A Travelling Medievalist's Blog

Last summer, Welsh cobs. Now Icelandic horses (don’t ever call them ponies, small though they may be!). Perhaps I should make it a life ambition to ride every surviving Medieval breed…
Icelandic horses came with the earliest settlers; although they are not large, the idea of loading one into a longboat is daunting. They must have chosen not only the sturdiest but also the calmest animals to make the crossing. For the past thousand years, the descendants of those brave, sea-faring horses have been bred for strength and good sense, but never size. Still, small though he may be, the Icelandic horse can carry a 200 lb, 6′ tall man (although his feet will all but drag on the ground). It looks absurd to Modern eyes, accustomed to tall thoroughbreds, but you get used to it. In Iceland, if you’re a horse, it’s good to have short sturdy legs, because the terrain varies from lava fields to rocky scree to ice sheets. And it’s good to be shaggy when the winter winds come down across the treeless heaths. It’s also very good to have a smooth and steady pace to eat up the miles, and they do: from birth, Icelandic horses walk, trot, canter and tölt. This last is smoother than either trot or canter. Some rare and particularly gifted Icelandic horses have a fifth gait, the “flying gait”, in which all four feet leave the ground at once.

Isabella at the tölt. Look at her little hooves go!

Our guide, Begga, who owns Islenski Hesturinn (The Icelandic Horse), told us the following story, about an exhibition of different breeds of horse in Germany. Big German horses doing elaborate dressage routines, elegant Arabs beautifully groomed with flowing manes, showing their speed. And then in come the Icelandic horses, short and shaggy, with their manes in their eyes or sticking straight up, their riders’ feet nearly brushing the ground. A ripple of laughter, politely suppressed, goes around the audience. What are these funny looking ponies going to do? The head of the Icelandic delegation pops a champagne cork, pours each of his companions a glass, and off they go at full speed tölt, three times around the ring, before stopping in front of the judges to drink a toast without having spilled a drop. The crowd goes wild.
Begga also has a theory about a link between Icelandic horses and the Icelandic language. She points out that Iceland has very difficult terrain and no dialects, just the same Icelandic everywhere, pretty much unchanged from Old Norse, while Denmark, with less difficult terrain, has several different dialects. She thinks Icelandic horses kept the language moving freely around the island, so that no little pockets of people developed their own way of saying things. It’s a lovely notion, though I suspect that Danish dialectical variants are probably influenced more by linguistic contacts Iceland simply didn’t have, with the other Scandinavian languages, with Dutch, with German.

I rode Isabella. I don’t normally much care for mares, but she was brilliant (although I needed to keep her at the back because she kicks). She loved to run, picking up the tölt easily from a fast walk. No need to trot if you can do this! I’m a convert. I entirely understand why those great tall Norsemen loved their little shaggy horses and still do. I’m already planning a return to Iceland, with a longer ride, maybe several days.

When Ingólfur Arnarson first approached the coast of Iceland in 874, he threw two carved pieces of wood overboard and followed them to their landing place southwest of the place he named Reykjavik, the Cove of Smoke, because of the steam rising from the hot springs all around. This is the beginning of Icelandic history because before Ingólfur’s arrival the island had been uninhabited except for the visits of Irish monks considered by some to be hypothetical, escaping from the world. Before the arrival of humankind, the only land mammal living on Iceland was the Arctic fox who probably arrived during the Ice Age. And please don’t ask me what he ate, since apparently even mice were introduced at a later period.

I arrived in Iceland by air and not by sea, at Keflavik which is somewhat south of Ingólfur’s landing site. Landing at Keflavik is a bit like landing on the moon. You come in over dark and brooding waves which merge almost imperceptibly with dark and brooding lava flow on which almost nothing seems to grow. It looks, in fact, as though it had been frozen in the moment of boiling, rocks belched up like great bubbles on the land.

Since the  collapse of its banking industry–a collapse so traumatic that Iceland is considering adopting the Canadian dollar as its national currency, although that’s a tale for another day–Iceland is doing everything it can to attract tourists. My Boston-Keflavik-Amsterdam flight was several hundred dollars less expensive than anything I could find this summer, and allowed me to break my journey for as many days as I liked between legs, so I decided to spend two days in Reykjavik. I’ve wanted to visit Iceland ever since reading Njal’s Saga, and I found a ridiculously inexpensive room, and besides I wanted to visit the Blue Lagoon and go horseback riding. There were no academic pretenses or excuses to my initial plan; I just felt I’d earned it (an academic excuse evolved later, but that’s for another post).

