give way beneath his feet. When Mme Gallerand came out to inspect the endive trench, she found her husband staring into a void. A hundred years or more before the Roman conquest, a consignment of wine amphorae, each one weighing more than forty kilograms, had been brought by ship and mule from southern Italy. The amphorae had been stored in the home of a wealthy Biturigan merchant which stood on the site of M. Gallerand’s vegetable plot. During the Gallic War, when the Gauls were pursuing a scorched-earth policy and burned down more than twenty Biturigan towns in a single day, the house was destroyed by fire. Its contents remained safely buried in the sandy clay until the postman’s spade pierced the night of twenty-one centuries.
A few weeks later, the endive trench was large enough to hold a team of excited archaeologists. Wine vessels had been found before in Châteaumeillant, but not in such numbers. Digging continued in the gardens of the Gallerands’ neighbours, and eventually three hundred and fifty beautifully turned amphorae were unearthed. One of them still had its seal of cork and pozzolana from Pompeii. Inside, there were traces of the resin that was used as a lining and the seawater that was added to the wine as a preservative. It was one of the largest stores of amphorae ever found in France. For some unfathomable reason, Châteaumeillant had once been a centre of the Gaulish wine trade.
As so often, an archaeological discovery seemed to make a mockery of historians who paint an orderly and rational picture of the Iron Age. The world in which Châteaumeillant had been a place of such importance must have been governed by criteria that bore no relation to any recognizable form of commerce or town planning. The small oppidum where the Kings of the World had sited their international wine warehouse was served only by two small streams, on which a child could barely float a paper boat. Neither river was ever navigable. Unlike most other oppida, the town was on relatively low ground and surrounded by higher hills. It had a wall which, according to calculations based on the work of African pool-diggers, would have taken two hundred people almost a year to build. This was not a fortification that had been hastily thrown up when the vocal telegraph brought news of the Roman invasion. Experiments have shown that this type of murus gallicus, with its exposed wooden beams and stone facing, was not the best defence against fire and battering-rams. The wall was built that way because it looked nice. If the aesthetically minded Bituriges had remained in charge of Châteaumeillant, the town might never have prospered in an increasingly secular, practical world, but it would certainly have found a place in the Guide Michelin.
With its coiffeurs, its funeral parlours and its ‘Loto’ café, modern Châteaumeillant looks like almost any small town in the agricultural heart of France. An anthropologist might conclude that the Castelmeillantais are particularly concerned with hair-dressing, burial practices and a form of divination based on horse racing and ritualized battles. An unassuming museum in a side street displays the hoard of wine amphorae almost exactly as it was found under the postman’s vegetable plot. There is little else to attract a casual visitor, and the museum does nothing to counter the impression that Châteaumeillant has always been a backwater. One display features an Astérix cartoon in which a rustic Gaulish lass shows off the latest Roman fashion: ‘The civilization of the invaders eventually conquers even the remotest corners of the countryside.’
The student at the reception desk was visibly unenthralled by the prospect of spending her summer in an old house full of damaged pottery. Responding to an expression of enthusiastic appreciation, she asked, with a hint of incredulity, ‘Ça vous a plu?’ (‘You liked it?’). Gaulish exhibits usually suffer from comparison with the dainty products of Roman industry, and, apart from Astérix and his friends, the only protohistoric human presence in the museum is an almost faceless stone bust of a man wearing a torc. Yet some of the original Biturigans can be seen on coins that predate the Roman invasion. One day, perhaps, the coiffeurs of Châteaumeillant will be inspired by their sophisticated predecessors to recreate some of the styles that enlivened the streets of Mediolanum Biturigum.
A few hundred metres away, across the river Sinaise, is Châteaumeillant’s main attraction: the ungainly Romanesque basilica of St Genès and its amazing collection of one hundred and thirty-one historiated capitals. Though the church is still a temple of the same religion, some of its twelfth-century Christian carvings are now incomprehensible, even to art historians. Their oak-leaf scrolls, labyrinthine entanglements and half-human faces staring almost indistinguishably out of vegetation would probably seem less exotic to a Biturigan Druid.
Inside the church, which had appeared to be empty, two figures were moving slowly through the forest of pillars: one was gazing up at the capitals with the keen eye of a connoisseur; the other man was shuffling about the echoey aisles, apparently lost in inner contemplation. He stopped in front of two antiquated maps that had been hung on a wall of the nave. One map showed the Compostela routes snaking down through Gaul; the other depicted Romanesque churches along the routes. Some of the churches were marked with a symbol signifying ‘trésor’. In this context, ‘treasure’ means a collection of valuable religious artefacts, especially those that contain the relics of a saint, but the man’s intense examination of certain parts of the map seemed to hint at a more romantic interpretation. When he moved away, I inspected the route that passes through the centre of France, and it was faintly disappointing to see that there was no ‘trésor’ in Châteaumeillant.
Outside, a small esplanade looks down on the Rue de la Libération. Sounds of sarcastic laughter were coming from the ‘Loto’ café across the street, where a group of locals were drinking at tables on the pavement. Nothing much happens in Châteaumeillant, and the strangers who wander into town on the Compostela route are evidently cherished as a source of entertainment. When the two men emerged from the church, we struck up a conversation. The man who had been studying the carvings was a modern Christian; he completed a certain section of the route each year on his summer holiday and was about to return home to the Netherlands. His temporary companion, who carried with him the smell of farm buildings and nights under the stars, was walking all the way to Compostela. He had the look of many miles in his eyes and a tone of wonder in his voice. Whether it was the reason for his departure or a result of his Herculean labour, he seemed to be suffering from a form of delusion, like someone striving for a goal that is sufficiently implausible to be taken for a profound truth. I wondered whether, after reaching Santiago, he would continue to Fisterra and whether there would be anything left of his battered shoes to burn at the ara solis.
He saw the bicycles resting on the parapet, and, since cycling is reputed to be an exacting mode of transport, and the Church allows pilgrims to undertake the journey on a bicycle or a horse, he assumed that we, too, were bound for Spain. ‘Vous êtes pèlerins,’ he said, as though stating a fact. I agreed that we were, after a fashion. He nodded as though satisfied that the information was congruent with some complex calculation. We shook hands and wished each other luck. The sun was about to disappear behind the oppidum. There are no hotels in what was once an international hub of the Gaulish wine trade, and there was still a long hour of cycling ahead.
The future route now lay to the east, along the equinoctial line, to the borders of the Aedui and the Arverni. Eventually, the same line of latitude would lead to the vast Helvetian sanctuary above Lausanne and, beyond that, to the place in the Alps where the Rhone has its source and which was known to the ancient Celts as ‘the Pillar of the Sun’. But these would be the stations of a later expedition whose distant terminus had yet to be discovered. More sounds of merriment came from the café across the street: the inhabitants of Mediolanum Biturigum were warming to their evening entertainment. It was time to return to the glowing screen and the lower world of the library, to find out how the paths of the gods had been brought to Middle Earth, and whether any of this was ever real or even possible.
