Chapter 5

A Circle in the Sand

‘The Sun Machine is coming down And we’re gonna to have a party, uh, huh, huh.’

David Bowie, ‘Memory of a Free Festival’

THE WALK ON towards Royston and Cambridgeshire beyond was delightful, helped by a lengthy stopover at the Fox and Duck in Therfield. I was sorry to find that the singing landlord performed only in the evening, so could not regale me over a lunchtime pint. A fellow walker stopped by who had so much ground to cover that he drank his meagre half-pint at the bar and went straight out again. I felt quite spoiled for time as I lingered over a generous burger in front of the fire, washed down with equally generous quantities of Theakston’s Old Peculier, and rolled over the last of the hills towards Therfield Heath. I passed two memorial benches in a quiet grove of birches with views out over the plain beyond. Both had inscriptions: one said, ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think’; the other, ‘Above the clouds it’s always sunny’.

Therfield Heath was littered with Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows and had been an important mustering point for tournaments and armies in the Middle Ages. In 1455, right at the start of the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist party gathered here together with Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, ‘the Kingmaker’, before going on to fight the first battle of the campaign at St Albans. It is probable that Sir Thomas Malory, a known supporter of Warwick, was part of that group, with the reckless, heady excitement that must have come at the start of hostilities; that is if he wasn’t in prison at the time on one of his numerous charges.

The battle took place in May. Did Malory remember that feeling of a war beginning in the spring when he wrote his final book about the collapse of the Round Table?

In May, when every lusty heart flourisheth and bourgeoneth, for as the season is lusty to behold and comfortable, so man and woman rejoice and gladden of summer coming with his fresh flowers; for winter with his rough winds and blasts causeth a lusty man and woman to cower and sit fast by the fire. So in this season, in the month of May, it befell a great anger and unhap that stinted not till the flower of chivalry of all the world was destroyed and slain.

Past Ickleton I approached the outskirts of Cambridge and the curiously named Gog Magog Hills, which would have given Brian Eno much pleasure. Although they are only about 250 feet high, Daniel Defoe referred to them as ‘mountains’. Here the Icknield Way crosses a Roman road, the Street, probably built to control the troublesome Iceni after their insurrection under Boudica.

When the land is ploughed and the light is right, you can see numerous dark lines on the soil, all converging on Mutlow Hill [a Bronze Age barrow]. These are the old hollow ways of the Icknield Way and the Street. At the point where they meet the Fleam Dyke, the vallum of the earthwork has been ‘slighted’ in ancient times. Part of it has been thrown back into the ditch. But the hollow ways pass both under and over the slighted bank.

This is the 1957 description of the site by T C Lethbridge, then the keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology. It is much as you might expect from the holder of such a post: a dry, observant, slightly technical account, written in crisp Cambridge prose by the author of several well-received books. Over the previous thirty years, Lethbridge had conducted many excavations of barrows and prehistoric sites in his other capacity as Director of Excavations for the Cambridge Antiquarian Society.

But what he discovered near by at the Iron Age hill-fort of Wandlebury, my next destination, was to send his distinguished career into a strange tailspin that is still highly controversial. ‘Poor Tom,’ a colleague told me, ‘he went slightly mad towards the end.’

I began to notice from the faces of other archaeologists that they were seriously disturbed by my interpretations of my excavations.

(T C Lethbridge, Gogmagog: The Buried Gods)

Lethbridge had painstakingly tracked down historical accounts of early chalk figures carved onto the banks of Wandlebury hill-fort, much in the manner of the Uffington White Horse or the Cerne Abbas giant. These Wandlebury figures were no longer to be seen; without regular scouring, and in a region of wet fertility like Cambridgeshire, they would soon have grown over. One Elizabethan account forbade Cambridge students to go to Wandlebury for any ‘festivities’, because of its pagan associations. The names Gog and Magog, given to the hills, suggest that it was regarded as a place rich in just such prehistoric and therefore pagan associations. Lethbridge speculated that these festivities might have included the scouring of chalk figures.

He decided to conduct excavations at Wandlebury to see if they could be traced, spurred on by the account of an old man who had once worked with him at the Archaeology Museum in Cambridge, in the restoration department, and claimed to have heard reports of the figures when he was a small boy in the nineteenth century.

It was enough to pique a red-blooded archaeologist’s interest. Using a technique he had employed many times before, and similar to that used by farmers when they check their fields for drainage pipes, Lethbridge went probing all over the slope at Wandlebury with a six-foot, stainless-steel pole to see if any of the turf had once been cut away, much, in his words, ‘like using a lead line at sea’ (Lethbridge had written about early maritime traffic and often used nautical terms and methods). He and his small team then marked up any resulting discrepancy with poles.

His excitement at finding what he thought were the outlines of three chalk figures is understandable. For any archaeologist it would have been the find of a lifetime, let alone one approaching the end of his career: Lethbridge was fifty-three. Yet his account in the forthcoming book, Gogmagog: The Buried Gods, was remarkably calm.

He described the figure of a horse, with a curious beak-like head that matched the iconography of other Iron Age horses; another figure of a man with a sword; and a final, dramatic image of a large female ‘giantess’. The head of this final figure he excavated and photographed, revealing a quite remarkable face.

Critics claimed that he had not taken account of the natural dips and depressions that might be formed in chalk by rainwater, or by the coprolite mining practised in this area of Cambridgeshire. Some even hinted that he had engineered the face himself by ‘creative excavation’, or suggested that students might have carved the figures as a prank.

Lethbridge was already disliked by some of his colleagues. He enjoyed a private income and had an attractive, much younger wife, neither factors which make for academic popularity. He was also prickly at times, as archaeologists can be. In many ways he was very like Hiram Bingham, the discoverer of Machu Picchu, who similarly managed to make enemies of his colleagues at Yale after marrying a Tiffany heiress.

I have met many archaeologists over the years. The only other profession that can be remotely as cantankerous are minicab drivers, with whom they have much in common. The minicab driver sits in isolation, waiting long periods for a fare, while hearing on his radio about other drivers being assigned lucrative destinations.

Archaeologists never quite reach their Robert de Niro Taxi Driver moment, but a simmering, repressed violence is often only a short dig away from their surface. The long periods spent in relative isolation, along with the frustration of digs that may not reveal much (but still have to be written up and published), are not good for the soul.

In addition, while Lethbridge’s description of the excavation had been straightforward and detailed, his interpretation of the findings was difficult for colleagues to stomach. Lethbridge was ahead of his time in being fascinated by anthropology and folklore. Archaeologists of that era were often suspicious of anthropology. I can remember a distinguished old-school archaeologist telling me, with casual and revealing misogyny, that ‘Anthropologists were like old women: they never stopped talking; and, worse, they paid far too much attention to what everyone else told them.’

In Peru, I was used to the running battle between archaeologists and anthropologists that was almost the leitmotif of Andeanist studies. Archaeologists resented the short cuts by which anthropologists could simply talk to people rather than spend years digging; unless, that is, they happened to come up with a bit of evidence that corroborated the archaeologist’s own conclusions. Meanwhile anthropologists felt that archaeologists had their heads stuck down holes and couldn’t see the bigger picture.

Lethbridge speculated widely (his colleagues said wildly) about the possible significance of the figures he had found. Drawing on a compendious knowledge of comparative archaeology, and with reference to Frazier’s The Golden Bough, the same work that had so fascinated T S Eliot, he made analogies right across the prehistoric world. Were the figures of prehistoric Iron Age deities? Did they bear some relation to the names Gog and Magog? Could they be ‘the lost gods of Albion’?

It was heady stuff. But the doubt cast by colleagues over his findings, which led to a Council of British Archaeology inquiry in 1956, and the aspersions cast on his excavation methods, sent Lethbridge into a spin. He resigned his post at Cambridge – he had always disliked what he called ‘academic trade-unionism’ – and went with his wife to live in Devon. There he started to write books of counter-culture that investigated areas way off left field, on the paranormal, dousing and suchlike, which have recently been acclaimed by Julian Cope and other New Age voyagers.