So at ten o’clock this morning I stepped out of a warm spa building into bracing 40F weather, wearing only a bathing suit. I only had to suffer the chilly wind for the ten steps it took me to lower myself into the weird robin’s egg blue waters of the lagoon, waters that seem even bluer because of the harsh black basalt that surrounds them. I’m not going to go into detail about the chemical composition of that water, or how it’s related to the lava beds below or the near by geothermal plant, because frankly I don’t really understand any of that, but I will say that early in the morning, with only a handful of other people in the water paddling silently about, it was a remarkable experience, eerie and yet strangely meditative. The steam above the water was so heavy, because of the difference between water and air temperature, that all you had to do was move about 20 feet away from another person and you were screened away by the mist, in your own private universe. Sometimes, to make things even stranger, a human figure would surge out of the swirling fog face entirely painted white with silica from the bottom of the pool. It’s supposed to do miracles for your skin (though it wreaks havoc on your hair!).

Ok, it’s not ancient. Maybe it’s not even “real”, whatever that means, since the pool was created as a by-product of the abovementioned geothermal plant. And it’s too expensive, and they pressure you pretty hard to buy Blue Lagoon skin care.  But after 4 hours of unsleep on the plane, and for that first half hour in particular, when I sat in the hot water at the edge of the pool and looked out over the black lava fields towards the snowcapped fells, feeling that no one in the world existed but me, it was entirely worth it.

St Patrick’s Day is not normally a holiday I celebrate, in spite of my name. Oh, maybe I’ll make a loaf of soda bread, but I refuse to wear Kelly green, which I think is just an awful colour and I am deeply horrified by the sight of drunken young men in leprechaun hats and by all the blatherskite associated with the worst North American celebrations of the day. In Philadelphia the drunken pub crawls around the University of Pennsylvania actually start the weekend before St Patrick’s Day, in Chicago they dye the river green. And this nonsense has actually now migrated back across the Atlantic to Ireland itself, where I understand that towns compete to see who can get more people to dress up like leprechauns (I’m not fond of leprechauns, as you may have guessed by now!). My inclination is to skip all of this tasteless absurdity and stay home with a pint of Guiness and perhaps watch Michael Collins again because, really, isn’t it always a good thing to spend an evening with Liam Neeson?

So when James pointed out that I’d be in Halifax over St Patrick’s day and suggested that we do something to celebrate, I was initially dubious, until I realized that my son has, at least in this respect, inherited my own good sense and was determined to avoid the pubs. We decided instead to cook a large meal for the band of his friends who congregate at his house on weekends. The menu would consist of a vat of Irish stew, a mountain of colcannon (potatoes mashed with leeks) and a Guiness cake (I used Nigella Lawson’s recipe– the picture is of her cake, not mine, but mine looked just as nice). Tanya, who writes her own blog, wanted to know about St Patrick’s Day and food traditions, and this got me thinking a bit.

St Patrick himself is not especially associated with food, as far as I know. He was Welsh, actually, and was kidnapped by Irish raiders when he was a boy and taken to Ireland as a slave. Eventually escaping, he returned to Wales and was ordained as a priest and eventually a bishop, and finally went back to Ireland to evangelize the island. None of the miracles I know of concerning him (banishing all snakes from Ireland, speaking with Oisin the son of Fionn MacCumhall who had returned to Ireland after 300 years in Tír na nÓg) have anything to do with food. Still, hospitality, and especially the sharing of food and drink, is an integral part both of ancient Irish culture and of Irish culture today.
More important than food or drink, however, is craic, which means something like companionship or fun, but of a sort involving the telling of tales and the singing of songs rather more than running around hitting a ball with a stick or anything of that sort. And my Saint Patrick’s Day was full of good craic, beginning with my conversation with my landlady Joan, of the Marigold B and B. Joan has lived in the same house all her life, and it belonged to her parents and grandparents before her; she is a veritable compendium of all things Haligonian. At breakfast that morning, she was telling me, I can’t quite remember why, about her grandfather who was a stone-carver and whose workshop, in fact, carved the headstones for the 150 unclaimed victims of the Titanic who were buried in Halifax. This is craic not because it’s fun in any kind of obvious way, but because it’s deeply fascinating. Then at James’ house, after dinner and quite a lot of beer, there was another kind of craic, which began with listening to the Dropkick Murphys, but quickly evolved into singing along enthusiastically (James and his friend Mike’s rendition of the duet in “The Dirty Glass” will live long in my memory, and on Facebook). We sang “Follow me up to Carlow“, which memorializes the massacre of an English army at Glenmalure; it has wonderful bloody lyrics (“From Tassagart to Clonmore/There flows a stream of Saxon gore”) and encourages footstomping. We also roared out “Come out ye Black and Tans“:

Come out ye Black and Tans
Come out and fight me like a man
Show your wives how you won medals down in Flanders
And how the IRA made you run like hell away
From the green and lovely lanes of Killeshandra.

