Digging for Pictures

If you examine a topographical map of England, you will see that the Southern part of the country is dominated by a huge starfish of high, chalk Downs, with each arm reaching out to the sea. Once these Downs had the only roads in England — some of the oldest roads in the world. They are very little used now. They are simply wide tracks between hedges or wire fences, their surfaces turfs sometimes as perfect as the lawns of an Oxford college. A shepherd and his flock, a solitary walker smoking a pipe and glancing at his map, a man on horseback or a drover with his cows — this is the only traffic you will meet. Once the valleys below the Downs were full of forests and swamps, but the iron ax and the iron plow cleared them; and then the Romans briskly drove their military roads from one end of the country to the other and dictated the future shape of English history. The old roads on the Downs were forgotten.

Where they meet, at the center of the starfish, was a prehistoric metropolis; and the cathedral of that metropolis was Stonehenge. The whole of this area is sown thick with the remains of ancient peoples. To spend your life here in Wessex, as I have done, is to live where archaeology is as natural, or at least as usual, as gardening. Walk across a newly plowed field and you may pick up a stone spearhead which has not been touched by human hand for 20,000 years. As crops come up, you may be able to detect rows of plants which grow faster than the others — because they have more room for their roots in a forgotten and earth-filled ditch. That ditch is part of a camp lost 3,000 years ago, which thus emerges in shadowy outline until the rest of the crop catches up and the whole thing vanishes again. If you take your children for a walk, they may play ‘king of the castle’ on a grassy mound, without knowing that a king is already in residence below them, his calcined bones huddled in an earthen pot, the rest of his kingdom forgotten.

Of course our professional archaeologists are as brisk as the Romans were. You can see them often enough on the Downs. They dig and survey with infinite precision. They map and dissect, docket and assess. You see them using the delicate devices of their science — surveying instruments and mysterious boxes which do strange things with the earth’s magnetism. They ponder, lost in thought over a map, while the west wind tumbles a mop of scholarly hair. They crouch in square holes, hour after hour, brushing the dust away from finds with camel’s-hair brushes. They publish diagrams of digs, statistical analyses of pottery fragments and photographs of sections of the earth with each stratum labeled. They are very efficient. Their published minds never run away with them. They are austerely proof against the perils of exercising an imagination which might assume too much.

We amateurs are allowed to help them sometimes — under strict supervision. But I have never had the courage to admit to a professional that, as far as I am concerned, archaeology is a game, and that I would not dig if I was unable to let my mind run riot.

For me, there is a glossy darkness under the turf, and against that background the people of the past play out their actions in technicolor. Sometimes I feel as though I have only to twitch aside the green coverlet of grass to find them there. Might I not come face to face with that most primitive of Europe’s men — Neanderthal Man — who once loped along the track where I used to take my Sunday walk? This sort of thinking is, of course, the rankest amateurism. It is to think like the Welsh, who say that King Arthur still sits inside Mount Snowdon, playing chess with his knights and waiting for the last battle.

For most of us, though, history is not diagrams — however accurate — but pictures; and in a place like this, the pictures lie under the grass, where our spades reach for them into the loaded soil. Do not the old men in the pub farther up my village talk of the golden boat that lies in the mound on top of the hill? Of course that must be a legend — but a golden boat was found under just such a mound in Sweden.

Of course our archaeologists have done a splendid piece of work, accurate and sober. They have established whole periods of prehistory in outline. But we amateurs are not like them. We are antiquarians. We are akin to those nineteenth-century parsons and squires who would take the family, a wagon and a dozen bottles of port or sherry onto the Downs and make a picnic of digging. Awful was the damage they did, 150 years ago, digging, for the hell of it, into the burial mounds of kings. Yet year by year life lays down another layer of remains for tomorrow. We amateurs can even envy them their careless rapture. Our lawless hearts leap, not at a diagram, but at the luck of the villager who turns up a cache of golden ornaments with his plow — wonderful, barbaric ornaments which will go into a museum, but should gleam on some lovely throat or wrist. Gold dies in a museum despite all you can do. All the gold that Schliemann dug up at Troy looks no better than tinsel, under glass.