These helped relegate his earlier findings at Wandlebury yet more to outer academic darkness. When I went to look at the outlying slope of the hill-fort where he had dug, now called the ‘Hill Figures Field’, the grass had grown back over his fifty-year-old excavations; moreover, the lower part of the slope was now covered with small trees.

But having seen the photographs of the quite extraordinary head he uncovered, and doubting that it was in the man to have fabricated such a find, I wondered if it was not time for further, more calm analysis of the phenomenon.

*

It was a cold day when Cambridge came into sight across the plain, ringed by the motorways and science parks that now surround it; no longer is there that sense of the college towers shimmering up out of nothing.

My feelings about Cambridge were complicated. I owed it a great deal. But in some ways I also resented it.

I come from a family of Cambridge scientists. Both my grandfathers won the Nobel Prize for Physics. So did their fathers. This was not good when I was at various schools. Physics teachers would observe me expectantly, as if I was a test tube that must surely start to glow red with successful combustion. Genetically the odds were stacked in my favour. But try as I might, physics remained a mystery as arcane as Babylonian cuneiform.

I somehow got through exams by rote – and the maths at least I managed – but failed to grasp fully how the simplest concepts of physics like mass and gravity interrelated, let alone the particle physics that my great-grandfather’s discovery of the electron had initiated. I was a disappointment. My parents took me to the Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution; I was bored. The models of DNA at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge made me think of candy on sticks and had an abstract beauty I appreciated, but could not understand.

The only time my scientific genes looked remotely like bearing fruit – or seed – was when a sperm bank suggested I could supplement my student grant by getting a premium rate for my genetically attractive product.

I walked into Cambridge along the Trumpington Road, past the small flat that my widowed grandmother had lived in; when a student – of English literature, not science – I had often biked out to visit her. Past the medical-industrial complex of Addenbrooke’s Hospital. And past the new Judge Business School which symbolised Cambridge’s brash new twenty-first-century face, as a centre of excellence and of money, with its post-modern façade that mixed classical elements with colours out of a child’s paintbox.

There was something about Cambridge that always prompted the same reaction in me, as it had when I was an undergraduate. Not respect for its learning, scholarship or antiquity – although in theory I felt all that – but the need for the warmth of another human body.

Whether it was the cold wind blowing in from the Urals over the East Anglian plains, or the rigour of its Puritan past, my reaction was always the same; the only other city where I had a similar response was Cusco at 10,000 feet in the Andes, where the nights were also cold.

The more my teachers tried to instil in me a sense of academic rigour, of reasoning, the more I abreacted by wanting emotion, and the restless abandon and commitment of a love affair. My first term I was taught by an English Fellow who had iced water for blood. We were reading Romeo and Juliet, a case study for the dialectical tension between reason and emotion. At one point I blurted out that I liked one scene because it was ‘so true’.

The professor pursed his lips. ‘The truth, Mr Thomson, is a very naive critical concept.’ Which of course it was.

Critical concepts would become far from abstract in the years that I was at Cambridge. The early 1980s saw a heated battle in the English Faculty that at the time both excited and amused the students, and was covered in the national press. Dons threatened to sue their colleagues; many refused to talk to each other; mass protests were held outside Senate House.

The ostensible cause for all this was the refusal to give tenure to a young academic called Colin MacCabe, an avowed structuralist. But this was just the tipping point. The real argument, which had been building for a decade, was over how English was taught. Should it follow the traditional model, in which, said its critics, an established canon of Great Writers were anointed and dissected like the bodies of Catholic saints? Or should Cambridge English acknowledge the French ideas of what was loosely called structuralism – although that term, like just about everything else, itself came to be deconstructed – in which what mattered was the text, not the author, and in theory (everything being now ‘in theory’) one could do as much critical analysis of a shopping list as of Shakespeare’s Sonnets?

The two most senior professors disagreed violently. In the blue corner, Christopher Ricks, who was able to riff exquisitely for an hour on the way Cleopatra said ‘Oh’, and had a quicksilver mind suspicious of any dependence on theory; in the red, Frank Kermode, author of the best-titled book of literary criticism ever written, The Sense of an Ending, and open to change. Both bounced around the ring trying to position themselves as the radical contender.

It was a fight without referee, judge or time limitation and rumbled on in the academic jungle long after a disgruntled Christopher Ricks had departed for Boston and bit players like MacCabe had moved elsewhere.

But what at the time could be discounted as a literary rattling of cages, and of overexcited academics, seems in retrospect to have presaged a far greater change in the decades to come. The carpet was pulled under our feet. Structuralism encouraged a postmodern approach in every discipline from architecture to museum curatorship, in which the concepts of originality and truth became redundant and everything could be fictive, elusive and playful. Which of course was fun, for a while. Chippendale pediments on New York skyscrapers, Flaubert’s Parrot and the growth of music sampling (no point in recording your own when there was already a James Brown drum break). So pervasive was its influence that the next decade would be summarised by another brilliant book title: Michael Bracewell’s The Nineties: When Surface was Depth.

Authors became fictional characters in their own narration. Martin Amis began the trend with Money, appearing alongside the fictional John Self. Will Self – not another Martin Amis construct, although many at first assumed so – followed suit, as did J M Coetzee and others. Literature became a hall of mirrors. There had always been writers and artists that way inclined, from Laurence Sterne to the Dadaists; now they took over the Academy.

In my own chosen profession, television documentary, the consequences were radical. Where once producers had been encouraged to go out and engage with the world, the remix became king. Why go to the bother of filming expensive new material when you could repackage and rewrite old archive? Originality became as outmoded a critical concept as truth had been. Whole evenings of repeats were scheduled – ‘white wine television’, Channel 4 called them. If there was nothing new under the sun, as structuralism suggested, then you might as well just rearrange the furniture. (As if on cue, the BBC scrapped their anthropological series Under the Sun, which had filmed remote and different cultures around the world, and scheduled yet more repeats.)

Travel documentary was one of the few areas where they still occasionally needed ‘new product’ and so I was able to film in India, Bhutan, South America and elsewhere. And at least if we had to cannibalise the past, I could do a ten-hour history of rock and roll, and go to interview all my old musical heroes in the process, for a series called Dancing in the Street.

Now, as I walked along King’s Parade with hundreds of other summer tourists, I was struck by how sunny and busy it was. In my mind’s eye, Cambridge had always been an austere, empty place. A dark place as well. I remembered coming back late at night along Garrett Hostel Lane and hearing the slow creaking wheels of the poet J H Prynne’s bicycle as he came lugubriously into sight, looking like a character out of Gormenghast. The University Library had been a bleak monument to the overpowering might of published academia, every book ever published going onto its shelves. If you wanted a pastry, you had to bicycle to Fitzbillies at the other end of town.

No longer. Trinity Street was prematurely lit up as if for Christmas – a retail Mecca with clothes shops, expensive cafés and boutiques sprinkled along its length. It seemed unfair when most students had little money to spare with the rapid increase in their fees; kids in a candy store with no change.

Back as a student myself, I had written for Broadsheet, which was not the official University newspaper, the pompous Varsity, but a scurrilous and photostatted arts magazine by young gunslingers who fancied themselves as critics.

I was the theatre reviewer, among other things. As a critic I was frequently myopic. It was easy to get it wrong. The actors who we all thought would go on to be the Hamlets and Ophelias of our generation, the ones who got the big, serious parts, ended up later as prep-school teachers in Wales, or nurses. The ‘character’ actors we thought of as charming but inconsequential – Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, Simon Russell Beale – were the ones who became famous.

Although there was one exception to this. I can still remember the first night when an actress wearing nothing but long red hair stood in the middle of the stage and revealed herself in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, with a performance of blazing integrity and scarily translucent white skin. I cleared the central pages of Broadsheet for a double-page spread on Tilda Swinton’s debut.

Some of the other writers on the magazine were exceptionally good, like Tom Lubbock and David Sexton. And the stellar talent was the young don who, by chance, became my own teacher when he moved to Trinity College: Eric Griffiths.