Sounds a bit Fenian, I know, but the best songs are the fighting songs. We finished the evening with “The Last of Barrett’s Privateers“, singing the line about Barrett being “smashed like a bowl of eggs” with particular gusto.

No parades. No green beer. No goddamn leprechauns. Good food, good drink, good craic, good friends. Possibly the best Saint Patrick’s Day ever.

The Travelling Medievalist will post again from Iceland…

It turned out that I wasn’t quite capable of six full days on horseback; surprisingly, it wasn’t the gimpy knee that betrayed me, but an ankle, which I managed to sprain on day four during a series of canters along a woodland trail. I was riding a rather slower horse than Hank, an elder statesman by the name of Morgan, and we got along just fine. But somehow, in the last of these long woodland breakaways, I got my right foot too far forward in the stirrup and something went pop. I took the next day off, but when we set out to ride on our final day, I knew after the second trot that I wasn’t going to be able to keep it up all day, never mind the 400mg of ibuprofen I’d already taken just in case. So I turned back, with tears in my eyes, 20 minutes into the ride and returned to the barn on my own (causing a bit of consternation in those who saw me walk up the lane, as they assumed that I’d been thrown.

Once I recovered from my disappointment in missing the trek to the mountain top, I actually had a lovely day, walking up to see the foals, one of them only a day old, with little Ruby, the daughter of our guide. And I’m sure the rest could go faster without me to hold them back. So it’s off to the International Arthurian Congress with my pride more or less intact (I still didn’t fall off!) and a swollen purple ankle.

Well, I am still alive, have not broken anything, and did not even fall off, though I certainly thought I was going to at one point. The muscles in my legs feel like marshmallow. I may never be a good rider, but I’m beginning to have hopes of progressing from mediocre to fair, and I am certainly learning a great deal about the very complex communication that goes on, or needs to go on, between horse and rider.
I was given a lovely, compact, caramel coloured horse named Hank. I should add that all the horses here are Welsh cobs, and that they come in four sizes: A, B, C and D. I think Hank is probably a B: tall as a large pony, but built like a horse. He has a pretty flaxen mane and tail, and he’s twelve years old: not a fossil like Aramis, but a good steady age. We caught our horses, groomed them, tacked them, and set out shortly before eleven, riding for a couple of hours along forest paths and past farms, trotting quite a bit and having a few perfectly manageable canters in leafy lanes and then we stopped for lunch. I began to think this was going to be easy. After lunch we headed up high onto the slopes of the hills (the Black Mountains, rather), which are covered in bracken and sheep, and prepared for another canter. And this one was absolutely wild: we flew across a track almost totally obscured by the bracken, turning sharp corners. Before I knew it, Hank and I were going awfully fast and I was convinced of my imminent death. I felt myself slipping, and yelled, much to my own embarrassment, but I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever gone so fast on a horse before. It was my fault, of course, not his. Used to riding Aramis, whose very top speed is never enough to catch up with the horse in front of him, I had simply given Hank his head; long reins are a way of telling the horse to run faster. So he did, and in fact ran so fast that when little dips in the trail came up, he simply jumped them. Not having anticipated either the dips or the jumps, my life flashed before my eyes– although the woman behind me told me that actually I was never in any danger of actually falling off but kept my seat quite well.
I learned a couple of very important things. First of all, most of the time even when you feel as though you’re about to fall, you’re really not. Second, when you are riding a well-trained horse (and all these horses are beautifully trained) it is your responsibility to tell them what to do in some kind of comprehensible fashion. When it came time for the last canter of the afternoon, over similar terrain, I (advised by our guide, who was quite patient with my idiocy) hung back, shortened my reins, and checked him a bit when he seemed to be speeding up. And he cantered beautifully and did not jump a thing. I was terrified the whole time, of course, but by the end of it I had learned that if I told him something the right way, then he would do exactly what I said. (This is not always true when he spots a particularly delectable bit of greenery as we’re ambling along, but we’re working on that). There are times when I need to make the decisions (go slower) and there are other times when I need to let him make the decisions (when we’re going down a very steep and treacherous slope, it would be lunacy to try and override the way he wants to place his nimble feet). My decisions are macro, his are micro, but we’re both engaged together in the making of them and they benefit both of us. After all, no one except the Man from Snowy River or Gandalf the White wants to hurl himself headlong down a rocky scree, and neither does any sane horse.
This makes me reflect upon just how specialized a skill riding actually is. Not only must the horse be trained to understand the commands given by the rider, but the rider must be trained to give the right commands. In this particular exchange, my horse was completely competent and I was not– I was talking gibberish when he expected coherent language. Nowadays, of course, most people don’t ride horses much if at all, so it hardly matters. But think again of Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, all mounted. Most of them are riding pretty ordinary horses, of whom very little will ever be asked except to advance a bit quicker or stop. A rider as incompetent as I could manage such a horse without much difficulty. The exceptions, of course, are the knight, with his “goode” horse, and the Squire, who has been “in chyvachie” and “wel koude… sitte on hors and faire ryde.” A warhorse would require a different set of competencies than a lady’s palfrey or a priest’s ambler, or even the Monk’s hunter: greater physical strength, for one thing, since warhorses were generally stallions, prized for their aggressiveness. The stallion here (one of the ones I can see from my window) often breaks down a fence to go cover a mare on the other side of the valley. Different commands, too, would be required, to make a horse charge in the noise and the confusion of battle; these would be backed up by mechanical aids, some of them cruel (spurs, vicious bits), but I doubt that all the brute force in the world would be, in and of itself, sufficient to make a horse really effective on the field. The rider too, would need to be able to keep his seat in extraordinary circumstances. A knight who was a really bad rider would be an embarrassment– like poor old Kay in La Mule Sans Frein who can’t even competently ride a mule.

