Britain's Ancient Undiscovered Pathways

[Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been traveled for more than 5 000 years that is an extraordinary place walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend this is it it's quite a strange looking monument [Music] but what's the truth behind all these megaliths and burial sites and lay lines and hidden caves along these pathways and why were there mystic origins such an attraction for later generations i'm going to explore these tracks to connect the clues they've left hidden in the british landscape now isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen her name is majesty what other name could she have [Applause] this week i'm in east anglia to find the ich nield way i want to know what this journey through norfolk and cambridgeshire can tell me about the history and legends of ancient britain through the stories songs and sacred places along its track these are the paths our ancestors would have followed the ancient trackways that we can still walk today [Music] this is the ich neil's way it's a great word ich kneeled isn't it and nobody has a clue what it means some people say it might have something to do with the word i seen i which was the name of buddhicus tribe and this was the pathway down which her victorious warriors went [Music] others say that it could come from an ancient british word for oxen the oxen's way but what i love is the fact that you've got this roadway snaking through east anglia and across to the chiltons and down towards the downs and then towards wessex and at its heart is a mystery that none of us can decode [Music] the igniled way is one of britain's oldest roads what remains today is a breed of prehistoric pathways i'm going to explore this elusive path from the coast in norfolk through cambridgeshire and finish my journey at whipsnaid in the rolling hills of bedfordshire [Music] along the way i'll explore a prehistoric mine i'll search for mysterious ley lines in the landscape uncover the hidden cave of a secret christian sect and hear terrifying tales of a demonic dog all of which will reveal to me how this ancient track was once used this is the norfolk coast at hanstanton i'm starting my walk near here a few miles inland at the beginning of the ich-kneeled way for the last few miles i haven't seen much other than trees and grass and crops [Music] it's like the ignite way is hiding its mysteries from me but this serene landscape is about to offer up its first puzzle somewhere extraordinary an ancient underworld that wouldn't look out of place in the lord of the rings grimes graves [Music] grim was the anglo-saxon word for the devil and when the early saxon settlers arrived here along the ancient ich niled way in the 5th and 6th century a.d they thought this ghostly place was his cemetery [Music] but these weren't graves the anglo-saxons were wrong this place had nothing to do with the devil far from it [Music] the ignited way is just behind me beyond that ridge but i've come to this extraordinary moonscape just off the way it's man-made although a very long time ago and to my mind it's one of the most exciting archaeological sites in britain why do i think that because a friend of mine dug it [Music] when did you first come here i came here to dig in 1972 and i left here after i'd finished of five summers in 1976. so you were practically a teenager when you started i was uh practically a teenager but not quite yeah what was it that you found here well i mean for me this was a sight where i like died and gone to evan because it was a neolithic flintline site and i think by now you know how passionate i am about flints and to actually excavate a flint mine site well couldn't get any better could it and we got mine down here this is one of the finest mines on the side behind oh i know what i will need this right you're going down first on me no no you can carry on you carry on you hold that one i will do my god it's a long drop it's about well in old money it's about 40 feet so we're looking at sort of 12 to 13 meters if my memory serves me correctly god dear oh dear grimes graves were neolithic mines that were dug to extract the precious stone used to make hunting tools like axe heads and spears descending this ladder into one of the 400 pits i'm going back an incredible four and a half thousand years oh it's really quite scary legs are a bit wobbly downfield [Music] how on earth would stone age people have been able to dig a shaft this day how would they have done yeah literally through human endeavor i mean they had to be motivated to do it what did they use they used red deer anger picks tony i mean that's a typical sort of thing this is a modern modern one it's one of mine but there are literally thousands and thousands of these things scattered through the the galleries how many blokes do you reckon were working at a time well they reckon you'd probably be working a team perhaps of 20 and a team of 20 you'd probably need at least six months of the year so it was probably was a seasonal occupation when they get in each other's way well they might do at the top but as you've got to get down then you actually have the labor force because you need a lot of people to chuck the muck out and get it out the top what was it they were after they were after the floor stone as we go into the galleries you'll see that there is this layer of pure black flint that spreads right throughout the bottoms of all of these galleries yeah you can see it's a complete seam of black flint and you can see here actually how they took it out they got their anthropics and they scored around the edge there literally gauging out a small trough at the top of the flint destabilize the chalk and then they were able to prose out the flint it's a very clear technique are those real antlers phil these ones are the real ones and you can see how similar they are to my replica one but what you have got on here that you don't get on mine is this clay you see this clayer that's actually congealed on the angler that's off the hands of the miners that use them and oftentimes you can actually see the fingerprints of the last person who used that it really does put you into contact with those neolithic miners what i don't understand phil is you can find loads of flint on the surface so what were they doing making this complex series of shafts and galleries well there's got to be something that drives them to do it it's like they're building the underworld isn't it they could well be that that is it but but it's not it's also that the objects that come out from grime's graves would in themselves be special and perhaps be revered and and respected it is an extraordinary place isn't it this was an industrial site certainly which no doubt used the ich neilled way as a distribution route but to me there seems more to it than that something urged these prehistoric miners beyond the need for arrowheads and axes to dig deeper to the underworld [Music] there are dozens of ancient stories about darkness and light and people going down into the underworld and coming back and people being reborn so it does make a kind of sense that neolithic people would have had some of the same preoccupations and might have enacted them out somewhere below me but that may just be fanciful and in fact these mines were simply industrial we'll never know will we but what we can be sure of is that making them required an awful lot of people and a lot of skill and surely four and a half thousand years ago every morning there would have been loads of blokes with deer picks on their back coming in this direction down the ick neil's way for a day's work at the pit [Music] i'm pushing on now back on the ich niled way believed to be one of the oldest roads in britain well i'm not at the moment i'm at thetford railway station and that's because there was a time when this ancient track was all but lost inevitably giving way over millennia to britain's changing landscape but a century ago one of england's great war poets set out to rescue this forgotten prehistoric highway my journey meets his here where the old track meets the new on platform two [Music] in the year 1911 a brilliant young man called edward thomas arrived here at thetford station by train in order to embark on a journey back in time in his book he says that when he was on the train he met this bloke really fat man about 18 stone smoking a pipe and he said to him can you tell me where the ich nield way is and the bloke said well i know where the best plane trees and oak trees are around here uh and i know who's dead and who's living and i know the price of the land but the igneous way never heard of it and i reckon if you asked most people around here the same question today you get pretty much the same answer [Music] thomas was a poet and journalist who had a mystic sense of the road a compulsive walker he tramped his way over much of the south of england between april and june 1911 thomas doggedly searched for the missing ikneeled way and its long lost story [Music] at a stroke the finished book caught the public imagination and poetically restored the magic of the ich nield its iconic opening line reading much has been written of travel far less of the road i'm meeting his biographer matthew hollis at thetford priory [Music] why did he decide to walk me at my old way work thomas was a full-time critic he considered himself a hack he was as he said to a friend around about that time burning his candle at three ends by which he meant he was working all hours to put money on the table for his family and to keep things going and this was a job so up he came and he started here at thetford and on he went so in those days he wasn't a poet he wasn't a poet at this time this was 1911 when he came to write this book and the first poems he will write will be three years later but what's interesting about the ikneeled way book is you can see him thinking about the poetry you can even find lines in the old way that will eventually re-emerge in the poems themselves did he like this area what's nice about that foot he saw it as the gateway to the igniled way some people like to choose between a landscape of hills and valleys and others like a landscape of light and water now if you're from this part of the world in stanglia you choose the latter you're used to the big skies and the colors in the water thomas wasn't from here he lived in hampshire he looked west to wales quite regularly and here was a little bit flat for him i i feel a bit guilty about this walk i have to admit that there's him approaching it with all this uh physicality and commitment and striding off into the distance was i can't find half of it and i go off and stay in a hotel for the night and i just feel a bit shambolic compared with him how long did it take him well there is a secret because thomas was capable of walking 10 15 20 miles a day he was incredibly athletic man he composed in his head when he was walking but when he wrote this book he cheated and he came here on two trips only one during the summer of 1911 and once during the autumn and even then he rode a bike and he finished the book in the british museum the british library as it was then why does that make me feel really good [Music] tragically edward thomas left behind the chalky ridges of the ikneeled way for the fields of france and the first world war he was killed aged 39 on easter monday 1917 the first day of the battle of harass [Music] for him a pathway like this one wasn't just a means of getting from a to b it was almost a meditation the rhythms that we set up walking along it would help us think and feel and create and get into ourselves and he loved the way that we would interact with nature along our path and the way that we invested it with life we say the path goes up the hill the path goes back down again no it doesn't it stays still it's us who do the walking but nevertheless we feel as though it's alive and i suppose that most people who walk a lot feel something similar but thomas's brilliance was that he wrote about it in such a fluent way [Music] i think he got the measure of the ich niled way quite early on i could not find a beginning or an ending to the ich nield way he wrote it is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends in immortal darkness [Music] i've now left the heathland of norfolk and crossing to cambridgeshire and i'm suddenly confronted by something that cuts dramatically across the ich neale way a place also described by edward thomas the devil's dyke the massive bank and ditch stretch in a near straight line for over seven miles and in a flat landscape reaches an imposing 30 feet in height [Music] there's a local story that the devil gate crashed a wedding a little town called reach a few miles in that direction and he was kicked out by the guests and he was so angry that on his way back to hell he carved this enormous gash out of the landscape with his tail must have been a pretty big devil doesn't it [Music] [Applause] [Music] yet again the old devil gets the blame in reality of course the devil's dyke was man-made built by the saxons in the late 6th or early 7th century a.d this was a time of war between the ancient kingdom of mercia to the west and the kingdom of east anglia to the east and this huge rampart formed a crucial border for controlling trade and the movement of people between the two today it's a protected wildlife habitat where one resilient local tradition remains as a link to the past [Music] hey martin hello have a look at these sheep yep see if they'll come through [Music] the most important function of this dike was the control of trade the dike itself runs at right angles to the mcneil way and local roman roads which were central for traffic going in and out of east anglia and one of the most significant commodities in anglo-saxon times to be traded was in anglo-saxon society the great land owners counted their wealth in sheep and tracks like the ackneeled way provided the route to market by the wool boom of the middle ages there was an enormous demand for wool clothing in europe if you owned land you raised sheep with top prices paid by the weavers of flanders in belgium english wool was the crude oil of its day some parts of the ich niled way are lost to the encroachment of agriculture and urban sprawl a landscape unrecognizable to bygone travelers a nearby parallel path brings me through hayley wood one of the last surviving ancient woodlands in britain [Music] it gives me a chance to experience the habitat that would have covered most of southern england at a time when the igneeled way was a thriving highway and it was along tracks like this that trade would have traveled the news would have traveled and indeed that music and soul would have traveled too was walking out for to take the ass she met a sailor all on her way so i paid attention [Music] so i paid attention to hear what she did say tony this is not some mad solitary lunatic in the middle of the forest we did actually know we were meeting up here didn't we what was that song that's the dark eye sailor it's an old english folk song um common in these parts and others too that's a local version from uh from the mcniel way so um but it's a song that would be found all over england and and britain these songs genuinely traveled all all over the place to america to ireland scotland backwards and forwards um wherever people went they would take their songs with them and sing them as they went dick neil way is pretty special isn't it very much so yeah and and to think that that passage of people carrying the old knowledge you know over generations and generations is a magic idea it's hard to resist this romantic idea of wandering minstrels in medieval england for travellers along the ich niled way ballads and stories might have fired the imagination but they wouldn't have filled their bellies they only needed to look around them for that [Music] well we've got a veritable ladder here of stuff with i mean beautifully growing here very common plants uh if you're looking for something pig-like this is the have a sniffer there poor it that does smell like a pig started yeah this is my bacon sandwich isn't it indeed what is it it's the hogweed um and a very common roadside plant the young younger shoots uh steam up beautifully to be a kind of asparagus alternative oh so you don't eat the stinky part no no that won't be very good for you but um uh got copious amounts of goose grass or sticky willy as it's called oh chummy oh yeah yeah just disgustingly sticky isn't it yeah have a chew on that really yeah great for the immune system and um it's bitter but it's actually immensely nutritious actually this is quite it's like like a bitter crunchy vegetable isn't it not grassy at all no this is the igneous way service station isn't it exactly or you're you're chemist but i didn't want to show you one other curious specimen the woody nightshade and these berries here as delicious as they look deadly poisonous and there is also a brilliant folk song that connects to this plant here will you sing me off to it while i go on my way then we'd love to it's there it's lord randall oh mother dear let my bed be made for i feel the gripe of the woody nightshade randall [Music] come all young men that you eat full well and those that's upright and merry it's far better i entreat to have toads for your meat than to eat all the wild wild berry [Music] here in the town of royston in hertfordshire the igniled way crosses the roman road of ermine street also known as the great north road where the roman legions march north from london royston grew at the crossing of these two ancient thoroughfares on the surface this may look like any other charming town centre but under this pavement beneath me is something strange [Music] in 1742 workmen accidentally discovered a man-made cave with some unique mysterious christian carvings [Music] this place is so brilliant it's only about 50 miles from london i'd never even heard of it look you've got all these carvings see that tunnel that's the way people would originally come in on a rope and then if you look above that right up to the ceiling you see where the daylight is coming in that's the grill i was looking through when i was outside that betting shop the carvings themselves though this one that's pretty clear isn't it that's some christopher with a little baby jesus on his shoulder and he's walking along with his staff there and then they reckon this is the holy sepulchre where jesus was buried and i love this bit above it this here is the hand of god with those incredible fingers there and that thing that looks like a fish is actually the holy ghost which is just going to go hurtling out into the world and that's a crucifixion here's catherine famous for