He arrived with a trail of rumour and innuendo swirling around him – that he was a loose-living, drug-taking, Machiavellian figure. Eric has always attracted controversy. Years later, the papers claimed that he had discriminated against an applicant from a state school because she knew little Greek. Unlikely, given Eric’s own background as a Welsh scholarship boy. He did, however, discriminate against what he perceived as obdurate stupidity or narrow-mindedness.

As the most charismatic teacher of his generation – the Guardian described him as the cleverest man in England – he could be frightening to his students, not least because he was so partial; you were either part of his coterie or shunned as an anoraked sad case: ‘Can you believe it, he’s doing his thesis on Tolkien,’ he complained of one of his students, consigning him unfairly to the mines of Moria.

He deplored my loose habits, heterosexuality and lack of cigarettes, but we became good friends. He was only a few years older than me. My abiding vision of Cambridge was of Eric in his rooms drinking and holding forth at length on Pope or Julie Kristeva and grabbing books from the shelves to prove a point.

My academic career at Cambridge up to that point had not been good. Awarded an exhibition (a junior scholarship) to go there, I was therefore supposed to work even harder to merit it, but hadn’t. The teacher who had commented on my naive critical concept had not lit my fires. I had lost all my notes on a plane to go partying in Majorca when I was meant to be revising in a windowless room. Just to rub salt in the wound, my beautiful girlfriend Emma worked far more diligently than me, pointed out the fact and could quote Dante in Italian.

Eric changed that. He was inspirational. He took his mentor Christopher Ricks’s fluency and supercharged it with a younger, protean energy, in which, like Ricks, he could riff and play on a concept until the strings bent. But he was also vulnerable: to doubts about his faith – he became a Catholic while he taught me – and about his own writing, which was less prolific than it might have been, partly because of his heightened self-criticism. His cherished friendships also sometimes led to cherished enmities.

By my last year, I was exhausted by three serious relationships that had begun well but ended unhappily. I exhausted myself yet further with a major dissertation on Robert Lowell’s sonnets, the literary equivalent of finding a lost city in the jungle. Lowell was famously prolific. Not only had he written hundreds of sonnets, he had published them in multiple versions. Helping me navigate the maze was my supervisor, the young poet Michael Hofmann, who sent me to Christopher Ricks for further guidance.

This was an intimidating moment. Made worse when Ricks, having reviewed my draft dissertation, paused in embarrassment: ‘I think that at one point you may have misquoted T S Eliot.’ It was not a question. I had misplaced a comma in a line of the poetry. Ricks let the moment hang. It was at that moment I realised I would never become an English academic.

Ricks had once, as a conceit, suggested that the entire English course be organised around T S Eliot’s criticism. He had edited Eliot’s verse. He could probably recite, comma perfect, whole paragraphs of Eliot’s prose. I might as well have urinated in the presence of the Pope.

I had already started to turn to film – or rather to television, to ‘broadcasting’ in the fullest sense of the word, finding a wider audience outside what seemed the petty arguments of literary criticism.

Late at night, I went to tell Eric of my decision. I heard him pacing in his rooms as I went up the stairs. He came to the door looking wasted, having been writing a review. I could tell he was struggling because, uncharacteristically, there was no music playing: usually Talking Heads were at full volume, tearing down the house.

‘I keep hearing all these voices in my head,’ he said. ‘Voices of writers.’

Wittgenstein famously urged F R Leavis to ‘Give up literary criticism!’ Despite English being one of the largest faculties at Cambridge and other universities, I felt like agreeing. Of course there was much to be grateful for: the chance to spend three years studying literature was a wonderful gift, which I drew on later. But it was not an altogether healthy discipline. Many of those who studied it became introverted – or even more introverted. As a way of engaging with life, spending your time in an ivory tower reading dead writers with only the odd break for a one-to-one tutorial with an equally introverted professor living in a smarter ivory tower; well it led to strange behaviour. One friend of mine was unaware of the Iranian hostage drama for eight months. Another didn’t know where the faculty lecture rooms were after three years at Cambridge, because he had hardly left his room.

And now I went to see Eric again. He had recently suffered a terrible stroke and was confined to a wheelchair. His sister and the physiotherapists who had been treating him at Addenbrooke’s had told me of his determination to recover. Unable to speak clearly, he could still manage three very characteristic expressions: of approval, with a smile; of dismissal, for those writers or critics like Julie Kristeva he considered beyond the pale; and, most characteristic of all, an ambivalent waving of the hand signalling that his critical jury was still out on the case. What I’d always liked about Eric was this last capacity for uncertainty, so attractive in a critic.

I found seeing him again very affecting. As it happened, I arrived on the day he moved into new college rooms, specially fitted out with wheelchair access. Someone was helping to fill his shelves with the books that had been in storage while he was in hospital.

Everything that had been best about Cambridge English came back to me. What Eric had tried to teach his students was critical honesty. Truth might be a naive critical concept, but you had to be honest to your own initial reaction to any work of art, without falling back on Flaubert’s ‘received ideas’, and stay counter-intuitive when all around you might be falling for the party line.

Eric had a magpie mind. He had shared my enthusiasm for Cambridge’s least-known museum, the Anthropological Faculty’s cupboard of a space in the corner of Downing Street, with its displays of aboriginal shields and Inca headdresses. Of all the loosely described structuralist critics, the one who had most caught my fancy was the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, with his Tristes Tropiques and tales of the Amazon and its tribes.

The cold rigour of Cambridge’s climate and puritan endeavour had made me crave not only the comfort of women, but sun and southern skies. I had already spent time in Mexico; I wanted to go further south of the border, to Peru. The lure of travelling, together with that of filming, meant that it was many years before I returned to Cambridge.

But now, I found, to my surprise, that I was enjoying myself. Irena had come down from London, so we could sample the excellent restaurants that had grown up in Cambridge since the days when there were just a couple of kebab joints and no one had heard of a cappuccino. We had a guest room overlooking Trinity College Great Court, one of the finest views in England. Best of all, we spent the weekend just wandering the streets, without any worry about an essay to be completed.

Looking back at it, that was the real problem about being a student at Cambridge. You had to work so hard, or at least, in my case, worry that you weren’t working hard enough. There was a perpetual anxiety. It would have been a great place to be on holiday.

Seeing the place with Irena’s eyes helped. She had left what was then still Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s. The communist state had gone into one last deep-freeze before the thaw of the Velvet Revolution in 1989. It was a repressive place where she was once sent home from school for wearing a T-shirt with a ‘USA’ logo.

When she arrived in England, Cambridge had represented intellectual freedom. She had married her first husband in one of the Cambridge colleges and frequently returned to the place, perhaps also because it was also the home of Pink Floyd, adored by Czech intellectuals, who from Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard downwards had a fondness for progressive rock. Irena had escaped across the Iron Curtain with her mother and came to England not speaking a word of English (the Czechs still taught Russian in their schools). One part of the ensuing culture shock was that by the 1980s no one was playing the music she had expected: Genesis, Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. It was all post-punk and new romantic.

Now, as she drove me back to Wandlebury to take another look at Lethbridge’s mysterious chalk figures, she kept singing the chorus from Black Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’, convinced that this was Ozzy Ozbourne’s view of prehistoric England. I was less sure, suspecting that it might be something to do with the Marvel comic of the same name. Either way, the lyrics were not deep: ‘Iron Man: is he alive or dead / has he thoughts within his head.’ Nor did they stand much repetition.

There was a drizzle of rain over the Gog and Magog Hills when we got there. The Iron Age hill-fort at Wandlebury is an odd monument anyway: it must be the only hill-fort in England to have an eighteenth-century complex of buildings and a walled garden within its circular ditch.

Irena’s general interest in English prehistory was low, verging on complete indifference. So I was surprised by the enthusiasm with which she helped identify the outline of Tom Lethbridge’s chalk figures on the grass slope. Using Lethbridge’s old photographs as guidance, we could clearly make out the shape of the central chalk face under the tussocks.

A park warden came over to see what we were doing, perhaps puzzled why a long-haired blonde woman was singing ‘Iron Man’ and playing air guitar as we tried to trace out the shape of the goddess’s head.

‘Ah yes,’ she said, regarding us with the kindly indulgence the English afford to anyone pursuing an unfathomable but harmless pursuit, like brass-rubbing or breeding llamas. ‘I have heard about the chalk figures. We’re closing in ten minutes.’