And the rain just keeps on coming. Lucy and I have left France for Wales, for our long-planned week of horseback riding, and in the next few days the weather is unlikely to crack 20C. And it’s raining.
But about this I am not complaining or feeling even mildly cranky. I am tucked up under a down comforter in a tiny white room in a rambling 17th century farmhouse. I have a narrow bed, a chair, a wee table with a lamp, two shelves, and a few oddly framed reproductions of nineteenth-century German paintings to call my own for the next seven days. That, and two windows. One looks out over the creek and into dense greenery. The second looks at a bank that rises steeply towards the sky where, silhouetted, I can see a half a dozen horses grazing.
The house feels like someone’s home, and well it should as it’s inhabited by three generations of Turners, who’ve been here for forty-odd years. The common areas downstairs, the sitting room and dining room, are full of wonderful stuff– not antiques, not objets d’art, just stuff– a weird old sofas covered with the skin of an actual horse, quite probably the Appaloosa whose portrait hangs near it on the wall, bits and pieces from Africa where the pater familias worked for years, maps of everywhere from Botswana to Bavaria, children’s toys (because at least 5 grandchildren are in semi-permanent residence), and lots and lots of books. I’ve been reading Highways and Byways in South Wales by A.G. Bradley with illustrations by Frederick L. Grigs (1903) this evening. I haven’t yet pinpointed us on the map in the back of the book, although I do know that we drove (in Tyrone’s taxi) from the train station in Abergavenny through Crickhowell to get here. I’ll try to be more precise tomorrow, but in the meantime here’s a wonderful example of Mr. Bradley’s prose:
At Abergavenny Castle, so runs the tale, [William de Braose] had invited his Welsh neighbours to a sumptuous and friendly banquet. When the wine cup was flowing freely, and the harpers were all hard at work, he gave the signal for silence and demanded on the authority of Henry I., but more particularly “in the name of the Lord,” which seems to have been a favourite formula with this unreliable person, that every one should give up their arms. This did not merely mean that they should deposit their daggers in a cloak room till the fun was over lest they should perchance hurt each other–which would have been a truly thoughtful and friendly suggestion–but his command had another significance altogether, and the fiery Welshmen, not rendered less so by copious libations of mead and the inspiring songs of the bards, indignantly refused. The hall was then filled in a moment with men equipped for slaughter, and in less than no time de Braose had turned his dinner party into a bloody shambles.
He goes on to tell another story, about someone I’ve decided to adopt as a dubious ancestress: Maude de St. Valerie, “known in Welsh lore as ‘Moll Walbee’.” But I’ll put that one in later. Now it’s growing dark outside, and I can hear the water flowing and I’m hoping I’ll get just the right sort of horse tomorrow: placid but not slow, good-natured but not dull. Four hours in the saddle. It will be quite a test!