the wheel of course there's the wheel on which she was tortured more figures down here very strange mystical figures and over here this is probably my favorite this one here this is 13 of these figures they reckon these were the disciples and jesus at the last supper and you see this little sliver here well judas was such a bad lad but he has to be there because it's recorded that he was at the last supper but he's far too iniquitous to have his whole face shown now isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen [Music] these strange religious carvings aren't displayed proudly like you might expect in some churches great lengths were gone too to keep this shrine hidden and the origin and function of the cave remain a mystery to this day we know it was used in the middle ages but by who was it a hermit retreat or a spiritual den for the night's templar it turns out though that this wasn't just a secret site for christian worship the cave holds an allure for pagans too royston is believed to be the meeting place between two important lay lines these ley lines are said to be straight energy lines connecting ancient mystical sites and it's believed this cave marks the exact spot where the two lines cross there are even some people who say they can detect these lines of energy i'm meeting derek woodhead a practitioner of the ancient art of dowsing derek come in and let's have a stare around this fantastic place which is fairly wonderful now i know that uh it's really fascinating because of all the carvings but for you there's something about it that's additionally fascinating isn't it yes this is a an amazing place for dowsers because it's the crossing of the michael and murray lions this is also where the roman road crosses the way but they're not the same thing um not necessarily no there is some sort of correlation between uh ancient trackways and um and ley lines can you show me how you'd identify these lines right well using dowsing rods um we can use pendulums as well i use a dowsing rod here which is a metal one on a spindle originally they were fork twigs they used to use but these days you can use the metal or plastic rods or timber timber ones um so what this does here is i'm asking sort of through my subconscious to in a sort of semi-meditative state so are you in a semi-meditative state now yeah so train yes yes it's not my conscious mind that's doing that something's going through my nervous system and then my subconscious so i'm looking for the center of it so it's like a beam of imaginary white light i'm sort of visualizing them so i'm going to ask it where the center of the mary line is that's running through this uh cave and it's immediately pointing over this way and i'm asking for the rod to deflect when i go through the center of the the saint mary line and i'm finding finding it there's quite a strong reaction there and if i do it from another direction [Music] it's it's there so it's showing that is that where the two meters the merry line uh is flying through this way then i asked for the michael line and showed me where the the where the microline is i know it's over that way so this closest point is over there somewhere um so i'm looking for the center of the michael line it's here so we've got two very powerful energy flows meeting about here so this would be a great place to sort of do meditational prayer or connection with the divine or whatever this is a very powerful spot the idea of ley lines dates back to 1921 when amateur antiquarian alfred watkins saw how ancient landmarks in the countryside could be connected along a straight line watkins called them ley lines or lays and believed they revealed the prehistoric tracks of britain above ground and back on the ikneeled way i'm up on the heath overlooking royston it's easy to see why he thought they were the outdoor footprints of a long past people watkins approach was pretty do it yourself you can imagine him on a sunday surrounded by his acolytes looking for ley lines and they'd come somewhere like the icknelled way and they'd see something of significance on that horizon and they'd see something else a barrow or something over there and they get out their rac map and their rulers and their dividers and compasses and draw a straight line between them wow we've got another ley line it's a real pre-second world war picture isn't it [Music] watkins attracted acclaim and controversy in equal measure he used strange reenactments to explain his theory about some of these sites one of which was filmed at woodcraft folk camp near the river y in 1933 watkins ordered a wicker cage built on top of the queen's stone to illustrate his theory that the stone was a sacrificial altar the cage contained two victims wearing loincloths [Music] as a result of the success of his book people set out all over the country to discover their own paths [Music] i'm meeting the grandson of one of watkins disciples who just happens to be a druid hello there [Music] so your granddad was pretty involved with watkins wasn't there yes he he started uh the straight track club with with watkins and ran in for nine years while watkins was still alive what was the straight track club well it was a club for people who were fascinated by this idea of the old straight tracks the alignments and they would go out on field trips together and they would plot lays on maps and then go out and actually walk them i love the idea of them all dressed up in their respectable clothes going around the walkways yes here you see pictures of their outings with sir charles de bell and watkins himself walking towards the camera what was his theory well his idea was that mounds church spires single standing trees on hilltops niches and ridges and so on were all aligned uh in a certain way it was used it was the idea was that in pre-history our ancestors used these particular markers as mark ways to help them navigate it was a sort of ancient gps system really they were particularly interested in the ich nil way weren't they they were in fact in this book towards the end there's a cutting that my granddad put in from 1938 on the letters page of the times talking about the ich nield way and about how it's not originally a roman road but with much old it was an old track why do you think watkins ideas were so attractive i think his theories were so popular because his book was published in the 20s after the first world war we'd suffered the ravages of of that war so we yearned for the countryside whether it's creepy christian caves or lines of invisible energy the igneeled way seems completely entangled in myth and legend stories created by generation after generation to explain the forgotten history along its path [Music] i'm now moving south along the highest part of the ich nield in bedfordshire to where the landscape gives way to the suburbs of greater london [Music] i'm on the lookout for a haunted hill steeped in dark tales of the supernatural over there is galley hill and it's surrounded by stories of hangings and executions and witches most of those stories have been virtually forgotten but there's one that still remains this is the story of the big black dog of galley hill a gallows was erected here and remained until the 18th century and visions of a hellhound have been reported ever since stories of the black dog can be found throughout british folklore often at places of execution and on ancient pathways like this one once upon a time hundreds of years ago a storm arose over this hill the fiercest storm in living memory and all the people of the pretty little market town of luton went indoors thunder and lightning crashed down and the fork of lightning came out of the clouds and it hit the gallows on galley hill which erupted into flames and out of the inferno came an enormous black dog it sniffed around for a bit and then burrowed into the ashes and disappeared and ever after that if ever a traveler came by who had evil in his heart the dog would appear again tear open his chest look out his soul and take his soul with him down to the bowels of hell at least that's what i've been told carl thank you for coming to such a scary place to meet me today was there really a gallows on galley hill well i think there's every reason to think that there was uh the name is powerfully suggestive and it's also just the right kind of place to put a gallows up in what way well it's on high ground it's near a significant centre of population and it's also amidst a number of different important route ways so this is a very good place to make a spectacle of punishment and to deter male factors and it's actually on the ich niled way isn't it so one could imagine that the images of all these people dangling and the stories to go with them would have traveled up and down the path yes absolutely so like in a present day horror movie you've actually put all the the evil dead in one place overlooking your town yes and i think that might be quite an interesting fact about the site because some of those late burials the people who we think might well have been the victims of the gallows were interred at this site not in a conventional way but rather headfirst inclined into the earth so you insert them in that way burying them head first perhaps if they dig themselves out they really dig themselves in yeah and that is is redolent of the kinds of beliefs that one sometimes finds associated with these sites that they are populated by by ghosts by revenants by the returning dead i suppose that's where my story of the black dog fits in doesn't it this idea that he's dragging them all down into the bowels of hell very often the folkloric black dogs um uh that they can be benign they can function as as omens or portents but in in very many cases the black dogs have more than a a whiff of the of the demonic or the infernal about them and that seems to be the character of the dog that was putatively seen on galli hill it's being portrayed as a as a hunter of souls a bearer of souls off to the other world and that sort of fits with a story about gally hill as a place populated by lost souls [Music] lost souls have been a recurring theme for me walking along the ikneeled way following in the footsteps of all those long gone that have trod this track before me the ghosts of the past return as you encounter their clues along the path the ignilled way itself becomes a sort of ghost line i'm almost at the end of my journey now following the ignealed way as it snakes along the eastward spurs of the chalton hills that's funny i always think of our ancient pathways as buried in the depths of the countryside in wiltshire or the lake district or the highlands or somewhere but here there's hitchin bedford dunstable places that i think of as extensions of the outer suburbs of london and yet it's so beautiful sorry hitching [Music] the igniled way brings me finally to whip snade tree cathedral the end of my journey so much of the track has been forgotten but this part of it is about remembering a natural memorial to the lost generation of the first world war [Music] a symbol of how britain after the horrors of the western front attempted to return to nature and the old ways [Music] created as a sanctuary for reflection whipsnade is a place where every year people return to remember the fallen under a leafy canopy a place i think edward thomas had he lived would have loved it's not hard to see how this beautiful avenue of trees was inspired by the great naves of the english cathedrals is it they were actually put up by a local landowner a guy called edmund blythe after the first world war in memory of the lads who'd died in france and you can imagine the survivors coming home bruised battered their worlds turned upside down maybe they'd lost their faith in god and these trees and bushes giving them some solace and a bit of calm to their shattered souls edward thomas of course captures that spirit marvelously in a poem he wrote called roads which starts off just as a celebration of the concept of roads i love roads the goddesses that dwell far along invisible are my favorite gods roads go on while we forget and are forgotten like a star that shoots and is gone but then towards the end of the poem he really twists the knife now all roads lead to france and heavy is the tread of the living but the dead returning lightly dance edward thomas's message was for each of us to find our own road and this has been mine my ich kneeled way i've picked up the path near the wash at hanstanton and have been guided along its route by prehistoric miners war poets ley lines and black dogs in some ways it's been both an emotional and an inspiring journey but in the end it's been a journey to feed the imagination the igniled way isn't one of those heritage paths where you get a little green arrow at every junction to tell you whether to turn left or right it's a confusing footpath it turns back on itself it splits into two sometimes or even three or you lose it completely and find it again another mile further on but the reality is that a track like this isn't so much about the destination it's about the journey and i've had a fabulous time even if like the great poet edward thomas i occasionally had to cheat a bit [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled for more than 5 000 is an extraordinary place walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend this is it it's quite a strange looking monument [Music] but what's the truth behind all these megaliths and burial sites and lay lines and hidden caves along these pathways and why were there mystic origins such an attraction for later generations i'm going to explore these tracks to connect the clues they've left hidden in the british landscape isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen wow her name is majesty what other name could she have [Music] this week i'm in wiltshire to walk the age-old ridgeway i want to know what this historic path across the north wessex downs can tell me about the myths and legends of ancient britain and the rights and rituals of its many travelers these are the paths our ancestors would have followed the ancient trackways that we can still walk today [Music] i'm starting my walk in wiltshire just off the busy a4 this is the beginning of the ridgeway thought to be britain's oldest road and along its path lie some of our most spectacular ancient sites [Music] i'm going to explore this elusive highway from the wiltshire downs across the high chalk ridge in oxfordshire and into berkshire where i'll rejoin the 21st century on the banks of the river thames ridgeway will take me to a world famous stone circle at the heart of a prehistoric landscape i'll follow in the tracks of celtic chariots explore a burial chamber older than the pyramids and uncover the secrets of a great white horse all of which will reveal to me how this ancient track was once used [Music] i'm only a mile into my journey on the ridgeway and it brings me to my first stop one of our great prehistoric puzzles every britain's most impressive neolithic site and the largest stone circle in the world [Music] this magnificent monument was erected by our stone age ancestors somewhere between 2000 and 3000 bc and is so vast it's believed to have taken centuries to complete [Music] two and a half thousand years later the anglo-saxons get attracted to this place and build a village here and then if you fast forward to the medieval you get this arrangement whereby they build a town around and in between the stones creating this almost fairytale look it's absolutely unique isn't [Music] it but what was this place used for the experts have been puzzling over its purpose for generations thought to be a place of ceremony and burial rites fertility circles and rituals to appease the earth goddess but these are just guesses really because we know so little about the neolithic people who built it [Music] in the middle ages and through to the 1500s local people tried to pull these stones down which must have been pretty scary why would they go to all that time and trouble well the local church thought they were pagan and mystical and dark and weird not the kind of thing that you would want to surround your town with and then later on farmers just smashed them up because they were in the way of their crops seems horrible to us now doesn't it like something the taliban might do [Music] by the 18th century the destruction of the stones was getting out of control crusading archaeologist william stukley's book on avery even names and shames the culprit farmers including disappointingly mr t robinson no relation even today the good villagers of avebury still live with the legacy that some of their homes were built from the crushed megaliths [Music] which way are we going just go going to the left here the walls along here that looks quite rough hewn all that lots yes yep and these here oh certainly yeah these look much more uniform but those these earlier ones certainly look like they could have been just guys smashing away at the same time absolutely well they learned that if they heated up the stone yeah and then put cold water on they could split the stones yeah but later on they learned how to cut them up more regularly well i'm not sure about those but i'm from english heritage and i'm afraid i'll have to take these roads away with me right we'll try and find something to replace it the ruined stones were also used in this building ironically it's now part of the national trust museum dedicated to preserving them eventually in 1934 an unlikely savior came to avebry's rescue scottish tycoon alexander keeler bought the village stone circle included keila poured his wealth into fast cars women and megaliths someone who knows keila's work very well is the current archaeologist for avery dr nick snatial so you've been mucking around in the presence of this this scottish jam king do you find him irritating i have this image of of this real control freak blasting his way through the archaeology and sticking up the stones willy-nilly kayla was an extraordinary man i mean he was he was a multi-millionaire he inherited the marmalade and boiled sweet fortune but uh but he didn't really care much for those he wasn't interested in the the family factories what he wanted to do was follow his passions his excavation records were so good that we knew that if we could excavate as well and get a little bit more information using modern techniques we could draw in what he'd done before to make something that was more than the sum of its parts oh it's nice to know that he was a good guy even if it does confound all my prejudices yeah he really was how the circle appears today is thanks to keila's vision he re-erected a total of 21 stones adding concrete pillars to mark the missing megaliths so is that it have we