*

It was ten miles or so from Cambridge up to Ely. First thing on Monday morning, I set off with renewed energy along the towpath beside the Cam, remembering times when I had jogged along it as a student to work off the excesses of the night before, my head full of writers like Thomas Malory, or plays like Cymbeline, or things I should have said, but hadn’t, to a girl.

I had visited Ely once before as a student. A day out, with my cousin Rachel Bell and her friend Elspeth Thompson, to get away from the claustrophobia of Cambridge. We had eaten in the Old Fire Engine House and taken great pleasure in winning some goldfish at a travelling showman’s stall on the common. You needed to hit a large balloon with a dart to win a fish. Three Cambridge undergraduates took some while to realise that the ticket for trying cost far more than the price of a goldfish.

It was an innocent time. Since then, Rachel and I have each been through matrimonial vicissitudes and poor Elspeth, who became a fine writer on plants and gardens, took her own life a few years ago, but the shock of entering Ely Cathedral felt much the same now as then: a wave of cold air, like entering a larder, or elevator shaft; the sparseness of decoration, together with an impossible elevation; above all, a repository of silence after the noise and intellectual confusion of Cambridge. Even if you didn’t share in the certainty of faith, it was calming to be with a congregation that did.

For me, Ely is the most striking of all the English cathedrals. It may not have the fine treasures of Durham or Canterbury, nor be as tall as Lincoln, but it has one wonderful advantage: scale. The town of Ely is so small that the cathedral dwarfs the place.

As I walked on, looking back across the Cambridge plain, the spire seemed even taller than the Burj Khalifa I had seen in Dubai just a few months previously, with its field of fountains playing in a desert, although that is the world’s highest building.

The last stretch of the walk lay ahead: I was detouring from the Icknield Way, whose route was indistinct over the plain (far easier for ancient trackways to be preserved in the hills). But I would end at the same point on the Wash and the coast.

I crossed the county boundary into Norfolk. Depending on their age, stage and inclination, people associated Norfolk with Cromer crabs, Alan Partridge or the Queen at Sandringham. It had only one association for me: a music festival held at a supposedly ‘secret location’, although a secret shared by many thousands. Friends of mine had organised the festival for many decades in the grounds of a large and rambling country house. They started with just 100 guests – an expanded party. The next year friends brought friends, those friends came back with theirs, and within a few more years they had to put on a cap at 2,000 tickets.

The reasons for this rapid success were simple: the presiding spirit, DJ and actor Benedict Taylor, together with his extended family, spread a warmth and enthusiasm to the entire project that enthused all who came; the owners of the house were an intriguing and genial bunch who were prepared to let their house and gardens be invaded each year; admission was by invitation only, which some claimed led to elitism, others to a sense of community and that, like any ‘tribal gathering’, as the first Californian festivals were called, you needed to be part of the tribe. Either way, it was a hot ticket if you could get one.

I went to the very first event that took place there in 1982, while still a student at Cambridge, driving through the Norfolk night in the rain with a male friend who had just been through a life-changing religious experience and was telling me about it; in the way you can share such thoughts when it’s pitch black outside and you’re driving and can’t see each other’s faces.

Arriving at the bulk of this large old house, which was deserted on the ground floor, we wandered across the empty reception rooms towards a spiral staircase leading down to the basement. The staircase was lit up with strobe lights and the Gap Band’s ‘Oops Upside Your Head’, which had just come over from the States, the first trickle in the deluge of dance and House music that was to follow.

There were two bowls of fruit punch as we entered the basement cellars. One was a straightforward, if potent, alcoholic blend of the usual brandy and wine, with the odd bit of fruit; the other was the same, but with added magic mushrooms. Having always liked psychedelia, and after two hours’ driving through the rain and plain of Norfolk with my friend sounding like a Johnny Cash song, I had a healthy glass of the magic mushroom cup. Many others appeared to have done the same; at some stage the bowls of punch had been switched, whether by accident or design. The rooms were full of outrageous costumes out of the Funkadelic and Bootsy Collins mail-order catalogue: gold lamé, leopardskin and feathers, with diamante sunglasses.

This was some years before 1989 and the rave ‘summer of love’. Ecstasy was still just a twinkle in the chemist’s eye. But already there was a realisation that at a time of recession and graduate unemployment, matched only by today’s figures, at least you could get out and dance.

I had just bought a winter coat with which I was inordinately pleased. Cambridge in winter was cold. I left it in one of the rooms as I arrived at the house, then remembered the car keys and my wallet were both still in a pocket. I went back to retrieve them before the magic mushrooms gained too much of a hold. The coat had gone.

Magic mushrooms can induce a floating sensation of calm and ease; but in the wrong circumstances, they can produce deep and traumatising paranoia. These were the wrong circumstances.

I started to sweat. I also started compulsively to ask all the other guests, repeatedly, if they had seen my coat or my wallet or my car keys. I can’t remember where I slept; I’m not even sure I did sleep. It was a long night.

The next day it emerged that someone, after a glass too many of punch, had gone off by accident with my coat, which they duly returned. A rational explanation, which in calmer waters I would have reached myself. But by then I had gone through a night of paranoid, mushroom-fuelled uncertainty in which I thought that my car, money and, worst of all, brand-new coat had disappeared up the chimney of this huge Norfolk house.

As the festival has grown over the years, and stretched over a long weekend rather than just a night, I’ve enjoyed the way a conventional part of the Norfolk landscape is turned for a few days each year into a musical epicentre with its own energies – a fraction of the size of festivals like Latitude, also in East Anglia, with its 35,000 capacity, let alone Glastonbury in the West Country with its 150,000, but with an intensity and warmth that are hard to beat.

Over the last thirty years we have become a nation of festival-goers. Glastonbury was a joke at the start of the 1980s, a hippie leftover. There was the odd big festival at Knebworth or Crystal Palace (Steve Harley built a scaffold just under the lake there, so that he could jump off the stage at the climactic moment of his set and ‘walk on water’, like any self-respecting rock star). But these were more big concerts to support headliners rather than places where, ultimately, ‘it’s not about the bands’.

Today there are more than 400 music festivals around the country, quite a few in similar ‘secret locations’ shared only with subscribers – like the 6,000-capacity ‘Secret Garden Party’ in Cambridgeshire, which proclaims itself ‘a massive playground for slightly daft adults, with boat races, emotional baggage lockers, science experiments, burning art installations, fire circles, floating sculptures, mobile sound systems, pillow fights and the alternative Olympics’. Emotional baggage lockers? What happens if you lose the key?

Festivals like Glastonbury now fulfil a latent need. We have always been fond of tribal gatherings. Archaeologists profess themselves amazed at the amount of feasting that took place in Bronze Age sites or hill-forts: pork in particular was consumed in abundance, an advance on the bacon sandwiches and hot dogs of today’s festivals. The medieval chartered fairs continued that legacy. It comes back to a central proposition about the English character: that we have the boldness of the very shy. For most of the year we refuse to talk to anybody else on trains and, the national mantra, ‘mind our own business’. But given the chance for a few days to lose our identities in the mix, to be communal, libidinal and Bacchic, we seize it with both suddenly hennaed hands. Just so long as we can go back to being normal on Monday for the office.

*

As always when entering Norfolk, I felt like one of Napoleon’s foot soldiers entering Russia. The county stretched out for ever. When I was young and foolish at Cambridge, I did very little walking to the north of the city, as I imagined it to be dull and flat. Now that I was older and supposedly wiser and actually walking it, I realised that I had been completely right. There were stretches of the last haul to the Wash when I thought wistfully of the Karelian peninsular in northern Russia, where at least they greeted you with a glass of vodka in every village across the tundra.

Or if not Russia, the plains of America, a landscape that likewise has no curves. Norfolk is bisected by straight lines of poplars and canals. Its fields are like aerodromes. Outside of commuter range from any large city, and with a fishing industry dying on its feet, the county’s density of population now is less than it was in the eighteenth century, when Daniel Defoe was startled by how many people lived in Norfolk. There may well be fewer today than in the surprisingly populous Bronze Age.