How curious to think that last time I wrote I was concerned about drought and excessively warm weather! As soon as we decided to go riding, the rain came in with a vengeance.

We ride with a group called Cavogaro, which stands for Cavaliers de la Voie Gallo Romaine, a name inspired by the fact that an ancient road used to run along the crest of the hills from Alésia, where Caesar defeated Vercingetorix, to Sombernon. Bits of the old road have been identified, as has at least one Roman villa beside it, but for the most part the trails we actually ride criss-cross back and forth across it, weaving up and down the steep slopes. We progress in single file at walk or trot alongside cultivated fields, and when we get into the more restricted woodland paths, we canter enthusiastically, as many as eight of us thundering along, and occasionally shrieking with glee or distress (when a branch gets you in the face for instance).

Lucy rides the most spirited horses Delphine can set her up with; every now and then, when something goes wrong at the back of the line, Lucy is left in command of the front. She’s acknowledged as one of the really seasoned riders, and as someone who knows the trails well.  I, on the other hand, just ride Aramis, my fat, beloved, probably-partly-Welsh pony. He’s ancient (over twenty) and greedy as a pig, but I like him and he likes me and we do very well together. And he loves to go for a sprightly canter, and he’s short enough that I get fewer branches in the face than most people.

Château de Thenissey, showing both what remains of the 14th C keep and the 18thc wing behind

Seeing the countryside from horseback is an entirely different experience from seeing it from a car window (of course!) or even on foot. You sit a bit higher, you move rather faster, you take different short-cuts. And indeed, you realize how many of these ancient tracks were designed for exactly this, not for tractors or four-wheel drive vehicles or any of the other silly things that now occasionally venture onto them. There are steep ascents and descents that would be impossible on anything motorized, and difficult on foot, but that are just right for a surefooted pony. And you get to thinking (or at least I do) about just how many people have ridden these paths before: ladies on palfreys, the occasional knight headed down to the chateau at Thenissey on a destrier.  Given the power of the Abbey at Flavigny, to which most of the area owed duty, plenty of priests on mules or donkeys, going to visit outlying farms, and maybe the occasional naughty and self-indulgent monk like Chaucer’s, on a horse far too good for a man who has taken a vow of poverty. Heavy farm horses, like the one in the Friar’s Tale, who gets the cart he pulls stuck in a muddy patch… and there were plenty of muddy patches the other day, when we started out in a fine drizzle that turned into steady rain after the first twenty minutes and persisted for the rest of the two hours that we rode, so that we couldn’t even risk a canter because the ground was so slippery.  When we finally dismounted, I had a dry patch on the top of my head (rather like a monk’s tonsure) where my helmet had protected me, and on my butt, and the rest of me was soaking wet and chilled to the bone. I also had a whole new appreciation for men-at-arms riding out on their lord’s service, or farmers coming home from far away markets, or pilgrims heading to Compostela, none of whom had the option of giving up after a couple of hours and climbing into a dry car and turning the heater on full.

The Travelling Medievalist is feeling a bit cranky. Upon arrival in her (non-medieval but still early modern) house in France, she discovered that not only did she have no hot water, but that the water that should have been hot was laced with anti-freeze and therefore toxic. Please don’t ask me to explain French plumbing, but the upshot is that a new hot water heater has been installed to the tune of some 1200 euros, which is way more dollars than you want to think about.
On the plus side, the weather has been stunningly gorgeous. Soon people will start to fuss about the lack of water, but for the moment they are busy harvesting the wheat, a few weeks early. And the red currents, which are not normally picked until after Bastille Day, but which this year have demanded attention much earlier. We picked three bushes worth at my friend Wendy’s last week, and that yielded 3 kilos of berries, which turned into quite a lot of pots of jam.
Jam (and its more delicate sibling, jelly) is not properly speaking a medieval phenomenon. Not in the Western world, at any rate. Jam requires sugar, and cane sugar was discovered in about 700 by the Arabs, who figured out how to use it to make all sorts of lovely things like sherbet and Turkish Delight. The Crusaders brought a sweet tooth home with them, but it was hard to indulge in France until the sixteenth century, when Catherine de Medicis brought an entire company of jam-makers to France. One book I’ve been reading insists that Nostradamus was the first maker of jam in France, but this seems too good to be true. In any case, making jam is one of the most satisfying occupations I know of, especially if you’re working with a fruit like red current, which is naturally full of pectin and therefore almost fool proof. Of course it’s hot work, leaning over the stove in clouds of current scented steam, in July, as you stir and stir and wait for the jam to reach that miraculous consistency when a tiny bit dropped onto a cold saucer holds its shape. But at the end of a sweaty afternoon, you have pots and pots of what looks like liquid rubies, all ready to be stored away for a cold day in winter when you will really need a bit of summer sun.