found just about all we can here far from it i think it's only it's only really at the beginning of the story of understanding what people were doing in these landscapes where they were living people often think we know everything there is to know about places like avery and the big wessex monument complexes but the truth is we've only touched the surface so what we need to do is get out there and explore more of the story i can't help wondering how the huge stones at avebury got there in the first place the ridgeway must have played a crucial part it's no coincidence that a few miles further along i discover firefield down the biggest group of stars and stones in all of england [Music] they're magnificent these massive stars and stones aren't they they're originally laid down under ancient seas and then flung up onto the land and eventually distributed all over here by rivers and melt water actually we had to get special permission to come to this part of the downs because it's privately owned but it's well worth it originally this was thought to be a full and standing stone but if you look at it closely it's more interesting than that see these grooves here this is a stone age work bench this is where craftsmen used to sharpen the hand axes in these grooves so the autograph of a neolithic craftsman really fantastic [Music] i can see why our ancestors would have kept the safety of the natural high road of the ridgeway the lowlands of ancient britain were choked with dangerous forests swamps and flooding rivers so early hunters and travellers would have kept to the ridgeway for their protection two thousand years after the building of avery got underway giant hill forts like this one began to appear every five or six miles along the ridgeway from then on it protected the celts from the romans the romans from the saxons then the saxons themselves from the marauding vikings [Music] the first hill fort i reach is barbary built and defended by the celts and where engineer rob herford has evidence that the celts weren't just walking the ridgeway they were riding it in style [Music] these are really interesting they're iron age fittings from a chariot and stuff just like that was found around here and it's remade you can see that they they look like that but how do we know that these chariots are celtic and not romans well some tribes actually had a habit of burying whole chariots with the owner all sorts of different places had different chariots of different kinds but the ones that the celts had of this pattern are quite comfortable to drive in you can sit down and drive quite considerable distances on that from one hill four to the next you can communicate with your opposite number in another tribe and in doing that you want the showiest chariot that you can make so you cover it in bits of big bling to show off how well to do you are absolutely i think this is really significant because for most people the the celts prior to the romans getting here are just a load of old dunderheads and you take two steps forward they'd fall over but if they were producing really sophisticated things like this and you've got this incredibly long route and we know how people were getting from a to b in in celtic times it's a completely different kind of civilization isn't it i must have a look at the uh the horses jason what what what are the horses called this is kaiju and this is fawn they're both brothers and they're dartmoor hill ponies so they are a native breeding do we reckon these are the kinds of horses that would have been used in the iron i think so i think so some people think of them as quite small but this seems to fit very well and when you're sitting in the chariot you can actually see over the ponies and if they were significantly bigger you just spend hundreds of miles looking at horses bums um and this i think works really really well are we going to uh let them pull this one along now king brave if you sit on the please door stride you'll get a slightly different view i see what you mean you you can see over them yeah that makes a lot of sense doesn't it oh we go boys come on yep here i am mr kels oh hang on hang on a minute there's a young celt here do you want to ride in my car here we go i should have done the whole ridgeway in this [Music] i'm beginning to form a picture now of a thriving highway crossing ancient britain but there was a time when the ridgeway was all but lost until it was rediscovered by one man who knew both the lay of the land and the secret history beneath [Music] each step along the ridgeway is transporting me to a different time and my next steps are taking me to victorian england in search of a writer who saved the ridgeway from oblivion richard jeffries now regarded as one of britain's greatest nature writers began in the 1870s to connect the discoveries he was making on his country walks jefferies realized that this overgrown track across the downs wasn't a farm lane or a modern road but something much more significant this is his book wildlife in a southern county and in it he says [Music] the origin of the track goes back into the dimmest antiquity there's evidence that it was a military road when the fierce dane carried fire and slaughter inland the eagles of old rome perhaps were born along it and yet earlier chariots of the britons may have used it traces of all have been found so that for 15 centuries this track of the primitive peoples has maintained its existence through the strange changes of the times it is of course what we now call the ridgeway jeffries was born in coat in wiltshire where the ridgeway continues northeast along the north wessex downs [Music] the country upbringing he would have recognized is all but gone the house he was born in is now swamped by this busy junction on the outskirts of swindon [Music] hi rebecca hello it's crazy isn't it the difference between the mayhem outside and this little idle yes but i suppose in a way that's what jeffers was writing about the contradiction between the industrial society that he was living in and the the rural agricultural society that had gone before he discovered the ridgeway for ordinary people didn't he did he spent so many years here exploring the local landscape that he actually mapped out the local area with the downs and it became to mean to him something more than than just simply a path it was a more for him a channel into the past if you like when he walked it he would imagine the the different cultures and the different ages of the past and the people who would have walked it before him in a way he's a very modern writer isn't he because if you or i or anybody were walking the ridgeway today it would generate in us certain emotions which we'd be quite happy to articulate but he was virtually the first person to talk about that kind of stuff yes people find a form of spiritual guidance in his works and comfort and for those of us who enjoy wandering um natural ancient landscapes his words really ring true for us when we're up there on the ridgeway experiencing all the nature his words come to mind and i think he manages to keep experiences alive in people's minds for richard jeffries the ridgeway and the ancient sites along it were more than just history they were a place of self-revelation i restrained my soul till i reached and put my foot on the grass at the beginning of the green hill itself moving up the sweet short turf at every step my heart seemed to obtain a wider horizon of feeling with every inhalation of rich pure air and deeper desire the very light of the sun was whiter and more brilliant here by the time i'd reached the summit i'd entirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances of existence i felt myself myself it's so passionate isn't it so exhilarating so excited it's a beautiful writer isn't it as the ridgeway climbs high to the east i leave swindon far behind looking at it through jeffrey's eyes i've got a new appreciation for this atmospheric landscape i love how the track seems to inspire storytelling and folklore a way to make sense of the strange and ancient things we encounter along the way whalen smithy encircled in a rustling ring of beech trees is a place steeped in its own myths and legends [Music] this is one of the oldest man-made structures in the world a neolithic burial chamber built before the pyramids of egypt and when you see it it makes sense the one frequent visitor to this site was the oxford professor of anglo-saxon literature j.r.r tolkien [Music] this is it it's quite a strange looking monument isn't it you've got these uh one two standing stones then you've got this gully here two more standing stones weyland was the blacksmith for the saxon gods and the story around here is if i don't break the legs if you put a groat i've got two and a half p here maybe that's something like a groat into one of these holes and you've got a horse without any horseshoes on then you go away and the next morning when you come back it's shod this is andy foley who's the national trust flop for here who let me in andy i i don't know very much about this kind of place but to me looking at this it doesn't actually look saxon it looks older than that is that fair yes that's very very true tony it's actually a neolithic burial chamber so like about how old would you say uh neolithic refers to about 2500 bc so 5 000 years in all so what do you reckon the story of this place was in in the new stone age well it's obviously an impressive sight a lot of effort gone into the the construction this stone here alone weighs seven tons so that would have been brought up from the veil from from distance so this is a big powerful potent place and then thousands literally thousands of years later the saxons come along and they what adopt it as their own place do you think that's right yes because obviously no written records they won't be able to understand or be aware of the the neolithic period so this place requires a reason or a purpose i think the wayland smithy story is when this originated yeah we kind of forget don't we that someone like the saxons would have had no idea who these people were this is just weird stuff exactly yes it's still being used i see what have we got in there today well it's just i don't know it just looks like someone's had a bit of a camp fire but it looks as though they've been quite a few of them over the years yeah that's the usual usual sort of offerings we get or wildflowers wrapped into posies and what have you did you say offerings yes so it's not just a bunch of hippies cooking vegetarian sausages no it's quite eerie actually you can see lots of mysterious little shapes in here no [Music] andy there's a a painted jaw is that a horse yes horse's jawbone yes it's lovely isn't it a nice piece of work man and hello it's like a big corn dolly isn't it or a wicker man yeah oh yeah well that might be slightly more sinister if it's a wicker man wicking man with tasty shades on you said there was some stuff in the trees yeah we get some ribbons and what have you left in these trees oh yeah i can see see ribbons here and here some there as well there's a i know there's loads there's something quite haunting about this place these colored ribbons are wishes blowing in the wind left by today's travelers nice to meet you goodbye a sacred site it's like the present is reaching into the long lost past with modern pagans reclaiming whale and smithy and the spirit of the ridgeway for themselves [Music] i'm walking along the high reaches of the ancient ridgeway in oxfordshire bringing me close to one of england's most mythical landscapes [Music] guarding the way ahead is dragons hill according to legend this is where saint george slew the dragon and as the beast's blood spilled over the hilltop it left forever a white patch where no grass can grow but i'm heading further down the valley to the delightful thatched village of huffington [Music] thomas hughes author of tom brown school days was born in the village here in 1822 where his grandfather was the local vicar hughes spent a carefree childhood rambling this path [Music] so he came down the ridgeway in this direction just like i'm doing now and he came across a green veil and i thought i'd lost my book for a moment and ahead of him there was this massive chalk carved horse and he said about it the king carved out on the northern side of the chalk hill the great saxon white horse which gives its name to the vale over which it has looked these thousand years or more let's have a look at it there's the veil [Music] but thomas hughes like many before him got it wrong they thought the colossal white horse and huffington castle perched on the hill above were built to celebrate king alfred the great and his victory over the vikings in the 9th century a.d it's true that alfred the great wasn't born far away and he did defeat the vikings on these very downs but was any of that connected to the white horse i need to find someone who can help me untangle fact from fiction [Music] what is it that we've got here well we're standing on huffington castle hill fort and it's one of our best known hill forts in this part of the world any idea what kind of date this hill for would be this sort of hill fort's usually around about 7th century bc so it's early iron age so given the dates you've just been telling me the idea that it was built by alfred the great to defend the area from the vikings doesn't really work does it no but british folklore is a wonderful thing yeah um and often you know you you end up with these names like castle um and it's harking back to this sort of mythical uh age trying to explain origins it's kind of what we do best gonna be a bit contentious why did you call it a fort is it really a fort were there lots of soldiers marching around yeah i keep doing that um there was a while where i stopped calling them thoughts and start calling them hilltop enclosures which is really what they are it's not nearly as sexy sounding it's not is it i like hill faults what relationship do you think there is between this hill fort and the white horse i think it's absolutely fundamental um the and not only that but the sighting of the horse it's almost a story playing out in the landscape and the hillthought sort of sits next to that story going right back to the late neolithic period and it's the iron age which sort of sees that it flower if you like and the horse is absolutely crucial to that so these landmarks weren't created for the glory of alfred the great they were built two millennium before he was born and the oldest of all is the great white horse that has been marked in this hillside for almost three thousand [Music] years and without the local people and their tradition of scouring it might have been lost forever this pounding of the chalk keeps the horse as pristine and clean as the day it was created by the victorian era thomas hughes was writing about the extravagant scouring festivals held here [Music] there was the double line of booths and stalls which i'd seen putting up the day before making a long and broad street and all decked out with nuts and apples and gingerbread and all sorts of socks and food and children's toys and cheap ribbons knives braces straps and all manner of gordy looking articles a female smoking marathon was held where the prize was a gallon of gin awarded to the woman who smoked the most tobacco in an hour get your out girls [Music] the great beauty of this landscape is best appreciated from the sky it's almost as if the ancient britons carved the white horse for some higher power to look down on from above a few miles on from the veil of the white horse the ridgeway takes me near the town of wantage where the open chalk escarpments form natural highways and habitats for migrating birds of prey one of the things that really makes my heart sing about walking the ridgeway is the number of birds of prey that you see some bloke said to me earlier that he'd once seen 17 kites all at the same time along here and of course you get sparrow hawks and buzzards and kestrels i think it's something about the the thermals they generate the means by which these birds can be supported whichever way they fly and with this close cropped grass they can see all the little rodents and small mammals they are so staggeringly beautiful but i think throughout most of history they've been much more than just some aesthetic little jewel in the sky they've been a means for you to get food birds of prey have long drifted and hovered over this landscape and have been used here for hunting since the middle ages one man who knows all about this sport of kings is local falconer david hughes [Music] so what i'm going to do when i get here so we've let him settle take the hood off there's just going to be a bit of fun there that's when he was invented for now i'm going to stick him on the perch then we'll just gradually walk back and he's going to have a look around to see what's happening yeah his eyes are on me which is a bonus right so there's the law so he's spotted me with the law now that's it he's seen the meat look he's bobbing he's working wind he's getting everything sorted come on good boy [Music] come on [Music] black [Music] yay [Music] how important was falconry as far as people getting food on their plates until shotguns came along i think it was one of you know other than the bow and arrow or a spear it was one of those for the nobility it was a sport to catch food for the for the pot and obviously i said the gospel would have been the cook's bird they were more likely to catch something than they were the peregrine so depending on your status you would have a different bird with yeah i'm the flipping knight of the realm what do i get well right you wouldn't have had a burden until the crusades when the knights went out to jerusalem they brought sega falcons home sacrifices i haven't even heard of one of those they're actually bigger than a peregrine yeah um the second largest falcon they're bigger than the peregrine they're a ground hunting bird the squire would have had atlanta falcon again slightly smaller and that's where we got the new birds coming into falconry oh i've actually got a couple of sacred falcons at home you have to in the middle ages i imagine you'd have seen every rank of society from peasants to princes using their birds of prey to hunt up and down the ridgeway today evidence of its rich history can still be found in our everyday language [Music] give us a couple of other words associated with foreign um hoodwinking and the hood the falcon here is wearing a hood so you fooled him you've had wings i've conned him into thinking it's nice so i switched him off excuse me we're talking hector come on the thing that strikes me about the bird is that even though i've never held a hunting bird before