From its earliest days, Britain was an object of desire.
Tacitus declared it "pretium victoriae" - worth the conquest, the best compliment that could occur to a Roman.英国bbc汽车节目
He had never visited these shores but was nonetheless convinced that Britannia was rich in gold. Silver was abundant too.
Apparently so were pearls, though Tacitus had heard they were grey, like the overcast, rain-heavy skies, and the natives only collected them when cast up on the shore.
As far as the Roman historians were concerned, Britannia may be off at the edge of the world, but it was off the edge of their world, not in a barbarian wilderness.
If those writers had been able to travel in time as well as space to the northernmost of our islands, the Orcades - our modern Orkney - they would have seen something much more astonishing than pearls: Signs of a civilisation thousands of years older than Rome.
There are remains of Stone Age life all over Britain and Ireland.
But nowhere as abundantly as Orkney, with its mounds, graves and its great circles of standing stones like here at Brodgar.
Vast, imposing and utterly unknowable.
Orkney has another Neolithic site, even more impressive than Brodgar, the last thing you would expect from the Stone Age, a shockingly familiar glimpse of ancient domestic life.
Perched on the western coast of Orkney's main island, a village called Skara Brae.
Beneath an area no bigger than the 18th green of a golf course lies Europe's most complete Neolithic community, preserved for 5,000 years under a blanket of sand and grass until uncovered in 1850 by a ferocious sea storm.
This is a recognisable village.
Neatly fitted into its landscape between pasture and sea, intimate, domestic and self-sufficient. Technically still the Stone Age and Neolithic period, these are not huts, they're true houses, built from sandstone slabs that lie all around the island and gave stout protection to villagers at Skara Brae, from their biting Orcadian winds.
They were real neighbours, living cheek by jowl, their houses connected by walled, sometimes decorated alleyways.
It is easy to imagine gossip travelling down those alleys after a hearty seafood supper.
We have everything you could want from a village except a church and a pub.
In 3,000 BC, the sea and air were little warmer than they are now.
Once they'd settled in their sandstone houses, they could harvest red bream and mussels and oysters that were abundant in the shallows.
Cattle gave meat and milk and dogs were kept for hunting and for company.
In Neolithic times there would have been a dozen houses, half-dug into the ground for comfort and safety.
A thriving, bustling little community of 50 or 60.
The real miracle of Skara Brae is that these houses were not mere shelters.
They were built by people who had culture, who had style.
Here's where they showed off that style.
A fully equipped, all-purpose Neolithic living room, complete with luxuries and necessities. Necessities?
Well, at the centre, a hearth, around which they warmed themselves and cooked.
A stone tank in which to keep live fish bait.
Some houses had drains underneath them, so they must have had, believe it or not, indoor toilets. Luxuries?
The orthopaedically correct stone bed may not seem particularly luxurious, but the addition of heather and straw would have softened the sleeping surface and would have made this bed seem rather snug.
At the centre of it all was this spectacular dresser on which our house-proud villagers would set out all their most precious stuff.
Fine bone and ivory necklaces, beautifully carved stone objects, everything designed to make a grand interior statement.
Given the rudimentary nature of their tools, it would have taken countless man hours to build not only these dwellings but the great circles of stone where they would have gathered to worship.
Skara Brae wasn't just an isolated settlement of fishers and farmers.
Its people must have belonged to some larger society, one sophisticated enough to mobilise the army of toilers and craftsmen needed, not just to make these monuments, but to stand them on end.
They were just as concerned about housing the dead as the living.
The mausoleum at Maes Howe, a couple of miles from Skara Brae, seems no more than a swelling on the grassy landscape.
This is, as it were, a British pyramid and in keeping with our taste for understatement, it reserves all its impact for the interior.
Imagine them open once more.
A detail from a village given the job of pulling back the stone seals, lugging the body through the low opening in the earth.
Up 36 feet of narrow, tight-fitting passageway, lit only once a year by the rays of the winter solstice.