Statue of Vercingetorix at Alesia

My village, or the hill it’s built on at any rate, first sneaks into history in 52 BC. That date is known to all French school children; it marks the final showdown between two colossal figures, Julius Caesar and the rebellious Gallic chieftain, Vercingetorix. In the summer of that year, Vercingetorix decided to make a stand at a place called Alésia, a hill fortress belonging to the Mandubii tribe. With hindsight, you can see both why he chose the site, and why it was a bad idea. The hilltop at Alésia is broad and shaped like a spearhead; it’s easily defensible, with sheer rocky sides in most places, and Vercingetorix had just handed Caesar a regular thumping at another hill-fortress, south in Gergovia. Besides, Vercingetorix ‘ troops outnumbered Caesar’s, and he was expecting help from 250,000 more coming up from the South. He was setting a trap with himself as bait, and he fully expected Caesar to fall into it and to be crushed.
That flat, defensible hilltop is also dry, however; in this damp countryside, it’s one of the few places where there’s not a spring to be found. It was mid-August when Vercingetorix and his army arrived, though army is a misleading word; the Celts were individualists, each one in search of single combat that would make him glorious, and often accompanied by slaves or wives and even children. Caesar says there were 80,000 of them but it’s hard to imagine so many fitting on that hilltop, and in any case classical authors always inflate their figures. Imagine, though, even a tenth of that number on a rocky hillside with no water.

In August, it gets very, very hot.

It’s more difficult, at first glance, to understand why Caesar chose the site he did, the high plateau beyond where our village now stands. Seen from the modern road, the hillside west and north of the surviving town looks gentle, even friendly. There are meadows with ponies low down, then a band of trees, then golden wheatfields on top. What the trees hide, however, is the fact that this hilltop too is abrupt, really a band of small cliffs running all around the top of the hill. There is a path between the outcrops of limestone, but you have to know where it is, and leaving the path is simply foolish. You think to yourself, “I’ll just cut cross-country and come down on the top of the Brigand’s pasture. That way I can be home for supper.” You start to head due west, but once off the path, you realise your mistake; the whole hillside is fissured with crevices, and where there aren’t crevices there are boulders, all of this invisible under a thick cover of dark yew trees and bloodthirsty blackberry brambles. Such experiments always result in hours of delay and missing supper entirely.

While the forest was virgin in Caesar’s day, and the undergrowth therefore perhaps less completely vicious, the boulders and fissures would have posed severe obstacles to both cavalry and infantry.  Caesar’s choice was a wise one in other ways:  the hillside has plenty of small springs, one of which supplies the town’s water to this day.  As for the dense woods, they were just what Caesar needed.  The Gauls were undeniably brave, and they were bigger than the Romans (almost all the ancient sources mention their intimidating height) but the Romans were engineers.  Once their headquarters was chosen, they began to build.  First they excavated a huge ditch down on the plain where the trains would later run, to hold back the relieving army (which was late in any case).  Then they began to cut down trees and to build:  7 satellite camps, 23 redoubts, miles and miles of walls hemming Vercingetorix in on one side, and keeping the other Gauls out on the other, dozens of booby traps from pits filled with stakes and covered with bracken to ditches flooded with water cleverly diverted from the streams that run on either side of Alésia, the Ozerain and the Oze.

Up on their rocky plateau, the Gauls could see and no doubt hear what was happening; sounds echo back and forth between these hills, you can hear a donkey bray a mile away or someone take a shot at a pheasant in October.  They sat up on the rock, in a din of crickets, scanning the horizon for the army that would arrive to rescue them and instead they must have seen great holes open up in the forest as trees fell, as space was cleared for the construction of towers and palisades. Everything was made to precise specifications:  the ditches were five feet deep, Caesar tells us, and the tips of the fire hardened spikes in the specially dug pits were only to protrude four inches from the ground. This was the same ruthlessly efficient Roman army that once built a bridge across the Rhine big enough to march a legion over, in ten days.  To the Gauls it must have seemed like black magic.