Yet Norfolk has a wide-open, empty, frontier beauty – and a buried secret. Under the peatlands to the north of the county, near the border with Lincolnshire, lie the remains of a fascinating civilisation.

After a long slog to get there, I found myself making one of the strangest time shifts in England. I was walking out of the New Town of Peterborough, past the light industrial units of Fengate with all their peripheral bric-a-brac of twenty-first-century urban living – the furniture stores, garages and drive-in plumbing depots – to appear suddenly in the Fens, an ancient landscape of dykes and straight roads and horses looming at me out of the mist.

Stranger still to come to Flag Fen, the country’s most significant Bronze Age ceremonial centre, just a mile or so outside the city’s edge.

Despite lasting almost 2,000 years, from 2500 to 800 BC, the Bronze Age is somehow less visible than either the preceding Neolithic Stone Age or the Iron Age that followed. Stonehenge and the other stone circles are easy and obvious symbols of the Neolithic; the Iron Age has the hill-forts I had followed in a line across the country all the way from Maiden Castle, a very public affirmation on the landscape. But the Bronze Age can get lost, despite in many ways being the most appealing and formative period of all.

The introduction of bronze around 2500 BC, and the beginnings of intensive agriculture around 1500 BC, coincided with a demographic explosion that took the British population to a level archaeologists are continually having to revise upwards as they make fresh discoveries, but may have been as high as two million.

Two million is a quite astonishingly high figure, if one remembers that the rural population today is no more than some five million. Given that it now seems most of the country was not only being farmed, but was deforested by 1500 BC, the whole way we view the Bronze Age has changed.

The old Ladybird version of our history, and the one I was taught at school, ran like this: that after a slow and backward evolution on the edges of Europe, through the evolving technologies of stone, bronze and iron implements, we were fast forwarded by the arrival of the Romans; then, after a period of darkness following their departure, the incoming Anglo-Saxons slowly embraced Christianity, cleared the forests and established the village pattern that the Normans and ‘modern history’ inherited. It is a historical model that relies almost entirely on written evidence, which is why the Romans, the first to write that history, figure so prominently.

But a far more radical and interesting way of telling the story has emerged strongly in just the last decade, as archaeology has made an exponential leap with its own new evolving technologies like LIDAR and DNA testing. It is one that I had become fully aware of only as I visited the prehistoric sites along my route.

In this model, history would be retold as follows: the Neolithic found us as part of a wider Atlantic community embracing Spain and Brittany, with an adventurous enterprise that saw monuments built as part of a ritual landscape from the Orkneys to my ring of stones on the Dorset coast; the arrival of the Bronze Age precipitated a period of activity like the Elizabethan or Victorian – one of enormous and confident expansion. We were at the top of the European commodities market, as we had unrivalled access to bronze, with the copper mines of Wales, the tin of Cornwall and the lead of the Somerset Levels allowing us to produce far more than anybody else. Bronze was not just a material but a currency, with bronze axes used for barter, and it is again not until recently that we have realised what an industrial quantity was being produced. It is now estimated that the Great Orme mine in Wales alone provided some 200 tonnes of copper, almost ten times more than was previously thought.

We were in effect printing money, and this golden age – symbolised by the fabulous Mold Cape made of fine beaten gold held by the British Museum – spurred the population growth and intensive clearance of the landscape.

For many years it has been known that the outlines of Bronze Age field systems can be seen on land that modern agriculturists regard as marginal, such as Dartmoor or Exmoor. It was assumed that these areas were farmed only because the wooded valleys were unavailable to prehistoric man. But now almost the reverse is thought – that at no other time in our history was so much land farmed; that Bronze Age farming had extended right across the area of southern England that I had just walked through, from the valleys to the highlands, and that the reason the field systems can still be seen on the moors is simply because more modern agriculture has retreated from such Bronze Age ambition.

The arrival of the new technology of iron in around 800 BC, far from being an advance, prompted the biggest recession in our history, one that lasted almost two centuries from 800 to 600 BC, beside which any eighteenth-century bubble or recent financial crises pale. Iron had been developed in the eastern Mediterranean. It was not a commodity with which England was particularly blessed. The arrival of Celts from Eastern Europe (or at least Celtic culture from Eastern Europe, as it is still difficult and tendentious to track the actual migration of peoples), and a lack of resources, led to population pressure and possible internal warfare, with the Iron Age hill-forts a product of that strife.

Then the Romans arrived. A study of the Catuvellauni and other tribes shows that the contrast Caesar liked to celebrate between the civilisation he brought and the barbarians he found was greatly overstated. Iron Age Britain already enjoyed many of the advantages of Mediterranean trade – and ‘the Roman Interlude’ was a less dramatic change than the classicists who first told our island story liked to make out.

Flag Fen was a rare reminder of that Bronze Age glory. It had been preserved by accident, unlike other wooden monuments in the country, because deposits of peat had settled around it, so preserving the wood that would otherwise have rotted. We are familiar with the idea that bodies can be preserved in this way, like the ‘bog people’ Seamus Heaney commemorated in his poetry; less so with wood.

It was discovered in 1982 by Francis Pryor. He had followed a technique established by fellow archaeologists in Holland: when a drainage dyke is cleared, a natural cut is usually scooped out of the side which gives investigators the chance to see down below the surface, without the labour and cost of digging themselves.

Francis applied the same idea to the fens and literally stumbled – he hit his foot against a post – upon the Flag Fen site, a momentous find. The post was the first of no less than 60,000, which stretched across this wet meadowland as a ceremonial causeway to an artificially constructed platform at its centre, and then on towards the light industrial units I had passed at the edge of Peterborough.

The word ‘ceremonial’ must be used with caution. It is the first that archaeologists reach for when they either don’t understand or wish to aggrandise their findings – but in this case is justified by the remarkable amount of offerings found at the site, a range of bronze swords and jewellery unified by their delicacy of composition.

I once tried to explain the difference between the Bronze and Iron Ages to some young children, with difficulty, until one of them said, ‘So was the Bronze Age the time of the elves, and the Iron Age the time of the dwarves?’ Well, not quite. But the delicacy of Bronze Age art and artefacts is extraordinary: at Flag Fen there were small bronze razors, rare glass beads, jewellery like tiny gold ritual rings, too small for a finger, and elegant bronze sickles, daggers and swords. I was much taken by an exquisite pair of bronze shears, kept in a wooden box that had been hollowed to fit them, like a guitar case. There was also the earliest wheel discovered in Britain, made of alder with oak axles and braces for extra strength.

I went to see Francis Pryor and his wife Maisie Taylor, who lived not far from Flag Fen on their farm – for Francis, as well as being an archaeologist, is a farmer, and looks like one in a satisfying, whiskery way. Perhaps this has given him more bonhomie than some of his peers; certainly he’s the only archaeologist I’ve ever met who offered me a drink without telling me at length about his fieldwork first.

Francis was putting up a gate when I arrived. His farm was small, at just 50 acres, and supported about 150 lowland Welsh sheep, a breed called Lleyn (described admiringly by Farmers Weekly as ‘quiet in nature, prolific, has great maternal instincts, milky, & will not eat you out of house and home’).

‘They keep me sane,’ he told me.

Much of Francis’s work has been about the importance of a direct connection with the land, like The Making of the British Landscape, a reworking of W G Hoskins’ classic account, so he lives what he preaches. And what he preaches most, understandably, is the chronic lack of awareness of the Bronze Age.

‘The Bronze Age was far more revolutionary than the Industrial Revolution,’ he told me over a lunch of cheese and cider. ‘We went from a country of scattered communities who farmed where they could and came together for ceremonies at a few great monumental henges, to a country that was largely inhabited as it is now. If we were to go back to 1000 BC, we would recognise the culture and the landscape – but go back to 3000 BC and the Neolithic age of Stonehenge, and we would be entering a different, alien world.’

Francis had studied archaeology with the eminent Andeanist Geoffrey Bushnell at Cambridge – at one point he had wanted to concentrate on pre-Columbian cultures in South America – so was sympathetic to the idea of ritual landscapes as a way of interpreting the Nasca lines or the Inca ruins around Machu Picchu, or for that matter ancient Britain.