A death canal, constriction, smelling of the underworld.
Finally the passageway opens up to this stupendous, high-vaulted masonry chamber.
Some tombs would have been elaborately decorated with carvings in the form of circles or spirals, like waves or the breeze-pushed clouds.
Others would have had neat stone stores or cubicles where the bodies would be laid out on shelves.
The grandest tombs had openings cut in the wall, to create side chambers where the most important bodies could be laid out in aristocratic spaciousness like family vaults in a country church. Unlike medieval knights, these grandees were buried with eagles and dogs, or even treasure.
The kind of thing the Vikings who broke into these tombs thousands of years later were quick to filch.
In return, these early tomb raiders left their own legacy.
These wonderful graffiti.
These runes were carved by the most skilled rune carver in the western ocean.
I bedded Thorny here.
Ingegirth is one horny bitch. As for the Orcadian hoi polloi, they ranked space in a common chamber, on a floor carpeted with the bones of hundreds of their predecessors.
A crowded waiting room to their afterworld.
For centuries, life at Skara Brae must have continued in much the same way.
Around 2,500 BC, the climate seems to have got colder and wetter.
The red bream and stable environment the Orcadians had enjoyed for countless generations disappeared.
Fields were abandoned, the farmers and fishers migrated, leaving their stone buildings and tombs to be covered by layers of peat, drifting sand and finally grass.
The mainland too, of course, had its burial chambers, like the long barrow at West Kennet.
There were also the great stone circles, the largest at Avebury.
But the most spectacular of all at Stonehenge.
By 1,000 BC, things were changing fast.
All over the British landscape, a protracted struggle for good land was taking place.
Forests were cleared so that Iron Age Britain was not, as was romantically imagined, an unbroken forest kingdom stretching from Cornwall to Inverness.
It was rather a patchwork of open fields, dotted here and there with copses giving cover for game, especially wild pigs.
And it was a crowded island.
We now think that as many people lived on this land as during the reign of Elizabeth 1, 2,500 years later.
Some archaeologists believe that almost as much land was being farmed in the Iron Age as in 1914.
So it's no surprise to see one spectacular difference from the little world of Skara Brae.
Great windowless towers.
They were built in the centuries before the Roman invasions, when population pressure was most intense and farmers had growing need of protection, first from the elements, but later from each other.
Many of those towers still survive but none are as daunting as the great stockade on Arran, off Ireland's west coast.
They didn't just spring up around the edges of the British islands.
All over the mainland too, the great hill forts of the Iron Age remain visible in terraced contours such as at Danebury and Maiden Castle.
Lofty seats of power for the tribal chiefs, they were defended by rings of earthworks, timber palisades and ramparts.
Behind those daunting walls was not a world in panicky retreat.
The Iron Age Britain into which the Romans eventually crashed with such alarming force was a dynamic, expanding society.
From their workshops came the spectacular metalwork with which the elite decorated their bodies. Armlets, pins, brooches and ornamental shields like this, the so-called Battersea Shield.
Or the astonishing stylised bronze horses, endearingly melancholy in expression, like so many Eeyores resigned to a bad day in battle.
With tribal manufacture came trade.
The warriors, druid priests and artists of Iron Age Britain shipped their wares all over Europe, trading with the expanding Roman Empire.
In return, with no home-grown grapes or olives, Mediterranean wine and oil arrived in large earthenware jars.
Iron Age Britain was not the back of beyond.
Its tribes may have led lives separated from each other by custom and language, and they may have had no great capital city but together they added up to something in the world, the bustling of countless productive, energetic beehives.
What the bees made was not honey, but gold.
The Romans would have known about this strange but alluring world of fat cattle and busy forges. Evidence of its refinement would have found its way to Rome.
Along with the glittering metal ware came stories of alarming cults, which may have prompted the usual Roman dinner time discussions.
"All very interesting, I daresay, "but would we really want to call them a civilisation?"
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