And all this time the army didn’t come and didn’t come because the chieftains of the Gauls were engaged in one of their interminable arguments about whether to side with Vercingetorix or Rome, and August wore on into September, the most beautiful month of the year, with brilliant blue skies and a touch of autumn in the air.  September is the month when the grapes and the blackberries fatten up and get sweet, and it’s the best month for taking long walks because it hardly ever rains.  Up on top of the plateau at Alésia, the limestone runs an inch or so beneath the soil.  In this bedrock near the place where the Gauls had their camp,  there are some shallow rectangular scrapes, possibly intended to catch and hold water.  But they are small and desperate.  In September the Gauls drove all civilians out of their camp; down before the Roman fortifications women and children, starving already, wept and begged for food.  But Caesar—and he reports his own ruthlessness ruthlessly—forbade the guards to let them in, and so they died.

By the time the relief army finally arrived, almost two months after Vercingetorix had sent for it, it was too late.  Caesar’s forces were too strongly entrenched and in the few pitched battles that were fought, his German cavalry, even taller and more terrifying than the Gauls, and with the benefit of Roman training, chopped the Gaulish horsemen into messes and drove the rest back.   There was one final effort—Vercingetorix tried a sortie against Caesar’s camp on the hill, while his cousin Vercassivellaunus, commanding the relief army, tried to break through the Roman line further north.  But the Romans rained missiles on them from their towers, Caesar sent out a youthful Brutus to engage the Gauls on the plain and then showed himself in his purple commander’s cloak to give heart to his men, the terrible Germans galloped out again, and then it was all over.

In the nineteenth century,  everyone was looking for an aboriginal ancestor.  The British, ruled by Victoria, found theirs appropriately enough, in Boudicca, leader of another Celtic revolt against the Romans some hundred years later.  The Germans have Arminius, irresistibly known as Herman the German, whose struggles against Augustus are the subject of the first books of Tacitus’ Histories.  There are wildly Romantic statues of both of these, the first in Piccadilly (?) and the second in the Teutobergerwald.   Herman, in fact, is hollow like the Statue of Liberty, and you can climb up inside of him.  Vercingetorix is more aloof.  No driving around him, no getting inside him.  He stands at the point of that spear-shaped plateau, leaning on a huge sword, looking down over the plain where his destiny played out.  His hair and moustache are very like those depicted on one of the coins he minted for himself two thousand years ago, though he looks more than a little like Napoléon III too.  You can sit in his shadow to eat your picnic, up on the top of the hill where there are no trees and its very quiet except for the song of the occasional lark.

There are two ways of telling how we got here, some forty years ago. One is my mother’s, one is my father’s. Each of them denies the other’s story pretty categorically, but that’s all right. I’ve come to feel that this place, for all its undeniable solidity, the weight of its stones, the noise of its thunderstorms, the heat of its dog days, is more than a little fictional.

My mother’s version of the story is both succinct and mystical. She and my father were touring through Burgundy with no particular plan. Their Green Guide mentioned a town with a Carolingian crypt and they were vaguely making towards it, down a road winding between hedges. It had been raining all day, and the road ahead of them was almost invisible. They came around a bend, and as they did so, a single beam of sunlight broke through the clouds and illuminated the hillside above them with its pointed spire, broken roofline, and fortified walls. The village seemed to be floating on a sea of fog, golden above the silvery damp. Stunned, they slowed to a halt—and in the back seat, I gurgled in glee. “That’s it!” my mother exclaims in her version of the story. “That’s where I want to live!” And so they did.

My father’s version of the story is longer and more circumstantial; I don’t know whether this makes it truer. He’s a book illustrator by trade, so attention to detail is part of what he does. He spent quite a few years in the 1950’s working for a marvellously eccentric printer in Paris by the name of Maurice Darrantière. Darrantière had typeset the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses, and many things besides. When asked what Joyce was like, he had only one answer: “Oh, my poor dear,” he would say, “he was the devil. The devil!” I am not quite sure what this means; nor, I think, was my father, but he learned a great deal from Darrantière, mostly about what would or would not pass muster in a sort of Bohemian French society that was directly descended from Théophile Gauthier and the Goncourts. When my parents, having (finally) acquired reasonably stable academic employment in the United States, along with a family (in the shape of myself), decided that they wanted to buy a house in France, nothing was more reasonable, according to my father, than that they should ask Darrantière for advice. Darrantière was originally from Dijon and so to him, if you wanted to live “in the provinces” there was only one place to go: Burgundy. Anywhere else would be uncivilized; the south was too close to Spain, Normandy was too English, Alsace-Lorraine unthinkable; Burgundy on the other hand was the site of ancient and civilized culture.