His main complaint now was that we were so ‘monument-specific’; that we tended to focus far too much on individual monuments, like Stonehenge, and neglect their setting in a far wider landscape of associated sites that give them meaning.

Sometimes, though, a monument came along that was devoid of such a setting. Together with his wife and fellow archaeologist, Maisie Taylor, Francis had been present at the uncovering in 1999 of what was surely the strangest of all the prehistoric monuments I would come across – what the press dubbed ‘Seahenge’, a Bronze Age circle right on the coast where the Icknield Way ended. But that lay ahead, at the very end of my journey.

‘I don’t do any more digging. It’s a young man’s job. When I was young, old men – and women – hung onto their jobs and grants. It was difficult to get started. I don’t want to be like that. And also I want to be proved wrong. I want new archaeologists to come along with new theories. And it’s not as if there’s much work around for archaeologists anyway. The credit crunch – or bankers’ balls-up, as I call it – has stopped a lot of the developer-led archaeology that boomed after the 1980s.’

Although it hadn’t stopped it all. Francis and Maisie were excited by a find that had only just happened close to Flag Fen, at a site called Must Farm quarry, thanks to the brick manufacturer Hanson, which had sponsored an archaeological dig before extracting clay from Jurassic age levels. The result was spectacular: six boats hollowed out from oak tree trunks at the centre of what was clearly a well-used Bronze Age river channel.

Along with the boats came fish and eel traps in the form of big woven willow baskets, and votive offerings of fine bronze swords and spears, tossed into the river in perfect condition. Preserved by the peat, the site was already being heralded by Francis and other leading archaeologists in the know, for the discovery had yet to go public, as ‘the largest Bronze Age collection ever found in one place in Britain’.

It was hard not to suspect that we stood at the very beginnings of a supremely exciting time for Bronze Age archaeology.

Right away, I felt I had to go and see the Must Farm quarry site for myself. It wasn’t far from Flag Fen as the oystercatcher flies, but the water made it difficult around that part of the world, so I had to go back into Peterborough and then out again. At one point, I walked around yet another of the roundabouts with which New Towns like to stud their outer belts, and came face to face with a building as representative of the early twenty-first century as Flag Fen was of the Bronze Age: a gigantic Amazon UK storehouse, big enough to launch a rocket from and a symbol of the Internet age. Clad in white tiles, it looked functional and clean and faceless. Inside, it was vacuuming up the retail business from bookshops and high-street stores, many of which would soon go to the white-tiled wall.

Did I call it a storehouse? My apologies. According to Amazon it is not a distribution warehouse, as the innocent observer might suppose, but, I discover, a ‘fulfilment centre’. George Orwell couldn’t have made it up.

Compared to the clinical environment of Amazon, the quarry when I reached it looked like something out of Iraq. Hanson had scooped meteorite-sized chunks out of the ground in their quest for Oxford clay, and as far as the eye could see, there were teams of archaeologists and quarry workers in hard hats and hazard-jackets wandering over the desolate site or using Land Rovers to negotiate the mud. Above them, and making the scene even more surreal, a wind turbine farm loomed over the horizon.

By definition archaeology moves slowly. I’ve been to many digs around the world and watching turtles race would be more exciting. It’s not a spectator sport. Every ten or twenty years there is a major discovery, but just as with fishing or surfing, the good days never happen when you’re there: ‘You should have been here yesterday, mate. The waves/fish were fabulous.’ Or rather, in archaeology: ‘You should have been here five years ago, Señor Profesor.’

So I couldn’t quite believe my luck that a chance encounter with Francis had led me here. I immediately took to Mark Knight, the red-haired project leader of the Cambridge Archaeological Unit doing the work. He was almost hyperventilating with excitement.

‘To find one intact Bronze Age boat would be remarkable. To find two close together was beyond my wildest dreams. To find six is just …’ His voice tailed off. Understandable, given that the find has at one stroke more than doubled the known number of Bronze Age boats in the whole country, and these have that vital archaeological commodity, ‘provenance’, the context within which they have been found.

The boats were lying on the bottom of deep pits, as if they had been in a lake that had been drained – as in some ways they had. Normally they would have disintegrated, but again the peat had preserved them at a considerable depth underground, some twelve to fifteen feet.

To give some sense of comparison: at Stonehenge you might get thirty centimetres of topsoil, most of which has been ploughed and disturbed at some stage anyway; here you get three to four metres, more than ten times as much. Peat accrues fast in deep layers. Such depth brings its own problems. It is well beyond the range of aerial or radar surveys from the surface. These boats would never have been found if they had not been in a quarry.

Mark had found his voice again. ‘And it’s not just the boats: it’s everything that goes with them. The swords, the fishing gear, the jewellery …’ So far, in his excitement, he had been talking in conversational English. Now he lapsed back into archaeology-speak: ‘You could say it’s a whole articulated 3-D Bronze Age landscape!’

What he meant was that the peat gave very precise layers of data: the six boats were deposited over an approximately 600-year timespan, from the first to the last. The dendrologists had yet to do a full analysis on the precise dates, but the early estimate was that the range lay between 1300 BC and 700 BC.

The boats were narrow, like punts, made of oak and decorated with curious criss-cross markings on the sides. Many had been heavily repaired. It was unclear whether they had been abandoned (perhaps when the repairs got too much), or more deliberately left as some form of offering, like the swords and jewellery that were thrown in the water close by.

The longest of the boats, at some twenty-five feet (‘big enough for an entire family and the granny,’ said Mark), had interesting scorch marks at one end of the deck. Mark speculated that the boat family may have kept a fire going on board; oak is so difficult to burn that the boat itself may never have ignited, as you might expect if you burned wood on wood.

Mark led me over to another adjacent quarry pit that was even deeper. ‘Look down at that. That’s the Mesolithic. That’s the level of the North Sea. It’s incredible to be getting down to these depths.’

The archaeologists had been lucky. If there was not a rich vein of Oxford clay for bricks, lying under the peat, at Jurassic levels, Hanson would not have invested the huge amount needed to dig down so far. And the interest in the clay coincided with the 1980s regulations requiring companies to get a site cleared by archaeologists before and while such work was happening. Not that Hanson needed forcing. I was impressed by the enthusiasm with which they had collaborated with the Cambridge team.

‘To be honest,’ one Hanson manager told me, ‘digging for clay is a dull and messy business. Having something like this keeps the digger operators interested. What would have been annoying is to pay a lot of money to the archaeologists, and then have them find absolutely nothing.’ The Cambridge team had been working on and off the site for the previous fifteen years, so it was not surprising they had become so excited on finding something of such value.

Mark explained to me how the landscape along the old course of the River Nene had changed considerably as sea levels rose. ‘At the start of the Bronze Age, around 2500 BC, this was still a dry valley, with the usual monuments and barrows [he waved a map at me that marked them all]. But then the sea levels rose and the area became wetlands. The inhabitants had to adapt. People turned to fishing and used these riverboats to get around.’

He conjured up an attractive picture of life at the time: ‘We’ve found fish and eel traps near the boats. The eel traps are remarkably like the ones still used. There’s a platform house close by. These banks were lined with willows, and there was probably an abundance of wildlife like otters and pelicans.’

The offerings his team found show how substantial was the trade overseas. The boats weren’t big enough to go offshore themselves – they were for river traffic – but some of the offerings, like a sword, looked Mediterranean. It suggests there may have been some trading posts (or, as Amazon would put it, ‘fulfilment centres’) on the nearby coast, where goods were distributed from ocean-going craft.

Mark gestured over to the fens that stretched out beyond the quarry. ‘The likelihood has got to be that there is more of this as far as the eye can see. We just happen to have found these boats here because this is the only place where anyone is digging to such depths. But this isn’t a unique event.

‘The fens must be the best place for prehistory in the whole of the country. I keep seeing colleagues flying out from Cambridge to sites in Mesoamerica and Africa. They should be just driving up the A1. This is where the action is.’