Yet it was a local man who started the rot — or, as I suppose I had better say, who transformed the ancient game of the antiquarian into the modern science of the archaeologist. That man lived just over the hill outside my window, at an estate called Cranborne Chase. He was General Augustus Henry Pitt-Rivers, a character who contributed his own legend to the countryside. He was, in fact, one of the English eccentrics. We have had many such and they enliven our history, though they were an expensive way of getting results. General Pitt-Rivers stocked his park with rare animals, for instance, so that a poacher after a brace of pheasant might suddenly find himself surrounded by the mysterious shapes of kangaroos. He built a bandstand and gave concerts to which his tenants were obliged to come. He got interested in the mounds and ditches on his estate, and, at one stroke, paved the way for archaeology to become a science. He made it a military operation. He employed regiments of laborers, surveyors and young scholars. He measured and recorded everything he found — whether he understood what it implied or not — so that today, almost a century later, his results can be interpreted without fear of a mistake.

How strange the mind is! Pitt-Rivers tried to discover the history of his estate and all its petty kings; yet for me, at any rate, he has obscured it. Consider. In the early days of spring, General Pitt-Rivers would set out, in a vehicle drawn by two splendid horses, through the cuckoo-haunted woods. His coachman drove, in fully livery, and two grooms sat with folded arms at the general’s back. Behind them, pedaling madly through the white dust, came his squad of young scholars, whom we may now call archaeologists, and who each achieved eminence and fame as such in later life. They rode penny-farthings, bicycles so named because their front wheels were so much larger than their rear ones. They wore tweedy trousers, blazers or Norfolk jackets, and straw boaters emblazoned with the general’s colors.

Pitt-Rivers was a man of terrible authority. He had the body of the earth laid open for him as a surgeon might order an intern to make the first incision. No one has ever claimed that he was a likable man, and no one has ever doubted that he had some of the madness of genius. Yet his zoo and his band, his museum perched ridiculously on top of the Downs, near Farnham, his extravagant archaeology, his savage personality — these have obscured that same shadowy past he tried to illuminate. For if I walk over his estate I do not think of Stone, Bronze or Iron Age men. I find myself listening with my inward ear to the tramp of laborers in step. I hear the busy clatter of hoofs, and half-shrink into the hedge as I imagine the general bustling by; and behind him comes that learned covey of riders on penny-farthings — their solid tires bouncing over broken flint — each with a hand up to hold on his ridiculous, emblazoned hat.

But the land is aglow with every kind of picture. When our children were small, we used to take them to some woods which hang on the side of the Downs and seem as impenetrable as those which surrounded the Sleeping Beauty. They are deserted except for the fox and wood pigeon. But if you step aside from the country lane you find that a deep ditch leads up into them — not a dug ditch, but one of these smooth grooves, three yards deep and ten yards wide, which can be made by nothing but generations of feet.

Trees lean in and form, over the groove, a green tunnel. Nobody walks there now. Yet it is as visibly an ancient main road as is the Pilgrim’s Way which Chaucer followed across the green hills of Kent. Only when you have clambered along it for hundreds of yards do you see why it is there — and where it once led. The woods have grown up around and through an immense building. Its walls and roofs are down. There are blocks of masonry; there is a gable still standing; there are the stumps of pillars, outlines of rooms, corridors, halls. Beneath your feet is grass, but underneath it you feel the firmness of pavement. You stand in the plan of a hall and see that worn steps lead down from one end, and you have some sense of the myriad feet that scooped away their stone.

You wait, but nobody comes. At most you hear a distant shriek of laughter from the woodman’s children, who are climbing trees far away in the forest. Meadowsweet and nettle, old-man’s-beard and purple loosestrife compete with the leaning oaks to shut away the world. The noisiest thing in the whole humpy, huddled ruin is the flight of bees. The worn steps will wait a long time for feet.

‘My Palace of Clarendon,’ said Henry the Second, ‘Clarendon, which I love best of all places in the world.’