So my parents got into the tiny car, with me in a car seat, and they drove down the A6, past Fontainebleau with its chateau, Sens and Auxerre with their cathedrals, until they ended up in a place near Vezeley called Quarré-les-Tombes. I don’t know which of them was responsible for this particular choice, although I suspect that my father, who has always had a taste for the macabre, couldn’t resist the name of the place, which is, as it turns out, entirely descriptive. The village of Quarré-les-Tombes is laid out in a square (carré) around its church, at a respectful distance. Huddled right up against the walls of the church are the tombs (tombes), hundreds of them. They are great big stone sarcophagi from the early middle ages. Most of them gape, one way or another; their tops have fallen off, or they’ve been tipped onto their massive sides. Mercifully, there’s nothing osseous inside peeking out. Archaeologists aren’t sure whether the place was a coffin factory and this its show room, or whether what you see now is a real necropolis, lying for some reason on top of the ground and not under it. What it really looks like is as if some giant hand with a grim but playful sense of humour had dropped the massive things from a height, like pick-up sticks or knucklebones, all around the church. This cheerful spot, in any case, is where my father left me with my mother when he set off to look for houses.

It was late afternoon when my father drove into the village, having explored quite a few towns along the way. It was raining gently, as it often is in Burgundy in the early part of the summer. He walked around entranced by the ruinous state of the place. Roofs were falling in and towers collapsing; swallows were building nests in the windows of unoccupied houses, and great late medieval mansions had been converted into barns where cows stood and chewed and swayed thoughtfully in the dimness. There were chickens in the streets but not many people; sometimes a farmer in his bleus de travail would stalk by, bent over beneath the pitchfork on his shoulder, sometimes a door would open and a woman in a house dress would furiously flap a dust cloth before retreating inside again. He found the general air of decay irresistible (this is the man who once wrote, in another context, “gloom, as a matter of fact, is my mind’s natural illumination”). The rain came down harder and he turned back to the café. It had a sign out front proclaiming it to be Le Bon Coin, and it was indeed perched on a corner where a street dove steeply downhill. The windows were shuttered but there was light from inside and a murmur of voices. My father pushed open the door and stepped into the bar. The atmosphere inside was as foggy as that outside. Four or five men were there, smoking unfiltered cigarettes, drinking wine, and having a conversation incomprehensible both because it was in patois and because it consisted entirely of monosyllables. In village conversations, you really don’t have to say much because you’ve said it all before and will say it all again: it’s about the awful weather, the prospects for a dreadful harvest, the appalling thing that happened to someone’s tractor, the dire impossibility of living this kind of life at all. The men wore the uniform of La France Profonde: bleus de travail, big grey rubber gum boots. But, I should add, not berets. Only two people in our town ever wore berets, and perhaps I’ll tell you about them later..

The conversation, such as it was, stopped when my father stepped in, and heads swung around to inspect him. To be fair, he probably looked a bit odd. He is a burly man who has always liked trench coats, and on top of that he had a beard. This was in 1964 and nobody except Fidel Castro wore a beard, least of all anyone in rural Burgundy. On top of this, he speaks French well but no one could ever mistake him for a Frenchman, and in this town at that time even people from Lyon or Paris were considered foreigners.
“Good afternoon,” he said, and he ordered a coffee. When it arrived, he asked politely “I wonder, could you tell me if there are any houses for sale in the village?” There was a long silence and then one of the men began to laugh. Then another guffawed, and another, and soon the whole place was uproarious. They slapped the tables and each other’s shoulders. Finally, one of them wiped away his tears and drew breath.
“But monsieur!” he exclaimed. “Why would you want to buy a house in a shithole like this?”

The shithole part was almost literally true. When my father stepped back outside into the damp afternoon, after partaking of a petit rouge or two, the sun had broken through the clouds and was coaxing fragrant threads of golden steam from the manure piles that seemed to fill every courtyard. But he had the name of a real estate agent in his pocket and within a matter of weeks my parents had purchased—for a song, as they say—the only available house in town possessed of both electrical power and running water.