it's really calm how do you train them it's all down to pieces of meat basically you'd have the bird sitting on the bow perch for a fo for a hawk for a gossip sat in a bow perch and you'd offer him a piece of meat and he jumped to the glove for a piece of meat yeah so again you're getting further and further away which brings in another term so at a certain point when you're jumping that bird from the perch to the glove you're at the end of your tether and it's again it's not because i'm stressing out over anything it's the fact that you're at the end of the tether because that's as far as you've got in your training [Music] all the time we've been talking five has been so well behaved look at that isn't that the most beautiful thing that you've ever seen [Music] sometimes i wish i could soar above the magnificent ridgeway like a bird of prey but then just once in a while this track offers up treasures beneath your feet that only the dedicated walker can find [Music] the ridgeway has now guided me three quarters of the way along my journey to the thames even today this ancient track is offering up remarkable treasures for the travelers who walk its chalky path in 2009 metal detectorist malcolm langford rediscovered a unique piece of britain's lost history [Music] this is annie annie bayard who works for the pas which stands for portable antiquity scheme of course a fantastic organization if you find anything which looks old and you think might be interesting then you can take it to annie or one of her colleagues and they'll tell you what it is rather than it being up on your fireplace in ignorance for years and years and that is exactly what happened with malcolm over here malcolm it was about seven years ago wasn't it yeah what happened well i was uh metal detecting the field just alongside the ridgeway i got an extremely good signal on my metal detector so i knew it was something nice yeah and i've dug that up it is quite beautiful isn't it it's a silver delirious it's a denarius but i didn't realize the great age of it because they didn't change some of the issues on the coins the patterns and the pictures they didn't change them for a long time and i knew it was a republican denarius but i didn't know how old so republican means that it was before julius caesar yes andy he brought it to you what was your reaction when you saw that i was amazed when i saw it i knew immediately that it was old yeah very old as well republican and i thought wow you don't see them in this sort of condition it looks almost brand new you know it's absolutely amazing have we any idea more precisely how old it is now we think it's about 207 bc that's mad the romans didn't get here till 40 odd a.d exactly so this is good 250 years before the claudian invasion but it probably didn't come here that early it probably came here in the first century bc [Music] malcolm had discovered the uk's oldest single roman coin it's really incredible to hold something like this in your hand and wonder how it got here [Music] who do you think it was who brought this coin here malcolm where do you think it came from ah well i'd like to think that a celtic warrior uh who'd fought as a mercenary in the um mediterranean here for the romans and it's in the history books that many celts did that and i'd like to think that he saw them using these discretely these things these coins and he brought one back to show his chief of his tribe that they were using these things instead of swapping goats for sheep and the like you know i just heard a slightly hysterical laughter there yeah um it could well be it could also be coming here through trade as well we don't know as malcolm has corrected saying the second punic wars was happening at the time that these were being issued maybe it was the mercenary we just don't follow but it does imply doesn't it that there was a much stronger relationship between definitely the i was going to say the mainland you know i mean france and us than might have been expected at that yeah exactly i mean especially in the first century bc when roman coinage started coming in more earnestly we see that there is trade you know britain wasn't this isolated little island um before the claudia invasion and this coin just goes to show that it's value for me is that it sort of implies that the brits weren't dozy-headed painted idiots until the romans came they were sophisticated trades absolutely yeah yeah absolutely they knew what money was all about they did pieces of evidence like this long-lost roman coin are driving home for me that the ridgeway really was an international trade route with links to the continent thousands of years before our tricky relationship with europe today [Music] as the ridgeway starts to descend into the goring gap the open remote countryside gives way to woodlands and small villages the track leads me towards streetley and goring two villages that straddle england's most famous river [Music] this is where the ridgeway meets the thames two of britain's most ancient strategic trade routes romans saxons and vikings all used the ridgeway to connect with this great waterway here the ridgeway was at its most vulnerable far from the safety of the highchalk ridge the lowlands of the river valley needed defending from plundering invaders what i find so extraordinary is that they were building these great chunky defense systems on the ridgeway thousands of years ago and they were still doing it in the 20th century and well we're not actually going to go on this boat but steve we're going to borrow your boat aren't we thank you mate to see how the people of goring prevented us from being overwhelmed by a german invasion off you go mate [Music] but these germans weren't saxon invaders coming to conquer the ancient isles of britain they were nazis [Music] that's it isn't it that's what we've come to see can we pull in somewhere pulling in this way yeah [Music] wait look at this it is like a prehistoric megalith isn't it except it's made of concrete i'm gonna need the torch [Music] this is a world war ii pill box okay it's not ancient exactly but it is recently uncovered one of the best surviving examples left in britain [Music] steve how come this place isn't such good nick well i think it's because it's on private land what precisely was its function well as you can see if you look out the embrasure you can see the bridges across the river between streetly and goring and we know that were some other pill boxes on the other side it's about defending the river at this key point it is ironic isn't it that they're still defending the ridge thousands of years after the original people put up their defenses absolutely and as you know coming off the ridgeway here you've got them king alfred defending against the danes and this end we've got uh the descendants of king alfred getting ready to defend against the germans what do people do with them now they're so solid um well what can you do with something that's got three feet walls designed to stop pretty heavy fire not a lot it's a coffee shop you can imagine archaeologists coming along in about 500 years time having no idea what it is always it's going to be rituals religious religious significance without a doubt or or offer uh protecting the corn in winter yeah exactly or it has no function at all other than a whole society got together in order to well that's exactly what they did yeah so the whole society did get together in 1940 and it was that's a pretty important thing to do i like to think that in hundreds of years time our monuments and behaviors will be wildly guessed at by armchair archaeologists and fireside historians just like me and that they too will get some joy out of the pursuit of the mystery [Music] i've walked bits of the ridgeway several times previously and i've always found it beautiful and really quite inspiring but i've never had such consistently good weather mind you looking at what's over there i think i'll be off home now [Music] for more than 5 000 years drovers traders and invaders have used this track and reused the sites along the way creating their own myths and legends to make sense of the landscape i've been following the ridgeway picking up the track near the megaliths of avebury i've been guided along its route by celtic chariots white horses and alfred the great [Music] but the enduring legacy of the ridgeway goes beyond its position as a natural line of defense each generation has added to the mythology and legend of this ancient track leaving clues in the landscape that we can still find today [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been traveled for more than 5 000 years that is an extraordinary place walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend this is it this is quite a strange looking monument [Music] but what's the truth behind all these megaliths and burial sites and lay lines and hidden caves along these pathways and why were their mystic origins such an attraction for later generations i'm going to explore these tracks to connect the clues they've left hidden in the british landscape now isn't this just about the best cave you've ever seen wow her name is majesty what other name could she have [Music] this week i'm in kent to explore the north downs way once trodden by caesar's armies and medieval pilgrims i want to know what this journey can tell me about the history and legend of ancient britain through the secret monuments and sacred places along its track these are the paths our ancestors would have followed the ancient trackways that we can still walk today [Music] this is castle hill in kent on the south coast of england and it's where i'm starting my walk over here is eurostar and the beginning of the big tunnel under the water this is folkston beyond it is the english channel and beyond that the start of the eu quite a long way away now and here is the beginning of the north downs way great chalk escarpment you can see a chalk cliff just there this place has always been where traders travelers pilgrims meet up and for thousands of years if you wanted to get further inland then you went along that pathway [Music] the north towns way is thought to be one of the main highways that ancient travelers arriving in britain would have used from folkestone i'm going to follow it inland through kent i'll take the old pilgrim road to canterbury before finishing my journey a down house in the wild beauty of the rolling kent downs along the way i'll discover one of britain's oldest oak trees she is lovely i'll make a pilgrimage to the shrine of thomas a beckett uncover a lost battle sight of julius caesar and marvel at the great discoveries of charles darwin i think that's really exciting all of which will reveal to me how this ancient track was once used [Music] on the coast at foxton my first stop is a three thousand year old archaeological find precariously balanced on a cliff edge and in a race against time [Music] this is the very very beginning of the north downs way you can see the sea just there and as you can imagine it's eroding these cliffs really fast which is why you've got this spoil heat here and over here an archaeological site because if this stuff isn't dug up pretty soon it's going to end up at the bottom of the sea but it turns out to be a really really interesting sight andrew andrew can i follow you just for a moment yeah sure andrew there's a lot of these curved things yeah curved stone things can you explain to me what they are these are late iron age rotary coin stones that's grinding stones for cool yeah for grinding corn into flour to make make bread absolutely essential to a daily life for everybody in the iron age really but there must be more than one household i would have thought you've got well how many have you got here must be at least a dozen at least a dozen but actually from this site we've probably recovered uh three or four hundred over the years yeah so if you found so many and so many that are broken it sounds as though they're actually making them here yeah this is and this is a really special thing about this site this is the production site from what i know about archaeology i would have thought that evidence of large-scale iron age production was pretty rare it is this is probably the only quern production site that we've actually excavated this is the modern day one this is the replica it's fascinating that 3000 years ago our ancestors were manufacturing these essential tools on an industrial scale and then distributing them throughout the country and beyond let's start grinding it down i'll lift it up and let's see because i can think i can see some white there oh fantastic starting to happen but it's it's quite quite hard work yeah but we can see it does work yeah it does work but what about the north towns way is there any evidence that they use that as a trading room well i think most of the crimes produced here went out by sea but we do find them in land in kent and and you can't you can't get by boat to ashford the only really str you know big long distance strategic way we know of at that time was the north towns way so this is really exciting iron age entrepreneurs were trading out of this busy site dealing directly with europe across the sea but also taking their business inland along the north downs way [Music] a lot of people say that folkestone got its name from the fact that of all the places around here that was the area where the folk got their stone it's certainly a notion that would have appealed to the late 19th early 20th century writer hillar belluck who in a sense was the man who rediscovered that pathway [Music] in 1904 bellock penned the old road to describe an ancient trackway across the north downs born in france but raised in england he was a prolific writer a politician and a devout catholic but he's also a poet i remember fondly from my childhood he was an oddly charming and quite humorous man who wrote a book of kids poems called the cautionary tales and i used to recite one of the poems from it which started the chief defect of henry king was chewing little bits of string at last he swallowed some which tied itself in ugly knots inside but more to the point he wrote this book the old road in which he argued that our pathway is actually a natural chalk ridge that runs all the way from farnham to dover you may say that nature herself laid down the platform of a perfectly defined ridge from which a man going west could hardly deviate even if there were no path to guide him bellat walked this path himself and said it was the route that the medieval pilgrims took the legendary pilgrims way and some pilgrims still come down here to this very day the pilgrims way is an ancient path thought to have been taken by medieval pilgrims to canterbury for several miles it follows the same route to the cathedral city as the even older north downs way pilgrimages have always been journeys of spiritual significance a connective link between holy places and even today modern pilgrims still travel this path to seek their own sacred places on route [Music] hello traveler where you going well i'm on pilgrimage a real pilgrimage tony robinson yes how do you too nice to meet you this is nettle hello nettle hello darling this is for you your pilgrim staff thank you very much because i believe we're going to make a pilgrimage together now excellent yeah excellent come on neton again come and go will is part of a new movement set up to revitalize the tradition of pilgrimage in britain but these pilgrims welcome people of all faiths and no faiths side by side so tony there's something rather special to show you here right because pilgrimage isn't just about churches cathedrals chapels or the built environment but the natural world as well and uh what i'm going to show you now is very much a holy place is it this trip couldn't could it be anything else no i don't think so it is extraordinary it is like it's like a tree out of tolkien isn't it absolutely wow her name is majesty what other name could she have and this is the largest virgin unpolarted oak in britain and some people say the world wow do we have any idea how old she is estimates between 800 and thousand years yeah god it's really sensual going in this way isn't it yeah yeah blimey and one of the key things in pilgrimage is to go slowly and to stop often yeah in places like this you may not pass this way again tony what does being a pilgrim mean to you oh it means connecting to places like this to things that are bigger than me and doing it through a journey on foot it is lovely touching something alive that has been alive for the best part of a thousand years there's one more thing i like to do at a place like this tony which is to give a gift and i i've brought one for you actually this is 925 british silver 100 years old and there's a hole on the other side of the tree and we could just fling in our coin as some sort of gesture of humanity to non-humanity yeah and that's the sort of absurd gesture that pilgrimage is all about got a throne for you there you go don't spend it all at once it is absurd but it's very nice in a very gentle way back on the track i enter king's wood an infamous place that offered perfect cover for the thieves and robbers that preyed upon pilgrims on the road but very quickly the tree is clear relief for the pilgrims i imagine as they emerged over the brow of the hill [Music] there it is the pilgrims very first site of their final destination canterbury cathedral for devoted medieval pilgrims on their long lonely journey across england the beckoning call of the cathedral city of canterbury was irresistible in his book the old road hillary bellock called canterbury the rallying point of all the roads from the coast like many of the pilgrims i'm following the track from the west through the north downs [Music] the magnificent cathedral at canterbury is the oldest church in britain still in use [Music] in 595ad the pope in rome sent a benedictine monk augustine to bring christianity to the pagan anglo-saxon kingdom of kent augustine established a church and became the first archbishop of canterbury [Music] christianity took root in england over the next 500 years but it wasn't until the death of archbishop thomas beckett in 1170 that the tradition of pilgrimage would take hold [Music] today the 7th of july is a special day in honor of saint thomas beckett that's why these candles are lit they mark his shrine he was an archbishop of canterbury and he had a row with king henry the second whose supporters murdered him [Music] and thomas became a saint and it was to pay homage to him that all the pilgrims came here and you can see how many there must have been look you see this sort of rumble here that's tiles that have been eroded by the knees of all the pilgrims who've knelt in front