He shared Francis’s feeling that we were only just on the cusp of further discoveries that will reveal a huge amount about the Bronze Age in the years to come: ‘In the past, it felt as if we were looking at the Bronze Age through a very narrow window, with the curtains partly drawn or slightly misted over. Now it’s as though someone has opened the windows.’

*

The last stretch lay ahead of me, to the coast and the sea.

I was excited by the revelations about the Bronze Age. I also felt tired. Walking long distances may make you fit – and that’s questionable, because it makes you fit for nothing other than walking – but there comes a time when a hot bath and a cold pint are the only things luring you ahead.

By chance, I had brought some coca tea back from my last trip to Peru. Strictly speaking, this was not something that the US Food and Drug Administration endorse – indeed they arrest people for it at airports – as coca leaves are the raw ingredient for cocaine. I hadn’t thought it sensible to ask what the policy was at Heathrow, if they had one. But the tea was herbal and gave a sustaining energy that helped Andean Indians through long nights on the mountains; I had taken it for years, particularly when walking long distances. This was a good moment to brew up with my thermos.

I sat on the side of the track, sipping at the acrid coca tea, looking out over the endless plain of Norfolk and thinking about everything I had seen on my 400-mile journey.

Some things in England had improved immeasurably. Pubs, pies and Premiership football for a start. Perhaps because Norfolk reminded me so much of Russia, which I had recently travelled across, I was struck by one contrast in attitudes: in Russia, the whole idea of ‘relationship issues’ had been considered for so long a bourgeois decadence under the Soviets that there was now widespread family dysfunction, with alcoholism and divorce rife; England was by no means perfect – and it was easy to poke fun at the ‘touchy-feely culture’ in which prime ministers kept apologising and everyone was ‘finding themselves’ before ‘moving on’ – but there seemed to be a far greater concern for other people’s feelings than in other countries I had travelled through.

Underneath the brash and flash of tabloid Britain that had reached parts of the countryside – I had a mental image of Jordan driving a black Range Rover as she went to ride her horses on the North Downs – there was still a residual modesty, a kindness that was there if not always spoken. That said, while being increasingly connected by the distorting prisms of cyberspace, we were disconnected on the ground: we don’t walk and talk enough.

England was also a phenomenally beautiful country. How often had I come back to Heathrow from abroad and marvelled at the sudden green of the fields as I drove home. We are complacent about its beauty, which we assume to be natural, but is highly managed by our farmer custodians, in whom we show little interest. You need to walk large stretches of England to appreciate its subtle gradations; changes that can be missed when speeding past on motorways or A roads.

My walk had taken me within the baleful orbit of London, a reminder that there were two countrysides: the one close enough to London or a big city for house prices to have risen steeply and villages to be empty during the week, when the inhabitants were sucked into commuter trains; and the older countryside, like Dorset or Norfolk, too far out, where the problem was often the reverse – a lack of public transport meant no one could leave during the day at all. Many of the East Anglian villages I passed had been left with bus services so reduced they had just one daily departure and arrival, if that.

It was also less secure living in the countryside than one might think: more gun crime than in the cities, according to statistics; more divorces; too many car crashes on small country lanes (more dangerous than motorways or urban traffic, and with a ridiculously high speed limit of sixty miles an hour, as I knew from my Speed Awareness Course); and, towards King’s Lynn and north Norfolk, one of the highest rates of suicide in the country.

I was sure this last, unexpected, statistic had something to do with everything being so flat. I’ve always needed hills. They don’t have to be the Lake District, Alps, Andes or the Himalaya – although some of my happiest journeys have been made in those mountains – but some slight rise in the landscape doesn’t half lift the spirits. All the way from the coast, I had been travelling along the spine of the country, with its gentle undulations of down and valley; by comparison, Norfolk was flat-chested. Sorry, Brian Eno.

I rarely listened to my iPod when walking. It was better for dozing off to if I slept out in the open. But crossing Norfolk was so dull that I saw no alternative. I should have been listening to Mozart or Vashti Bunyan, or for that matter Eno’s ambient musings – something calm and reflective. But instead I was listening to Ryan Adams’s guitar-driven Rock N Roll at full volume, the only way to relieve the tedium of the East Anglian steppes.

The pretty village of Ringstead came as a welcome relief. There was the faint flush of a hill – the Ringstead Downs off to one side, with their beech trees and chalk grasslands, a very last whimpering sigh of the Chilterns; the Gin Trap, a seventeenth-century coaching inn, which served an excellent bangers and mash; and some farm buildings reassuringly in the centre of the village.

It was just a few miles to Hunstanton, a curious Victorian resort that had been built up by the L’Estrange family, the local landowners since the Norman conquest (their hereditary title of ‘Lord High Admiral of the Wash’ sounded straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan).

Hunstanton had much that was bad and much that was good about England. The bad was more obvious. A grim set of plastic amusement barns had been put up along the seafront, with slot machines; there was an ‘Ancient Mariner Inn’, with the sort of restaurant that sandwiches go to when they die, and another pub that had proudly put up a sign to say there was ‘a real log fire’. You expected everything to be fake. It had none of Blackpool or Weymouth’s exuberance or charm. There were bossy notices from the L’Estrange Estate telling you not to do any of the things you might normally want to do at the seaside.

But beyond, on the beach, I found some huts that Maisie Taylor had told me about, spread out below the cliff. These were not the polite little beach huts that change hands for over £100,000 at the front on Southwold, but more ragged, bleached affairs, scattered across the dunes and sometimes, I was told by locals, overwhelmed by them. On a bad year whole huts got submerged by the drifting sand. One was called Sea Holly, in turquoise; another, Ocean Drive, looked like it had been a wooden caravan that had got to the beach and just stopped. Both were the sort of places to write a book in and look out to sea, as the winds shored the dunes up against you.

I’m a sucker for bleached wood, whether on a beach hut or the driftwood that was scattered over the sand. And across the wide beach, flecked with flint, kite surfers were racing at a fabulous speed, matched only by those who were out on the water.

A little down the coast too were the remains of St Edmund’s Chapel, built in 1272 in memory of the martyr king, who was thought to have landed on Hunstanton beach in AD 855 ‘to claim his Kingdom of East Anglia’, some fourteen years before his death at the hands of the Vikings.

If he did land here – and the historical jury is still out on the case – he would have found that it all looked very familiar. It reminded me strongly of the wide Jutland and Danish beaches from which the Angles had come.

But what I had always known would be the end of my journey lay just a mile ahead along the shore, at Holme-next-the-Sea, the north-eastern edge of the Wash, and a departure point since prehistoric times to cross both that water and the North Sea to Europe.

*

In the spring of 1998, a special-needs teacher called John Lorimer found a Bronze Age axe on the beach at Holme. Not that he knew what it was at first; the crescent-shaped blade required identification by the county archaeologists. While they were looking at it in Norwich, John returned regularly to the same spot on the beach to look for more artefacts. He noticed a strange piece of wood in the peat beds that the incoming sea was slowly eroding – strange because of its weirdly contorted branches. Then on later visits he realised that a neat circle of posts around the tree were becoming exposed – at which point it was clear the structure was man-made.

John called in the experts, who by this time had dated his axe. It was when they realised that the ‘branches’ were strange because they were in fact the inverted roots of an oak tree buried upside down that the world stood up and took notice. Or, in Francis Pryor’s words, ‘picked it up, ran with it, tossed it around in the air and devoured it’.

The wood had been preserved by the same peat that had kept Flag Fen causeway and the boats at nearby Must Farm quarry in such good condition. Wood can be accurately dated, unlike a stone circle. The date the experts came back with was 2049 BC, in the early Bronze Age.

The papers needed a catchy name. ‘Seahenge’ was obvious but misleading – for when it was constructed, it was not on the beach, but inland, and was not strictly speaking a henge. But no matter. The growth of the coastline had, over four millennia, brought the sea to the site. That it had exposed the circle now rather than at any other time over the past few thousand years – when it might well have been ignored or missed – was sheer luck. It was also an indicator that there might well have been many more such sites which have not survived.

One reason the press loved it was that the Druid and New Age community didn’t. As could have been foreseen, they objected strongly to the timbers from Seahenge being removed; for English Heritage decided the only way to save the circle from the incoming sea was to take it away for preservation.

