In the Land of Giants by Max Adams: the Dark Ages illuminated

In the Land of Giants

Author: Max Adams

ISBN-13: 978-1784080341

Publisher: Head of Zeus

Guideline Price: £25

In December 2014, on the day of the winter solstice, the English historian and archaeologist Max Adams set off on a long, dark walk from York across the wolds to the North Sea at Whitby. Before leaving York, he called at the city's glorious Minster – and his description of his visit bears a little examination. Adams is not concerned with describing the splendid interior of this vast church; nor is he especially interested in recalling his temper, his attitude, his frame of mind at this particular moment. Indeed, his record of the day is not notably about him at all. Instead, he draws attention to aspects of the Minster that lie hidden out of sight – and that can stay out of mind too, unless we know what we are about.

Below the church lies the heart of the garrison fort of old Roman Eboracum; in the undercroft can still be seen intact lengths of Roman walls, stone laid painstakingly to defend this northernmost city of the Empire, which slowly took on a new face as the imperial era gave way to what are known as the Dark Ages.

In the Land of Giants, as it ranges widely in a series of long walks across the landscapes of Britain and Ireland, is concerned with such glimpses and accretions: of history unseen or barely seen; its long, slow layering; its destruction by time, fire or neglect; its recovery and interpretation – and in particular with the sense that it is etched all about us, if only we take the trouble to learn or understand.

Adams’ particular terrain is, of course, especially problematic. The Dark Ages, the long centuries between Rome and the beginnings of modern history, are not called this without reason: this was a period of population decline in Europe and of a general withering in trade and other human interactions. Every Irish schoolchild knows that the endeavour of Irish monks maintained a light of culture burning in this time – yet it remains the case that hard facts, figures, numbers from this era are difficult to come by.

Adams, then, has quite the task on his hands: but he succeeds in this remarkable and engaging book in bringing the period to vivid life. Much of this has to do with his own training as an archaeologist: history, we realise, can be inscribed on a jug or a bead just as eloquently as on a piece of parchment – and again and again in this book, he is able to point to the materials brought from the ground that have made these Dark Ages considerably less dark, year by year.

But much of the book’s success also rests on Adams’ geographical range: his movement through these landscapes, his ease at knitting together and illuminating what he sees as he goes – and, thankfully, his ability to do so with some humour and without taking himself too seriously. Aspects of In the Land of Giants, in particular the careful and thoughtful walking of the land, are reminiscent of WG Sebald – but whereas The Rings of Saturn roves what amounts to an eerily unpopulated country, Adams’s world is thick with people, with warm companionship. Not for him either a grave-faced Wordsworthian pacing or Colossian bestriding of the land: Adams is keen on his motorbike as a means of getting around; and keen too on observing his basic human needs, the scrambled eggs and toast, roast lamb, tea and buns and much else that even the most solemn landscape walker needs to sustain great thoughts. There is not much sense of an overarching Romantic ego at work, and this is all to the good.

Rather, there is a keen-eyed awareness of the political and cultural ramifications of the terrain. By enquiring in such a way into these Dark Ages and into the peoples and cultures that inhabited them, Adams brings these centuries and these people into the light – and in particular, he illuminates the ties that bind them to us and to our modern world. As he walks the border between Wales and England, for example, he sees the extent to which such a frontier has never had much relevance in the lives of the people who lived there; place names blur and fuzz from Welsh to English and back again; trade and human relationships work endlessly back and forth.

This sense of an endless dialogue is especially interesting in the case of Ireland. As Adams stands on the hill above the Manx harbour of Peel, the Irish coast is cloaked below a looming cloudbank; as he bobs in his boat off the harbour wall at Holyhead, the lights of invisible Dublin cast a dramatic purple glare above the western horizon – and yet Ireland is felt everywhere in this book. A speculative birthplace is allocated to St Patrick: the fort at Birdoswald on Hadrian’s Wall, high in the Pennines and today set amid “a landscape of boggy mires, dispersed sheep farms and conifer plantations”, was formerly a solid, powerful place – and its Roman name of Banna was similar to the Bannavem Taberniae of Patrick’s Confessio. Similarly, Adams’ treatment of Dál Riata, that Irish-Scots kingdom knit together by the sea, is shadowed by the presence of Ireland: the kings of Dál Riata brought the booty of Europe to their fortress at Dunadd (its domed shape compared by the ever-peckish Adams to a Walnut Whip) but their rule was legitimised by Colmcille following his arrival from Derry.

And at length the book and Adams come to rest briefly in Ireland itself – specifically on the north-eastern shoulder of Inishowen. Here, on the slopes above Lough Foyle, he and his fellow archaeologists look back across the sea to the Scottish islands floating in the distance, mull on the ties that bind – and explore the rich material heritage of the district and make connections.

Adams is commendably sensitive to the specificities of Irish fieldwork: “In England,” he writes, “where the historical evidence is generally a little simpler, there is much less relevant or useful oral tradition to assist or perplex the landscape archaeologist; in Ireland there is a whole universe of richly nuanced narrative which has to be interpreted as a textual source in its own right and woven into the broad tapestry we are trying to create, even if much material evidence has been lost or deliberately destroyed in acts of cultural barbarity”. It is impressive – though very much in keeping with the tone of the whole book – to see such awareness in action; and absorbing to note the results that can flow from such openness.

In the Land of Giants offers many pointed lessons – not least that history ought to play a central role in our culture and education. A psychological effect of contact with history, after all, is that it reminds us of the temporary nature of culture and politics. States and nations that can seem eternal and unchanging are in fact anything but; and our own sense of centrality becomes healthily diminished too, as we shrink to being a mere part of an ongoing drama, rather than its stars. And this book reminds us too that – unwelcome though such a reflection will be in some quarters – we hold a collective title deed to the land itself. It connects us to our past and our present and to ourselves; and we sever this connection at our peril.

Neil Hegarty’s books include That Was the Life That Was, the biography of David Frost; The Secret History of our Streets, a social history of twentieth-century London; Story of Ireland; and Dublin: a View from the Ground. His debut novel, The Inch levels, will be published by Head of Zeus next year