of some thomas there must have been thousands and thousands of them and thousands of pilgrims making donations for the privilege of visiting the shrine meant good news for the church incredibly even though it's almost a thousand years ago every penny was accounted for here we have accounts for the year 1200-1201 and they detail the monies received as offerings at the various shrines and places in the cathedral what sort of money were they making well for the tomb itself we've got the figure here of 431 pounds so assuming and a donation of one penny per pilgrim um that is over a hundred thousand pilgrims and that's just to the tomb it's a very rough way of estimating yeah yeah but i suppose some wealthy people would have come here and flashed the cash around and given far more than simply a penny of course this is a donation made by louis vii king of france when he visited the cathedral in the year 1179 which is recorded in the charter so louis vii came to pray at thomas's tomb for the recovery of his son who was gravely ill his son recovered and as a thank offering louis uh issued this charter and the charter grants the monks of the cathedral a large quantity of good french wine i bet they were happy about that i think they were delighted yes [Music] whether a humble worshiper or a visiting dignitary one way or another this was a spiritual tax on the faithful traveler i'm back on the road out of canterbury at the village of harbaldown for centuries this was the only road to london and i can imagine paupers pilgrims and princes all passing this way and all happily buying into the cult of thomas a beckett [Music] this hatch is brilliant inside it in the middle ages there was a holy relic the shoe of saint thomas a becket which apparently he left in a nearby well and if you were a pilgrim and you were walking past and if you knocked on the hatch it would open and a leper's hand would come out holding the shoe and if you kissed it then your life would be full of blessings provided you gave the leper a few bob of course the hatch is on the outside wall of a medieval leper hospital where weary pilgrims would have passed it's strange that a place like this would have been a resting point for travellers but i've been told that there's something even more curious in the grounds [Music] i'm looking for a watering hole in this wood that apparently has royal connections why you'd have a watering hole in the wood i've got absolutely no idea at all [Music] oh darth vader wasn't in there at all look it's here oh i could have gone around the side and up that concrete path never mind i love little things like this it's a surprising little place in the corner of a field you see those three feathers there on that headstone that is the symbol of the prince of wales and that is the well of the very first prince of wales the black prince who's a bit like our prince william only slightly more butch edward of woodstock aka the black prince was a gallant hero of the hundred years war with the french his legend born from the iconic black armor he wore into battle he was also very devout and would make a pilgrimage before any military campaigns offering penance for those his army were about to kill the story goes that towards the end of his life he had this really bad eye affliction and he was coming past this place which was already a popular drinking place for the pilgrims on their way to canterbury and he dipped his hands into the water and pressed his fingers onto his eyes [Music] and they were miraculously cured back on the north downs way a few miles further on i'm traveling far back in time and to a fabled site of hidden history [Music] [Applause] fifteen hundred years before the black prince's army rode through here and 600 years before augustine established christianity in britain it wasn't canterbury that dominated this landscape it was the celtic stronghold at bigbury and by following the north down's way into the heart of this woodland i'm walking on the warpath of one of rome's most famous sons julius caesar [Music] in the late summer of 55 bc the legions of caesar's expeditionary force were the first romans to set foot in britain lured back the following year by tales of an island rich in pearls lead and gold caesar landed a deal in kent and is said to have launched his first attack at a fort near canterbury there's no physical evidence of caesar in britain but he wrote an account of the campaign and it's traditionally thought that the big battle took place just up there and i think you'll see why [Music] caesar had a fearsome reputation in britain and the celts knew they'd have little chance against the impressively equipped roman army unless their defense was carefully planned [Music] this place is called bigberry and you see that slope up there that's a defensive earthwork and this is what caesar said about the battle in his conquest of gaul a night march of about 12 miles brought caesar he always refers to himself in the third person singular caesar rather than i in sight of the enemy [Music] with their cavalry and chariots and tried to bar his way by attacking from a position on higher ground now this is the important bit repulsed by his cavalry they hid in the woods where they occupied a well fortified post of great natural strength since all the entrances were blocked by felled trees laid close together well there's no doubt that that is a seriously engineered piece of ancient british fortification isn't it [Music] it's so tempting to think of caesar's legions marching on bigbury against the celts but is there any real evidence beyond caesar's account to support this i've come to meet steve willis who's a local archaeologist and has done a lot of very good work on big brewery steve are there any other candidates for this roman battle any other iron age hill forts of comparable size around here no tony this is a unique sight in eastern kent there aren't any strong holds of the late iron age around here for miles so this does fit in with the caesar story exactly the other thing that caesar mentions is this 12-mile overnight walk does that make sense it brings us exactly to this spot from where he landed exactly and you've got another intriguing piece of information haven't you that was brought to you by a local metal detectorist we have tony it was found in 2012 a very recent and very exciting find these helmets dating to this period are very very rare this is 2 000 years old this would have been worn by one of the adversaries in the in the battles against caesar oh you must have thought that all your dreams had come true when that was passed to you and this is what it would have looked like originally yeah that's right we have this uh replica which is coming to light now i try it on yeah well indeed tony how do i look well it fits you but you're wearing it back to front sorry that was like a school cap oh so this is to protect the neck to protect the neck correct yes i love the idea of me looking down upon the enemy surrounded by my mates with the sun glittering on our helmets that's right and that would have been very intimidating i think my enemy would have been really scared of me [Music] the romans did eventually conquer britain in 44 a.d and ruled for nearly four centuries they gave us new towns canals viaducts i would have used the very track i'm walking on before building their own roads hard and straight across the countryside [Music] the north town's way is entangled in the legacy of the roman occupation yet sometimes it isn't the great monuments but the tiny clues that reveal something extraordinary about this ancient track [Music] stepping back onto the north downs way i'm struck by how these wonderful ancient tracks channel the imagination about the people who traveled these paths before me every step could be the step of a christian pilgrim or a roman centurion or even an ancient briton [Music] after leaving bigbury i find myself thinking about what the romans left behind in britain and near the saxon village of chering an unexpected trace of the romans still lurks in the undergrowth normally along here on the track you can find intriguing creatures but knowing my luck i'll not be able to find any now triumph i found them look there's one there isn't it massive another one under here it's one over here too little crowds of them not allowed to touch them because they're a special scientific interest but they're they're called pot lid snails or sometimes apple snails presumably because of their size and until fairly recently people thought that they'd been brought here by the normans as a snack for pilgrims who were going up and down the pilgrims way but it now seems pretty sure that actually they were introduced by the romans there are certainly a lot of them associated with roman sites you can't prove anything for certain can you but that seems to be the case sadly in modern times these roman snails are being poached as a delicacy and many of their native habitats are now kept secret by conservationists [Music] the idea that it was pilgrims who first brought these snails to britain is one of the many myths of the north downs way i'm meeting a local writer who's dedicated his life to debunking the myths of this old road do you think the pilgrim's way was originated by pilgrims no i think all the evidence that historians and archaeologists have concluded that it was a prehistoric trackway one of the things that happens in the pilgrims narrative is that the pilgrimists build and exaggerate each other's stories so we start with numbers of pilgrims then we build on that and we have thousands of pilgrims and end up with a hundred thousand pilgrims medieval pilgrims using the pilgrim sweep so in prehistoric times you've got people coming maybe from as far as france using this pathway to trade tin and copper and chert or whatever yeah and then it falls into disuse and then the pilgrims start to use it then you get thomas a beckett so many more pilgrims are using it then after the reformation it falls into disuse again and then towards the end of the victorian times suddenly these writers seize on the romantic notion of the pilgrims way and uh and here it is now brought back to life yeah and for me one of the interesting things about that is perhaps we um have as many pilgrims walking the pilgrims way today as we did in the middle ages using it as a router beckett shrine and we're two of them [Music] i'm a different kind of pilgrim my journey is taking me in the opposite direction it's funny though wherever you are on this pathway there's always some sort of religious symbol nearby but i'm leaving christianity behind in search of a time before the pilgrims before the romans to find a prehistoric place that holds clues to our stone age past [Music] some of the earliest human remains known in britain have been found in this area [Music] this is the epic landscape of the medway megaliths [Music] these mysterious structures are the only group of megaliths in eastern england and like much from prehistory are steeped in folklore the first i encounter on blue bell hill are the fallen stones of a neolithic burial chamber that have puzzled the locals for centuries [Music] it's said that it's impossible to count the number of stones on a megalithic structure these ones are called the countless stones and you can sort of see the problem little stones would get buried under the big ones some stones would be under the earth and only occasionally reappear in fact there's a story about these stones which is that there was this smart baker who decided he would work out how to count the stones he baked a whole lot of loaves of bread and he put one loaf of bread on each stone [Music] now the punch line of the story is there's the last one that the devil was coming all the way around behind the baker and he was gobbling up the loaves so when the baker turned round he had no idea how many there were another version has it that the devil took just one away so he got the count wrong another says that the devil disguised himself as a loaf hello and again the baker got the number wrong the fourth one is the most dramatic he gets the number right the crowd gathered all around him and just as he's about to announce what the number is he keels over and dies that was pretty realistic wasn't it except that now i've got to go around again and put all the loaves away the story of the countless stones is only a bit of fun but later generations have always projected their legends onto these stones because in the mists of time their original power and purpose has been lost hey chris oh hello you're not lost are you you know i'm not lost i want to glean from you your fantastic story chris lives over there in that lovely house and at the bottom of his field is this this wonderful stone which is a stone of great significance it is indeed because this is the white horse stone of kent yeah uh five and a half thousand years old like all the other graves in the area but there's a story associated with this one oh yes this is a little bit special this stone because many years after it was used by the neolithic people it was used by the saxons who first arrived in the country about 455 a.d and what happened was the saxons landed they wandered round in kent for a couple of weeks and they ended up here which marks the site of a very important battle which may well have taken place in that field oh indeed yes that's right there was a huge battle between the saxons and the britons and the leaders were vortigan on the british side and his son category on the saxon side they were the brothers horseradish so on one hand you've got the newcomers the saxons led by hengist and horsa and on the other side you've got the romano british who were here after the romans left absolutely yes the battle was dramatic many hundreds of people were killed on both sides very big battle and both of the chieftains or kings were killed as well uh horsa the saxon king as he lay dying was put on top of the white horse stone and that his blood stained the stone bright red which means that even today the flag of kent hits a white horse on a red background and all because of this style all because of this stone that you see here yes amazing thank you see you [Music] [Laughter] [Music] it is amazing this intoxicating mix of myth and history projected onto stones placed here thousands of years ago just a short walk away at the last of the megaliths older than stonehenge the oddly framed kits koti around here you've got the only collection of prehistoric megaliths in eastern england megaliths just means large stones but these ones are the entrance way to a huge barrow that stretched 70 meters in that direction and inside it there were a lot of burials now you can see it's surrounded by this metal fence and that was put up by the victorians to try and make sure that it didn't get covered in graffiti but can you show them all that graffiti there that's victorian so it kind of failed and instead what you've got is three large stones surrounded by a monument to victorian wrought iron work [Music] it's such a victorian thing to do to build a fence to simply keep people away but my journey on the north towns way will take me to the home of a quite extraordinary victorian mind one who would take us even further back in time to the beginning of life on earth [Music] i'm crossing the river medway in kent to continue my journey along the north downs way i've come a long way from the travelers on the pilgrims road to canterbury searching for a spiritual revelation [Music] this trip though is a pilgrimage for me to pay homage at a place of profound significance a place of scientific revelation my last stop on the north townsway it's truth it's getting hot now is that the house of someone who knew these downs intimately and drew a conclusion from them that turned religion on its head charles darwin is one of the greatest thinkers in history and his theories on nature made us re-examine our place in the world in 1842 after his round the world trip on hms beagle darwin moved to down house just off the north downs way [Music] down this corridor is something i've always wanted to see just behind this door come in this is the study that belonged to charles darwin the charles darwin i suppose you'd have expected all this kind of bric-a-break on the walls the maps and the skulls and the books this dog basket belonged to his little white terrier called polly who'd lie curled up here while he did his work and i love this detail come over here have a look in there this is where charles darwin did his ablutions his shower and washing his hands and his potty and everything you don't think of him doing that kind of thing do you and this is his table with his microscope on it and lots of string holders for some reason tickets and notes and he would sit here overlooked by some of the greats of his age like a kids pop posters on their bedroom wall that's hooker the biologist that's lyle the geologist that is josiah wedgwood the pottery manufacturer who was his grandfather and whose money of course helped fund this whole project and it was here that charles darwin wrote a book that transformed our understanding of us within the universe and that book was the origin of species and he wrote it here i think that's really exciting darwin's book the origin of species marked a dramatic turning point in scientific thought that life on earth was a process of evolution and not an act of god [Music] from downhouse darwin could gaze upon the north downs and reflect on the experiments that he'd created to test his theories what he developed in the house was put into practice on his walks outdoors [Music] one of the things that virtually all writers and philosophers and poets agree on is that walking helps you think in fact in some languages the word for travelling is the same as the word for thinking darwin even created his own trackway in the grounds of the house and he regularly walked this circular path including five times at lunchtime but in order to keep track on the number of times he'd been round he had a full of stones and at the end of each circum locution if he would put a stone down which would work really well except his kids would come along and kick the stones and chuck them away so his system was completely blown nevertheless some of his greatest ideas emerged on this very path [Music] irony hello the orchid lady how nice to meet you lovely to meet you too show me some of your blooms i'm not sure you want to come into a hot greenhouse on a sunny day like this yes they do look lovely don't we but of course darwin was famous for his orchid studies because the first book that he wrote after the origin of species was about orchids and that was where he learnt that orchids are very different from most other flowers how they have