Rollo Maughfling, the self-styled ‘Archdruid of Stonehenge and Glastonbury’, was just one of many who protested. He has described the first time he saw the circle, as the tide retreated over the wooden posts and they began to emerge from the waves with, at their centre, ‘the magnificent upturned central tree formation, seawater pouring off it and lapping around it. A shiver ran down my spine.’

Many of the archaeologists were affected as well. Francis Pryor described what it was like to enter the circle when Channel 4’s Time Team built a full reconstruction:

I can only say it was profoundly moving and peaceful. Somehow the thick timbers excluded nearly all sound from outside. I was also strongly affected by the strong smell of freshly split oakwood. You could almost cut the tannin in the air. The cleft-oak interior harmonised with the de-barked tree trunk in an extraordinary way. It was as if this special enclosed space had truly been cleansed and purified …

Some protesters tried to stop the archaeologists’ work by throwing away their sandbags; the police were called. A legal challenge in the courts to halt the removal of the circle, which the protesters argued should be allowed to stay in its natural and spiritual site, failed when it was clear English Heritage carried too much establishment and academic backing to be beaten.

The circle and the central oak were finally removed. After restoration at the specialist tanks in Flag Fen, they are now on display at the Regional Museum in King’s Lynn. The central inverted oak, in particular, retains all its power, even behind glass.

The press controversy surrounding its removal, with photos of Druids bearing staffs confronting bulldozers and archaeologists, overshadowed the fact that Seahenge was such an extraordinary creative achievement.

For me, entering the mindset of those who made the circle was in some ways as challenging as anything contemporary art could offer. Here was a tree that had been stripped of its bark – a cumbersome operation which Francis has described as ‘completely senseless and pointless’ – and then, even more oddly, planted upside down, an idea that was beyond the irrational. Around it had been positioned a dense circle of fifty-five oak posts, forming a palisade: these too had their bark stripped, but only on the inward-facing side. The bark had been left on the exterior, so that to an observer the original monument would have looked like an enormously wide tree trunk, which one could then step inside to find the inverted oak tree at its centre.

The only entrance was through one of the posts that had split, so offering a narrow V between which to slip; as a child, climbing in the oak tree-house that we built in a wood in Suffolk, I remember the feeling of getting stuck between such forking branches; and of the subsequent entrance to a special place.

Because the bark had been stripped from the inside of the posts, the interior, once gained, would feel worked and cleansed. And inside this giant artificial tree, what would we have found? The trunk of another oak tree, but inverted so that its one-tonne mass disappeared into the ground and its truncated roots waved in the air. The world turned upside down.

We think of the oak as an image of our national stability. Our steadiness under fire. Hearts of oak. The French have their long lines of high, thin poplars, the Spanish their cork trees, the Italians their olive groves, the Russians wide forests of silver birch: all trees of great practical use, of value.

We like our oaks for their steadfastness, their age and the way they spread about themselves with a wayward sense of ownership; that they also provide acorn-feed for pigs and our beloved pork is collateral benefit.

I find it intriguing that what archaeologists call ‘the Great Central Stump’ of an oak tree should have been used with such lightness, such finesse, although those seem to have been the trademarks of the Bronze Age.

The one-tonne trunk was lowered upside down into the ground using woven honeysuckle rope: not a natural choice of material. We know, because some of the abandoned honeysuckle rope was found wrapped around and under the oak, preserved by the peat, the first such prehistoric rope ever to have been found. Maisie Taylor, Francis Pryor’s wife, had helped make the identification, and I had talked to her about it at their farm.

To give honeysuckle that tensile strength, it would need to be soaked first, and then woven with great skill. There are other naturally occurring materials that would lend themselves much more easily to making a rope. So the choice of honeysuckle was a symbolic one, just as was the oak, which might possibly have been brought some distance to the circle to transfer a sense of place, like the Stonehenge bluestones brought from Wales.

In 2049 BC, at the time the oak was lowered into the ground, the transition to a deforested Britain was beginning. The trees were starting to be felled. Bronze axes and tools could work the wood in a way impossible in previous Neolithic times. On just this one upturned trunk of oak, the marks from some fifty different axe-heads have been distinguished.

Francis had suggested one possible explanation for the site, and one that made sense to me intuitively: that it was a mortuary ring. The tree, a symbol of life, had been turned upside down to show death; the body of the deceased was then placed on the upturned roots of the tree so that scavenger birds could descend to strip away its flesh – excarnation, as had happened to the skeletons of those found near the Iron Age hill-forts I had visited; the outer palisade created a private and hidden space within which this could happen. In his view, ‘The tree could have provided a superb excarnation platform, but I cannot prove it.’

Whatever the explanation, to see the great blackened trunk of the upturned oak tree at the nearby King’s Lynn Museum is a primal experience. As with Damien Hirst’s shark, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, the glass case the trunk is kept in only adds to the feeling that this is an emotion we once knew but have since anaesthetised.

*

And now I had come to the beach where it had been found. There was of course no sign of ‘what I’d come to see’, or rather respect the memory of. I knew exactly where Seahenge had stood only because Francis and Maisie had given me accurate directions. Black waves swirled over the spot.

The beach was completely empty, aside from a few distant dog walkers. Beyond the bar of shingle at Gore Point, oystercatchers, one of my favourite birds, were wheeling with their bold, confident cries. Grey plovers were walking on the shingle. The marram grass had woven the sand together to form dunes along the beach tough enough to withstand the North Sea winds and tide, for the while at least; a duck-boarded path led across them to allow birdwatchers access to the shore.

I liked the view of local historian and archaeologist Matthew Champion, who, while sympathetic to the reasons for the removal of Seahenge, had commented that ‘perhaps we should have let the cold waters of the North Sea finally take it away once and for all. The circle was after all a place of boundaries, a symbolic structure on the cusp between sea and land, life and death, the land of the living and the land of those who gone before. Perhaps it would be no bad thing if we had simply let it slip over the boundary for one last time.’

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …

John of Gaunt’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II is a familiar way of framing our island story, a Churchillian way. The sea as our defence, our moat, that protects us from invaders and gives us our strength.

But there is a different way of looking at it. The sea makes us open to other influences. As a nation, we are one gigantic port, absorbing the language, cultures and rhythms of the world. We have always done so from the earliest of prehistoric times. That is our strength. We are not landlocked, immobile.

Empire didn’t suit us. It brought out the bossy, inflexible, hierarchical side of our national character. But being more on the edge of things again, that will suit us fine – a fluid, swirling mix of energy, like the sea around us, which can absorb people and ideas from across Europe, whether music, food, architecture or technology, and transform them with mercantile energy.

Elizabethan England was a minority power, running before the heavy galleons of Spain and the Habsburg Empire in Europe. We are better as the world’s pirates than as its policemen. We are a liminal country, on the edge of things. Which is a great place to be.

I looked down at the wide sands of Holme, with their black pools, the low tide sucking across the beach. Seahenge was a reminder of the changing line of the coast and our country’s mutability; of the many secrets that still lay buried waiting to be discovered, which, if archaeological techniques continue to improve so exponentially, will surely happen; of how many other such wooden mortuary rings might have been scattered across Bronze Age England, and the miraculous survival of this one.

Above all it was a reminder of flux, of change. Nothing about England is solid: its people, its culture, its language, its coastline. All are constantly changing, and have been from our earliest prehistory.

Rather than trying to hold onto some outmoded notion of national identity, like a piece of the driftwood out in the ocean, we should just let go and have the waves take us where they will.

I looked out to sea. In the far distance there was the faintest white line of wind turbines on the distant horizon, like the white foam of waves breaking. A flock of plovers rose up to join the oystercatchers wheeling above me. A huge and empty sky was lit to the west by the descending sun.

The end of one journey inevitably meant that soon I would embark on a new one. I didn’t know where I would next be travelling. There was talk of taking a boat around Cape Horn and the lower coastline of South America.

Whatever happened, I felt I was ready to go abroad again; although I was not sure I would find anywhere quite as strange and foreign as England.