old Roman road of Sarn Helen reach the mountain road. Up there you will see nothing, not even one of those helpful brown tourist notices, just a gate, and a space in which you can park.
It is still a metalled road, but as you walk it you will see the stones put there by a local authority, or some local farmers, give way to older, much older flags, and a point will come, a quarter of a mile along, when, before a second gate, you will see the monolith start to rise, and rise, until 11 feet of it stands in the sky. On the Ordnance Survey it is marked as Maen Madoc, but that is just the name given in much later centuries when men had long forgotten what this was. In front of you is a gravestone.
And the drums are pounding.
If the light hits it at the right angle you can still make out the letters, DERVACI FILIUS IUSTI IC IACIT . (The stone of) Dervacus, Son of Justus, Here He Lies. The letters are jumbled and close together, the A’s upside down, as though whoever cut these was doing his best to follow a tradition, perhaps literacy itself, only dimly remembered. No one knows who Dervacus was, or Justus, and no one will ever know. But the artist Alan Sorrell has painted an imaginative reconstruction of the raising of this stone, a little group of men and riders on the moor with the shadows lengthening as the sun goes down. Which is how it would have seemed to them. This stone was set up in a world in ruins.
2
For the end of the world was long ago-
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgement day.
G.K. Chesterton in ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ is writing about the fall of the Roman Empire, the scale of which we find hard to acknowledge. It was the nearest thing to a world state the planet has known, with a standing army and a civil service, its public buildings grander than ours, and, for the rich, villas with more comforts (the Roman room, with its couches, sideboards and underfloor heating, recreated in the Museum of London, is still the last word in comfort). For the men of the time it must have seemed all this would last forever, but it ended with an abruptness terrifying even now. Then, in Chesterton’s words, there was just ‘the plunging of the nations in the night’.
In the Roman world the dead had been buried beside the roads. At High Rochester, north of Hadrian’s Wall, four of these tombs have been found, and they are very strange structures, big things, taller than a man, one of them circular and conical, the other three small pyramids. All were put up when the Empire stood. The difference is that the tomb on the moorland above Neath was not.
When the archaeologist Sir Cyril Fox excavated it in 1940 he found that to put it up someone had dug through the metalling of the road itself, which suggests this was overgrown even then. Roman Britain had probably been gone for two generations, with its organised life in cities and villas, and the warbands of the first English would have been picking their way through the countryside when someone decided to bury Dervacus in the old grand Imperial way. But not entirely in the old way. The Roman dead had been buried on the outskirts of towns, when, for some reason, perhaps because these towns were already ominously deserted, or for their own security, they buried him in this remote place. The last Roman may lie here.
3
Some 10 feet from the stone, Fox found a pit 8 feet square and 2 feet deep, the outline of which can still be seen. This was probably the grave, only there was no body. He found evidence that it had been disturbed, and this, together with the acid soil in such a high place, would have destroyed the human remains. But it is what Fox did next which is so wonderful.
The stone had fallen and was lying beside the road, but instead of carting it off to some museum, the fate of so many Roman and Dark Age memorials, he, in a time of World War with British fortunes again at their
It is still a metalled road, but as you walk it you will see the stones put there by a local authority, or some local farmers, give way to older, much older flags, and a point will come, a quarter of a mile along, when, before a second gate, you will see the monolith start to rise, and rise, until 11 feet of it stands in the sky. On the Ordnance Survey it is marked as Maen Madoc, but that is just the name given in much later centuries when men had long forgotten what this was. In front of you is a gravestone.
And the drums are pounding.
If the light hits it at the right angle you can still make out the letters, DERVACI FILIUS IUSTI IC IACIT . (The stone of) Dervacus, Son of Justus, Here He Lies. The letters are jumbled and close together, the A’s upside down, as though whoever cut these was doing his best to follow a tradition, perhaps literacy itself, only dimly remembered. No one knows who Dervacus was, or Justus, and no one will ever know. But the artist Alan Sorrell has painted an imaginative reconstruction of the raising of this stone, a little group of men and riders on the moor with the shadows lengthening as the sun goes down. Which is how it would have seemed to them. This stone was set up in a world in ruins.
2
For the end of the world was long ago-
And all we dwell today
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgement day.
G.K. Chesterton in ‘The Ballad of the White Horse’ is writing about the fall of the Roman Empire, the scale of which we find hard to acknowledge. It was the nearest thing to a world state the planet has known, with a standing army and a civil service, its public buildings grander than ours, and, for the rich, villas with more comforts (the Roman room, with its couches, sideboards and underfloor heating, recreated in the Museum of London, is still the last word in comfort). For the men of the time it must have seemed all this would last forever, but it ended with an abruptness terrifying even now. Then, in Chesterton’s words, there was just ‘the plunging of the nations in the night’.
In the Roman world the dead had been buried beside the roads. At High Rochester, north of Hadrian’s Wall, four of these tombs have been found, and they are very strange structures, big things, taller than a man, one of them circular and conical, the other three small pyramids. All were put up when the Empire stood. The difference is that the tomb on the moorland above Neath was not.
When the archaeologist Sir Cyril Fox excavated it in 1940 he found that to put it up someone had dug through the metalling of the road itself, which suggests this was overgrown even then. Roman Britain had probably been gone for two generations, with its organised life in cities and villas, and the warbands of the first English would have been picking their way through the countryside when someone decided to bury Dervacus in the old grand Imperial way. But not entirely in the old way. The Roman dead had been buried on the outskirts of towns, when, for some reason, perhaps because these towns were already ominously deserted, or for their own security, they buried him in this remote place. The last Roman may lie here.
3
Some 10 feet from the stone, Fox found a pit 8 feet square and 2 feet deep, the outline of which can still be seen. This was probably the grave, only there was no body. He found evidence that it had been disturbed, and this, together with the acid soil in such a high place, would have destroyed the human remains. But it is what Fox did next which is so wonderful.
The stone had fallen and was lying beside the road, but instead of carting it off to some museum, the fate of so many Roman and Dark Age memorials, he, in a time of World War with British fortunes again at their
Similar Books