rather specialized adaptations they don't have stamens like other flowers they have strange pollen sacks on little stalks the idea that flowers had some kind of sexuality must have been quite difficult for the victorians it was very difficult for darwin too because it was highly controversial and shocking even and people who started to try to hybridize orchids or said that they had sexual parts were almost excommunicated so he was on very tricky ground when he started his work on orchids how did he get away with it well darwin got around this very neatly by saying that the insects that pollinated flowers were acting as marriage priests which is a very charming way of explaining it isn't that lovely he didn't just experiment inside his greenhouse though did he no one of the places that we know he went to regularly was a small grassy slope and hopefully we'll show you some of the wild orchids that grow there hopefully let's go let's go [Music] after traveling the world in search of clues it was at home on the north downs that darwin discovered some startling evidence to support his theory of evolution [Music] so what was the experiment that he did i'll show you one of these orchids these orchids are all pollinated by insects so having looked at this flower darwin decided to mimic an insect and took a pencil yeah and he probed into the flower deeply and then when he would do it to his astonishment on the pencil with a pair of little stalked pollen sacks the orchid's polenia so it was opening itself up in a very sexual way to the bee yes so the bee could then take the pollen move off to another orchid and fertilize that one and what happens is the bees are a bit put up by this you know suddenly on their head these strange club-shaped structures are stuck on and you can watch them backing away and they're so disturbed that they very often fly to a completely different plant really then ensuring cross-fertilization between two separate plants so it's a remarkable adaptation i do find it absolutely extraordinary that there is this beautiful tiny discreet bit of kent countryside and these lovely elegant little flowers and they opened up our understanding of evolution and natural selection [Music] i've been on a journey exploring faith and superstition but there's a nice irony i love here i've ended up with a great man of science and reason charles darwin was a traveler on a quest for knowledge and the answer to the fundamental questions of our existence [Music] the north downs trackway was formed by the footsteps of thousands of people who made their own journey traders invaders and pilgrims and today we still walk this path partly to pay homage to all its previous travelers and partly like pilgrims to continue the search for something of our own you see a path like this one and it feels like it's been here forever doesn't it but of course every path starts with someone wanting to go from a to b across virgin territory and then someone else goes in the same direction and someone else until hundreds and thousands of people have done it and it's worn and there in the landscape and then maybe after a while people don't want to walk that way anymore and it starts to fall into disuse and eventually you can hardly see it there'll be hundreds of years after that someone else wants to go from a to b for an entirely different reason and then more people do and more people do until eventually it's like a huge scar it's become part of our country part of our landscape part of our culture [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled for more than 5 000 years he's quite small isn't he he's small but he's mighty small but mighty walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts and romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend of all the archaeological finds i've come across when i heard about it my jaw actually dropped [Music] i'm on a quest to connect the clues and rediscover the stories hidden among britain's ancient pathways i want to find out what it is that tempts today's travelers to go back in time and rediscover these mystic tracks [Music] do you recognize the north star not the brightest star in the sky but it's probably one of the most useful it's a bit like me [Laughter] smell a leather you can still smell it 1900 year old leather isn't that absolutely amazing this week i've come to dartmoor in devon to walk the ancient routes that connect christianity and paganism through centuries-old stories of sacred sites extraordinary stones and literature's most notorious hound these are the paths our ancestors once followed the ancient tracks that we in britain can still walk today [Music] dartmoor has been described as england's last great wilderness it covers an area of some 370 square miles mankind has lived on dartmoor since the stone age and over time has left an indelible mark on this exposed landscape i've been to dartmoor loads of times and whenever i come i hear some new weird and wonderful story about the place that really raises the hairs on the back of my neck but i've never walked across the hole more i don't really know how the whole thing fits together i do know that this is going to be a journey through time i'm going to hear lots of tales from different periods and i've brought my own timepiece with me as my companion although exactly why you won't know till the end of the program [Music] across dartmoor is a network of ancient trackways shrouded in history and mystery i'll be following a procession of medieval stone crosses along the abbott's way before heading in search of consecrated ground along the old lich way a way of the dead along my journey i'll retrace the footsteps of britain's greatest detective plunge the depths of a bottomless lake and come face to face with a fantastical array of four-legged beasts [Music] and with a little detective work of my own i hope to unravel the time-warned secrets that remain deep-rooted in this vast untamed terrain [Music] for many centuries people have been drawn to this sacred site in search of the divine but fast abby was mentioned in the 11th century doomsday book and in 2018 will be 1 000 years old its fortunes have ebbed and flowed through the years from wielding great power over medieval pagan societies to its devastating 16th century demise after henry viii's dissolution of the monasteries [Music] then in 1852 french monks who had been exiled from their own monastery came here to what was then a deserted ruined and flattened ancient monastic site and after a lot of hard work and inspiration they created this moreland sanctuary for these 19th century monks re-cultivating this abandoned land was essential and today's monks are equally self-sustaining religion it seems has prospered here by harnessing the natural world the monk's very survival has depended on it [Music] spiritually replenished the abbot has offered to show me the first of the crosses that will guide me across the wilderness ahead is this the original position of this cross no no no no it was brought from south brent so what was the significance of putting it right here well because traditionally the abbott's way starts at buckfast and goes on to across the moor to tavistock and so this is really this this a starting point so this has become the first marker stage it's going to become the first marker stone yes yes oh well if you don't hear from me in a week i'm going to send the dot more rescue after you it's all right all right tony bye god bless bye-bye and as well as the abbott's good wishes i have another guide to enlighten my journey [Music] there's a little book from about 1935 which gives a really nice picture of what it would have been like traveling along this road it's called the abbott's way it was priced at sixpence and it says for several hundred years this thoroughfare witnessed colorful pageantry of medieval life it goes on to lament that fragments alone remain today it's a funny word that fragments isn't it but it's true nowadays all you get are these tiny little hints of what life would have been like here and it's up to us to use our detective work to pull them back together [Music] [Music] shield health in god rich it is really rather bizarre walking down a trackway in the 21st century and coming across a bloke singing a medieval song yeah no this is something i do a lot i think it's a great way of connecting with the land i mean we're in a land where well this is called the abbott's way now and monks and abbotts would have walked it in the past and we know that it existed a thousand years ago and this song i'm singing is the oldest song we know of written with with the music and the words so we can be pretty sure that some monks would have sung this song maybe even on this path should we walk away together yeah do we know much about the actual bloke who wrote that song you were singing it's called godric of finch shale finchale yeah it's a part of northumberland [Music] with my pilgrim for company i follow the abbott's way to where it splits into two one going to buckland abbey and the other to tavistock and it's at this junction where i find the largest and oldest of dartmoor stone crosses do we know what this cross is well it's called nuns cross or siward's cross and we definitely know that it was here in 1240 because king henry iii sent 12 of his knights to perambulate the dartmoor boundaries and we know they visited this cross this is real history isn't it it is as is the song i sung earlier which is we know will have been definitely sung at the time this crosses around because that was written in 1160 just before this we have recorded this cross so it's a great joy to be able to sing it here and connect the two yeah you serenade it and i'll head off up the hill to meet you andrew goodbye [Music] [Applause] [Music] m my singing pilgrim makes me think of the first of dartmoor's many cautionary folk tales as the moor rises gently to a high ridge i'm climbing one of three hills here this one known as piper's hill [Music] way over there can you see that mound of stones that's on top of the second one and the third one is that little one there with the tree there and these mounds are supposed to be pipers who are frozen for all eternity as a punishment and what did they do wrong they played their musical instruments on the sabbath and that is a typical dartmoor story that conjunction of the pagan and christianity i wonder what the very first version of that story was if only these stones could talk or pipe i should probably say every step i make now across this magnificently bleak and stony expanse takes me back in time back way beyond the struggle between church and paganism and back into another glorious dartmoor mystery i've got something for you here look slap bang in the middle of a deserted moor you've got this great name the drizzle bone it's four meters tall it's about six tons in weight and really it kind of asks you more questions than it gives answers doesn't it what period is it well it's surrounded by prehistoric stuff so presumably it's late neolithic early bronze age it's got this big knobbly thing at the top of it which presumably gives it its name but most importantly what's it for is it some kind of way marker is it the place where people met like at a fair or something or is it like stonehenge part of some enormous prehistoric clock which reminds me time to move on these ancient places are a wonderful spark for the traveller's imagination each one a piece in dartmoor's grand complex jigsaw puzzle bidding the bone goodbye and with barely another soul in sight the mind tends to drift off to stories of the supernatural and of dare i say it apparitions and there's one particular apparition that crops up all over the high moorland of devon and cornwall the pixie in the old days if a traveler lost their way and got really confused they were sometimes referred to as being pixie lead but i'm a seasoned traveler i know how to handle pixies by using a very ancient trick if i put my coat on inside out it'll so confuse them that it'll keep them off my back and i'll be able to stick to the right track [Applause] every year the nearby town of ottery mary is invaded by hordes of local children dressed as impish elves to mark pixie day [Music] legend has it these pixies were caught trying to silence the town's church bells and banished to a nearby cave i think these pixies are a force to be reckoned with i'd better find their cave and pay my respects [Music] oh yeah there it is look you see in there now i'm told that if i want to ensure that i get down safe then i have to leave some silver here's two half crowns cool two and six five bob that should keep me safe on the journey back down again shouldn't it [Music] pixies and the paranormal held a particular fascination for the creator of sherlock holmes sir arthur conan doyle the legendary writer was taken in by phony photographs of fairies believing these celestial creatures to be real but lurking on the moor ready to inspire conan doyle's most famous novel was the legend of a very different apparition not as charming as those pixies though because here on dartmoor this became the inspiration for the most spine tingling tale in the whole of detective fiction sherlock holmes and the hound of the baskervilles [Music] the ancient abbot's way across dartmoor is a landscape steeped in centuries-old myths and legends and a location that inspired one of our most iconic literary masterpieces the hound of the baskervilles sir arthur conan doyle's love letter to dartmoor and all its mysteries they reckon that when he came here in 1901 to recce the place he used to walk up to 18 miles a day in order to find suitable locations for his terrible tale the plot of this complex murder mystery attributes the sudden death of the wealthy sir charles baskerville to a family curse involving a supernatural hound dartmoor had provided the inspiration cast and backdrop for this beastly apparition and the hound of the baskervilles also marked the resurrection of the legendary detective sherlock holmes conan doyle had killed off homes eight years earlier but the celebrated sloop simply couldn't be left out of such a ripping yarn the inspiration for the hound of the baskerville's most blood-curdling scene is just a short walk off the abbott's way in dartmoor's most dangerous bog [Music] sherlock holmes himself said that dartmouth would be the perfect setting if the devil ever did really want to get his hands on the affairs of men and there's this wonderful bit at the end of the book where the arch villain john stapleton is actually killed by the the bog in the center of dartmoor it says somewhere in the heart of the great grimpen mire that's actually here down in the foul slime of the huge morass which had sucked him in this cold and cruel-hearted man is forever buried right down there for pilgrim travellers straying from the safety of the path and onto this wild untamed bog was fraught with danger just as deviating from the christian to the occult was seen by many as a step too far but remarkably it was this very path that conan doyle himself chose to travel i'm intrigued to find why the writer was so fascinated with victorian spiritualism [Music] it's so bizarre isn't it on one hand you've got this kind of man who invents fictional csi and yet on the other hand he was prepared to countenance stuff which nowadays we would think of as weird and a bit daft it does seem like a contradiction to us now and i think we very much parcel these apart but in the 19th century believers thought that they had discovered a scientific religion and he said i believe it because i've seen it if i have to go back to believing in things that i haven't seen i might as well go back to the old religions when i talk on this subject i'm not talking about what i believe i'm not talking about what i think i'm talking about what i know and talking about things that i've handled i've seen what i've heard of my own ears it's kind of crude empiricism right they thought that they were rejecting the old ideas that you had to believe on the basis of faith and now you could sit at your kitchen table and you could experiment you could rap you could be with a medium and you knew that there was an afterlife because you could see and touch and talk to the dead is there anything in the hound of the baskervilles that reflects his belief in spiritualism well that's quite spiritual a story in many ways the hound of baskerville is very very clearly an attack on this old-fashioned idea of hell sherlock holmes jokes about in this investigation he might be up against the devil what the story does it disproves the existence of the supernatural hellish beast but it opens the door for other more modern understandings of supernatural phenomena it is odd isn't it that he should set this story in the theater of dartmoor which on one hand seems to me almost to epitomize the very early christian religion and yet on the other hand it keeps spinning off into weird and pagan beliefs almost everywhere you look yeah yeah this place where the primitive is always with us it's important i think that you get a sense that the ancient beliefs of the neolithic people maybe are not too dissimilar from the spirit beliefs that he's arguing for elsewhere whatever conan doyle's obsessions the hound of the baskervilles is a wonderfully potent story so potent in fact i feel the creatures brooding presence everywhere i look [Music] wait a minute and here he comes thundering towards me it's the hound of the baskervilles aren't you gorgeous no not gorgeous absolutely terrifying have one of these that's it the lovely hound of the baskervilles come on come and show yourself let's have a look at you look at that oh and very slobbery too the slobbery [Music] i promised you four-legged creatures on my wander through this formidable terrain but none say dart more more than these iconic ponies running untethered across the moors i truly feel i'm intruding on their turf a visitor on their land but what i want to know is how far back these beautiful creatures have adorned the wild dartmoor landscape [Music] well not all the animals on dartmoor are quite as threatening as the hound of the baskervilles are they well um not all except george when he's hungry um these are dartmoor ponies and they're renowned for their fantastic temperament being children's riding ponies but of course they have a long history connected to dartmoor i suppose in the old days they would have been working horses wouldn't they yeah i mean if you go right the way back through history they were used in tin mining you know this is the the old-fashioned quad bike isn't it yeah you know this is this is the proper quad bike she so wants to walk on but there is one question that i want to ask don't be impatient before we go which is do we know that there were little ponies on dartmoor a long time ago like in the bronze age well we do isn't that amazing pre-history and we have proof because in the 1970s there was a archaeological dig carried out on shore more on the other side of dartmoor and from seed samples that were taken they actually found some hoof prints and they were similar size to a dartmoor pony's feet so yes we had cattle sheep and ponies on dartmoor three and a half thousand years ago we've got the answer to the question now do you want to walk on come on in [Music] back on the abbott's way to sheeps to church and i'm keeping my ears peeled for a group of bell ringers who can help me figure out the baffling tale of nearby crazy whale pool you see dartmoor has no natural lakes so i think getting to the bottom of this aquatic conundrum might not be as easy as it seems [Music] [Applause] [Music] hello peter good morning good morning how long have you been associated with the bells in this church 70 years and were you the first of your family no father and grandfather both rung in this church so what's the link between the bells and the pool there's a lot of history and maybe some legend attached to crazy whirlpool parishioners wanted to know what depth it was grandfather said they had six bell ropes from this store to try and measure the depth but it ended in failure so it was even deeper than six ropes tied together yes it is mysterious isn't it there's a lot of mystery attached to it [Music] the sight of this bottomless dark water lagoon is marked by its namesake crazy whale cross this lake is so well hidden that when it's approached from the open heath it only reveals itself at the last moment [Music] there it is imagine a long bell rope dropping into that at 100 feet 200 feet 300 feet they still haven't got to the bottom 360. they've run out of rope and still it goes down and down infinitely deep [Music] the water board say it's a tudor tin mine and it's actually 16 feet deep the locals say that's rubbish the water board never measured it or if they did they didn't do their job properly but what it proves indisputably is that in a landscape like this you can believe anything you like even things which aren't possible at least not in the material world [Music] the hounds the pixies the occult leanings of conan doyle i've certainly encountered more than my fair share of dartmoor superstitions but even greater mysteries lie along the abbott's way up ahead i'll become spellbound by an ancient witch and find out who won the battle between a vicar and a savage beast [Music] dartmoor a land of sweeping views and enduring legends and as i follow the primitive tracks across this epic landscape i'm continually drawn back in time by exhilarating vistas that fuel the imagination then suddenly appearing like a mirage i'm halted by the sight of something actually very real somewhere where serving time comes with the territory surrounded by unrelenting wilderness you could call it britain's alcatraz and i for one am more than happy to keep my distance there's not much doubt what that is is the dartmoor the most infamous prison in the whole of britain imagine even if you managed to get over those perimeter fences what would you see in front of your freedom no just mile after mile of bog land wherever you went you would be able to be seen not much chance of escape no wonder today that single word dartmoor is still the epitome of gloom and terror dartmoor's prisoners time must have moved very slowly but not for me as the constant tick tick ticking tells me it's time i traveled on or traveled back i should say back in time beyond recorded history back thousands of years in fact this is maryvale one of dartmoor's most significant bronze age settlements [Music] maybe i'm a bit weird but this kind of thing in the landscape gets me really excited can you see that there's this long row of stones and it goes look it's got to be 200 meters in that direction but it's not just one row look there's a row here and there's a row behind it incredibly impressive huge amount of work and if that wasn't enough look we've got exactly the same here the twin rows of stones absolutely parallel to the first row and thirdly we've got some bloke who appears to be committing what looks like the worst archaeological crime imaginable is that a sander it's not a sander it's a scanner a scanner yeah what it's looking for is a micro microchip with hidden on this stone oh thank goodness yeah i thought there might be sandpaper on it i couldn't think of the word for the machine polishing it out yeah now unfortunately these stones are on the threat from a lot of our grounded artifacts especially ones in accessible locations from theft so to try and combat that uh we put microchips within the stones so if they do get stolen we'd be able to hopefully track them down so you put in a little chip like you would in case you've got dog gold exactly the same technology it's the same type of microchip that is ridiculous why would people nick these they're thousands of years old they're irreplaceable it's just so brutally stupid isn't it yeah what do you think they originally were uh i think these monuments are very complex they're associated with the landscape views they're setting in the landscape as well and the burial mounds just behind us we've got a stone circle and other canes in this area i think we've got a kind of approach like a medieval church it could have been a processional way up to venerate the ancestors and they can or it could have been venerating the landscape it could have been a territorial market so many different uses probably occurred at these monuments so in an odd way not that far removed from all the christian crosses that i've seen throughout here i'm not going to say anything else i just think this place is so wonderful i'm just going to wander around have a look at it okay nice to meet you cheers whatever the reasons behind these stone rose archaeologists believe a prehistoric community thrived in maryvale in what would have been a much warmer climate it's difficult to imagine now but this more land was once abundant with luscious forests and animal prey [Music] today's terrain is relentless and i have to pick my way carefully through the stones to keep my feet dry almost darnmoor's endless capacity to surprise though is about to offer up another arresting spectacle [Music] i've just come off my path a bit there's the abbott's way going all along the top of those hills there and suddenly it's boggy morass and i'm soaking wet almost up to my knees now but the reason that i came here was i can't go any further than this but i wanted to show you that that little tour thing is called the sphinx and just like its statuesque namesake this remarkable rocky formation attracted victorian travelers keen to see and as this victorian picture shows photograph the sphinx for themselves but liz you don't call it the sphinx do you i certainly don't nope that's known as vixen tour i think the sphinx is a relatively modern name it's been known as vixen tour for hundreds hundreds of thousands of years who was the vixen well the vixen that is the notorious witch of vixen tour called viksana pixarna what did she do she had a liking for travellers who were walking across the path that you were on on the abbott's way what do you mean the bog i've just been through yep that one the very same so she had a method of conjuring up a mist and luring unwary travellers into her bog when she caught sight of them she would clap her hands and cackle with delight and pull down the mist so the traveler was suddenly enveloped in this swirling mysterious mist became scared and before they knew it they were sinking deeper and deeper and deeper into vixen tour maya and she'd leap off the tour fly over on her broomstick where the fingers of the traveler would just be seen sinking into the bog and before they they disappeared she'd snap them off one by one snap snap snap snap and suck out the inside before running back up to the tour it's a great story i could listen to that all day there's another thing about this environment that really impresses me and that's the sense of time here you go if you've been walking for a couple of hours but actually you've got no idea how long you've been walking do you find that oh absolutely time disappears i i think it's one of the other magics of them all time stands still it has no meaning well unfortunately time does still have meaning for me i've gotta get on anyway very nice to talk to you if you hear a scream in the next quarter an hour you'll know what's happened thanks a lot bye big sunnah sounds like a right horror story [Music] almost on the outskirts of tavistock now if i were a medieval pilgrim i think i'd be ready for another sign that i'm on the right path [Music] standing steadfast among the golfers the seven foot high pixies cross may well provide spiritual guidance for players praying for a good shot it certainly is a miracle that the cross has withstood the march of time to stay on course [Music] pilgrims and monks used the cross to point the way to tavistock abbey and escaped prisoners from princetown were whipped at the cross as punishment in some ways though it's incredible that these crosses still exist at all with dramatic tales of total upheaval during the reformation the one that intrigues me most took place in the 16th century when henry viii got rid of all the monks and dissolved all the monasteries and imposed a set of much more puritan vicars in their place and the village of walkhampton got this particularly zealous vicar who was absolutely determined to get rid of every last religious icon every crucifix every statue of a saint every cross in his entire parish [Music] when he found out about the pix's cross he instructed his parishioners to destroy the offending granite emblem however with no volunteers forthcoming he took the tools and the task into his own hands so he's all on his own attempting to hack away the old cross when suddenly he hears this roaring noise and he looks down and there is a big black bull staring him right in the eyes with dribble coming out of his mouth and pouring the ground with its hoof and he clearly wants the vicar to get out of the way but the vicar isn't backing down and the vicar stares at the ball and the ball stares at the vicar and the vicar stares at the ball and the ball stares at the vicar and eventually it's night and neither of them are going to back down and eventually next morning all the villagers are gathered round and they're still this standoff until finally they managed to extract a promise from the vicar that he won't destroy the cross and they lead the ball away while the story of the bull of the parson may be just another of dartmoor's many legends it does hint at a deeper meaning something about nature versus religious obsession though in this case it was bullish persistence that ultimately saved this ancient cross [Music] my walk across dartmoor may not yet be complete but the final ticking of the clock is looming as i follow the old lich way of [Music] [Music] having laid the abbott's way to rest i'm now in the wake of the dead on the altogether more macabre old lich way this way of the dead was the final journey for christians who died on this more their religion meant that no matter where they passed away their body had to be laid to rest in consecrated or sacred ground lych is an old english word for corpse and a lich way was a path that they used to carry the corpses along on their way to get buried uh lich gate was the little gate in the side of a church that the corpse came through and a lich owl was another word for a screech owl because people used to think that the noise it made was an omen of death they'll lift me up and lay me down play me down gently down till i reach consecrated ground along the old lich way on route i encounter folk singer steve knightley who weaves this path's rather mournful undertaking into beautifully evocative verse [Music] some called the old litch way which sounds great when you sing it in a church or a cathedral and uh but it's it's sort of like old english and there's a piece of almost latin plain song in it yeah it mentions the places along the route where people would stop just to rest you can imagine carrying a corpse 12 miles is a pretty exhausting task but it isn't actually an ancient song no it's not an ancient song but it's very much in that style you know it's very much in that sort of timeless folk style if you like you know this area really confuses me because on one hand you know looking out here it's just burgeoning with life isn't it all the flowers coming out the leaves looking so intensely green and yet this is actually a way of death you imagine what it's like in midwinter here when you're carrying your nearest and dearest 12 miles lidford is that way to the to the west it would have been the most extraordinary i mean it would be a tragic way of uh of of taking your loved ones to be buried so lidford uphill is that where you're heading yeah uphill all the way see you all uphill good luck cheers i'll see you they'll lift me up and lay me down gently down till i reach consecrated ground along the old lich way and like steve these local actors have also been inspired by the old rich way as they recreate the dramatic procession of the deceased to a christian burial and the next life they too are reconnecting with the past as they negotiate the same primitive clapper bridges that once conveyed dartmoor's dead again [Music] it's compelling to think of the urban flow of generations of human settlement in a place so enduring as dartmoor the moors and woods bearing witness down the millennium and more so the magical and primeval westman's wood [Music] the name dart as in dartmoor is said to derive from derwent the ancient name for oak trees [Music] it's here i have my first meeting with a member of the order of bards ovids and druids by the sound of it a man in perfect harmony with nature [Music] andy that music is so appropriate for this wood isn't it yeah it's perfect isn't it um just the kind of soundtrack to a landscape like this and this is what dartmoor would have looked like before it was a mall absolutely this is one of the um the last remaining pockets of ancient woodland on dartmoor um and yeah once the whole of dartmoor would have been forest like this so really when we look out over the wild expanse of dartmoor we're looking at the ruins of an ancient wildwood are there any particular stories or folk tales that tie in this area with druids or druidism we know from roman sources that the druids were shipped in sacred groves and here we are in a sacred grove and this would have been a bit of woodland in the iron age so who knows maybe uh maybe there would have been druids performing their rights here on a full moon well certainly on an evening like this it feels as though they're still here yeah yeah well and indeed good to meet you yeah you too safe travels enjoy your pilgrimage thank you time is almost at an end as my path along the old lich way reaches the church of saint petrox been the time traveler in dartmoor discovering an ancient story where pixies and prisoners share its pages with standing stones and sherlock holmes and here we are the final resting place on this historic path along my journey through time to a place where time itself is written in stone i've come into this church which is pretty beautiful anyway isn't it um because i'm looking for a particular gravestone it was a guy called george routley i think it's just here he died around about the beginning of the 19th century and i don't think you'll be very surprised to hear from his epitaph that he was a watchmaker he departed this life november the 14th 1802 wound up in hopes of being taken in hand by his maker and of being thoroughly cleaned repaired and set going in the world to come what a creative way to end your days from someone whose craft marked the very essence of life and on that timely note my pilgrimage has come to an end well i finally achieved my ambition i've walked all the way across dartmoor and i think it's quite appropriate that i should have finished talking about a watchmaker because in many ways dartmoor is frozen in time isn't it with little flashbacks in stone and in words we've had literary stories old wives tales tales in song tales about the moor itself it is an extraordinary landscape and personally what i like most about it is the fact that even in the second decade of the 21st century it's still pretty much untamed [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been traveled for more than 5 000 years he's quite small isn't he he's small but he's mighty small but mighty hello walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts and romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend of all the archaeological finds i've come across when i heard about it my jaw actually dropped i'm on a quest to connect the clues and rediscover the stories hidden among britain's ancient pathways i want to find out what it is that tempts today's travelers to go back in time and rediscover these mystic tracks do you recognize the north star not the brightest star in the sky but it's probably one of the most useful it's been like me smell a leather you can still smell it 1900 year old leather isn't that absolutely amazing this week i'm trekking the ancient earthwork frontier that straddles the border between england and wales offers dying inspired by legends that transcend time itself my walk along this remarkable route will reveal a mythical monarch romantic scribes and a fearsome dragon these are the paths our ancestors once followed the ancient tracks that we in britain can still walk today [Music] my journey begins in england on the shore at sedbury gloucestershire and the southern starting point of something quite remarkable this is the mighty river seven you've got wales over there england over there and since 1966 they've been linked by that beautiful elegant bridge and i actually feel quite at home here because i used to live just beyond that big stanchion there in bristol and i still support bristol city come on you reds but that isn't the boundary that we're interested in today just beyond that big cliff there is another boundary between england and wales one that's existed for over a thousand years and is full of myth and legend it's time to explore offers dyke [Music] offer was an eighth century king who ruled over a large part of the english midlands then known as the kingdom of mercia office dyke stretches more than 80 miles dividing the two great nations of england and wales through centuries of tribal conflicts religious strife and local legends this ancient border has helped define what it means to be english and welsh [Music] i'm going to walk north from the seven estuary along the offers dyke path a modern reinstated version that follows the course of much of its ancient namesake [Music] on my trek i'll explore the borderlands between the ancient english and welsh kingdoms of mercia and palace finishing my walk as the dyke crosses the river seven again near welsh pool along the way i'll walk in the wake of romantic poet william wordsworth explore the subterranean resting place of king arthur confront wales's fearsome mythical emblem and ponder the priceless gold coin issued by king offer praise of allah [Music] offers dyke a massive ditch and bank structure has been around for more than 1200 years the earliest records of this formidable frontier come as early as the 9th century when the welsh monk assa wrote there was in murcia in fairly recent time a certain vigorous king called offer who had a great dyke built between wales and mercia from sea to sea [Music] a lot of people have never even heard of office dyke or i've only got a vague idea where it is and indeed it is quite difficult to find in the landscape for many of its miles although when you climb up on a bit like this and get to the top you are at the top of one of the most important monuments in britain this took hundreds of man hours thousands of people in order to make it in fact it's such a great piece of ancient engineering that a lot of people compare it with the building of the pyramids [Music] but unlike the pyramids king offers extraordinary achievements have in recent times faded from view it wasn't always this way other created this massive earthwork but he also created something else which is much smaller but is still remembered and it's this we've all got them floating around in our pockets haven't we the humble penny offer established the english penny which still exists over a thousand years later [Music] at the time of his death in 796 a.d the penny had pronounced offer rex anglorum king of the english but it actually represented this visionary rulers global ambitions when it came to currency and commerce i'll reveal more about this later [Music] few written records were kept at the dykes build though inevitably legends have flourished and the path over time has become an inspiration for an illustrious roll call of authors and artists before me that is who have walked its route [Music] at this next ominously named stop on my journey i've been promised a certain devilish sightseeing and a feast for the eyes of one of britain's most awe-inspiring views can you see that beautiful ruin over there that of course is tinton abbey and just below me down this rather hairy little path yep there it is that is the devil's pulpit this book was written in the 1880s by wurt sykes and he says near tinton abbey there is a jutting crag overhung by gloomy branches of the ewe called the devil's pulpit his eminence i.e the devil used in other days and wicked days to preach atrocious morals or immorals to the white robed cistercian monks of the abbey from this rock pulpit in other words here he'd be looking down at the monks trying to seduce them into doing all sorts of disgusting things but they were good and holy and noble so they didn't get juiced up at all and in frustration he stamped his feet and you can still see the marks on the top of the pulpit [Music] whereas if he'd been a little bit more cool he could have enjoyed the spectacular view couldn't he for the rather more serious-minded william wordsworth the magnificent intern and the epic walking tour that would lead him there were inspirations for his poetry but it wasn't any old poem he wrote it in the meter of someone walking along so he was reminding himself of how he felt when he saw it i've got the first few lines on this postcard here it's actually called lines composed a few miles above tinted abbey on revisiting the banks of the y during a tour not the punchiest of titles but i think you'll get what i mean about the rhythm of it five years have passed five summers with the length of five long winters and again i hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur once again do i behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky see what i mean [Music] i wonder if i like the tintana poem so much because i'm an actor and the the words in it are so muscular those words with consciously recreating the way he walked in the meter of this perm yes because uh he wasn't a person who sat down at his desk and wrote this poem was written a few miles above tinton so very specifically and the dates proved that so we know that he was composing as he went along and wordsworth would dictate his poetry like milton used to do um so he wasn't a desk poet he was very much an action poet in the sense that he would be as he was walking he would use the rhythm of his walk he was a prodigious walker wasn't he yes he was i mean he was a very athletic walker he walked a thousand miles across europe one summer on a kind of cheap grand tour and he could walk 20 miles without thinking about it what would tinton abbey have been like in those days well uh the ruins would not have been as quiet as they were now for example i mean when were words with us here there were beggars living in the ruins of the abbey there poor people who he wouldn't have met if he hadn't just got out there on the road that's right on that note i think i will say goodbye now if i cross that bridge there am i still in england no i think that's the gateway into wales so i wish you uh no blisters and good weather lovely to see yeah nice to meet you cheers bye as i cross the border and take my first steps into wales i'm hungry for a close-up experience of this glorious vision of gothic architecture the quite stunning tinton abbey was founded in 1131 and nestles in a valley surrounded by misty green mountains its dramatic ruins never fail to provide travelers with an unforgettable spectacle this [Music] hold me with my powerful hands willie wordsworth wasn't the only young artist to come here turner painted it and in the early 18th century a host of artistic young people flocked here when it was rediscovered as a sort of wild and magnificent cultural icon it's not difficult to see why they were drawn here we call them the romantics and if there's one thing this place is it's absurdly romantic it's like a beautiful dreamscape which they recreated in words and oils and poetry who wouldn't be inspired by tintan abby [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] is britain's longest ancient monument and even after 1200 years is still walked by today's travelers wanting to explore the rich history of this ancient border between england and wales i'm now following the track back across the river and back into england this is the doward in herefordshire a limestone hill around which the river y has carved a steep-sided gorge i'm in search of yet another regal legend but this time it's king arthur not offer i see [Music] sometime around the end of the 17th century there was a poor elderly woman who lived near here and she'd lost her goat and eventually she came to a woodcutter's camp which was here she asked the woodcutters if they'd seen her goat and they said well we're not quite sure but there is a cave just here and we think we might have heard a bit of bleating from inside it and in those days it was really closed up and she said well i i can't see anything can you can you hack a bit of the cave down so they did but what they did find was a gigantic skeleton of a man about 12 foot long and i don't know whether or not they managed to find the goat but they carried the skeleton out and it became the talk of the local area and i would love to be able to show it to you but i can't because they eventually took it down to bristol gave it to a chap called mr pie who was just about to go off on his ship to the west indies and stupidly he took the skeleton with him and the ship founded and the skeleton was lost so there is no tangible evidence but everybody around here believes that skeleton did exist and it was the skeleton of king arthur now whether or not it really was i have no idea but i'm not on my own today i've got a friend with me sarah sarah peverly sarah do you reckon those bones could have been the bones of king arthur it would be amazing to think that they were wouldn't it it would be absolutely wonderful because there's so many connections in this area with the arthurian myth you can almost tangibly sense arthur here can't you yeah you can i mean the arthurian myth has a pull on our islands generally um it crops up it gets rewritten lots and lots of times in moments of crises so whenever there's a big conflict in the country the arthurian myth flourishes again it's a way of reminding people that unification is important and of course sites like this are absolutely integral to keeping that myth alive because you've got that kind of otherworldliness about it it certainly does feel very otherwise incredible isn't it i mean you can really imagine lancelot and gwenevere cantering through this environment absolutely i mean this place is just so evocative isn't it it's it's got that kind of liminal feel to it where you've got the supernatural and the the natural worlds colliding you can imagine a fairy or a dragon living in such a cave i love that word liminal you've got the line between the mystery inside a cave and the reality of the outside you've got the two countries wales and england marked by that line of offers dike this area is quivering with liminality isn't it yes let's get out of here before we fall to pieces we may not have found king arthur in the cave that bears his name but there are bones hidden in its dark interior stone age people used these caves as shelter and flints used by hunters can be dated to more than 10 000 years ago it's these remnants of fantastic ancient beasts such as mammoths wooly rhino the jawbone of a wolf and these extraordinary hyenas teeth that really fire the imagination but i want to know if there's any scientific evidence to back up claims of king arthur's existence i have a feeling that news of some archaeological discoveries in a cave up ahead may give me some answers [Music] there's a killer path this is so skinny it's only a few hundred feet down there but it must have taken me the best part of 20 minutes to get up here tim what are you doing mate trying to stand upright this is really extreme archaeology isn't it it certainly is yes it does look pretty spectacular it's an amazing cave are there any human beings associated with it yes there are lots and two in particular the remains of two male individuals that date from about 600 a.d 600 a.d well that's that's perfect time for us it is isn't it the romans have just left yes the saxons have yet to arrive yes and it's it's it's a period for herefordshire in the welsh borders about which we know very little so we were very very surprised when the date came back as 586 to 610 a.d now what might that be at your feet well these are some of the fines tony um just like a comedy bone it certainly is isn't it i mean it tells you how well preserved he was that's a femur it is that's a bit bigger than mine definitely he was over six foot in his socks wow um this is most of his head um so again typical of the age um his teeth are very very worn wow you know when you've got your your teeth for 65 years plus and stone ground bread you're going to get through it that uh beautifully preserved well we may not have king arthur but we've got someone from the time of king arthur and that's good enough for me what an amazing find and yet more historical finds and ancient tales both real and imagined lie ahead and following the path north re-crossing the border into wales and traveling forward several centuries to discover the three castles built in the minnow valley as part of the norman conquest of south through the wales the border country between england and wales but it was william the conqueror who resolved to add an extra impenetrable layer to office mighty dyke to sort out those lawless welsh once and for all when william the conqueror came to britain from france he upgraded off his defensive line by putting in a load of castles along the dyke he knew that their sheer bulk and height would prevent his norman soldiers from being hammered by the force of the mighty welsh bowman these deadly arrows tore through the air and chain mail to strike fear into the norman invaders i'm intrigued that such a seemingly primitive weapon could create so much carnage i know that the normans were terrified by the welsh bow and the welsh bowman but what was a welsh bow well if we put aside the starry-eyed romanticism of the being a welsh longbow there isn't really a great difference in the in in the actual bow itself it's more from the material that it's made but more importantly the use of the bow how they were actually deployed by the welsh basically rebels guerrilla warfare fighting so this is a real guerrilla weapon yes it's not like king arthur's excalibur that unites the whole country this is like your ak-47 of its day it's not a precise sniper rifle but it does its job for a fight very quickly so are you going to have a pop at our little square bloke i think i can do that for you yes i'd like to see that okay [Music] [Applause] the bows the battlements and the skirmishes along this border were indeed unrelenting in those lawless times [Music] walking off as dike today offers a sort of no-man's land a chance to meditate about ancient warring nations and the nature of borders and then anderson caddock's church at langat at lingard which is in [Music] this beautiful whitewashed exterior may seem serene but within lurks yet another reminder of the bloodthirsty conflicts the return of another legendary warrior [Music] so all that white on the outside seems pretty authentic but inside it would have been a completely different kettle of fish you see this fresco which was discovered fairly recently all those reds and oranges i think in here it would have been a riot of color now that is saint george he sees helmet and see the plume coming out of it which is called a panache which i think is pretty appropriate and he is treading just about make it out i think on the red dragon now whether that is simply a symbol of good triumphing over evil or whether it's the english stomping all over the welsh i have absolutely no idea you can be the judge of that i'm not going there this is a hugely symbolic picture in so many ways it may be faded and partly lost but it's still extremely impressive and elaborate there's no denying how iconic the dragon is for wales as an antagonist to england really is a place potent in myth and legend where these national identities unfold the frontier for the imagination captured in folklore and verse and further along offers dyke literary giants international artists and a fantastic forest will proclaim the enigmatic beauty of this enchanted land [Music] stretching up to an impressive 18 meters wide and three meters deep office dyke is the immense eighth century frontier that divides england and wales as i walk the path that follows much of its course legendary and literary heroes weave stories that collectively define the relationship between these two proud and no nations better celebrates this storytelling tradition than my next stop i've reached hay bluff a prominent hill at the northern tip of the black mountains which straddles the border between england and south east wales i'm just coming down off hay bluff which is the highest point on the offers dike path it's a bit of a slog but it's really worth it because you can see all over herefordshire great views and now i'm going down there to visit one of my favorite events certainly my favorite festival in the whole world the dyke has led me to hay on why the town of boston half english half welsh and a modern mecca for lovers of the written word in a setting that has itself inspired so many wonderful writers could there be any more perfect place to celebrate the book this has got to be the biggest the most influential the best organized literary festival in the whole world i've been coming here every year for years sometimes just as a punter sometimes to speak or perform but i always find it quite intoxicating in every tenth there's a philosopher a political thinker a writer it's an assertion of ideas of discourse of talking of freedom and hope really just as each step builds a journey each word comes together to create a story and there's one particular travel writer who held the spirit of this land close to his heart no matter where he rode i'm on a mission hey is all about bookshops this one's wonderful it's like a bookshop of your dreams and i'm looking for travel writers whose travel writers along here a b c yes there we go oh of course would be right up high wouldn't it bruce chatwin one of our greatest travel writers english but inspired by the history and heritage of wales bruce chatwin's award-winning 1982 novel on the black hill told the story of twin brothers living in a bleak welsh farmhouse straddling the english welsh border and chatwin's insatiable wanderlust inspired much of his writings he once said man's real house isn't his home it's the road and life itself is a journey to be walked on foot i couldn't agree more [Music] chadwin died aged just 48 having only published five books but his reputation as one of our finest writers was already secured and his literary influence continues to this day you've written about this place haven't you i have i wrote running for the hills and if i could have done i would have called it on the black hill but unfortunately someone got there before you bruce jack would nick my title 20 years before yes and he dug up the dirt the stories the myths and the legends i have a whole swathe of hereford shown this side of poets and he takes it all and he puts it into on the black hill and it's wonderful in that it's the story of the place in terms of time which isn't linear but cyclical and goes with the seasons and that's how i experienced growing up here i think there is a deep truth there about how time happens in this region there must be loads of stories about this place it's thick with stories so we could start over there with the neolithic and we can move through the romans the normans second world war and right up to the current they're the best fields in the valley because there was an almighty battle between the english and the welsh down there and of course the blood according to my godfather soaked into the soil and made it i was so conflicted about alpha's diet on one hand it seems to me this very old ancient thing and on the other hand it's really quite young compared with an awful lot of british history isn't it uh it sounds old doesn't it the offer is it is old old english um yeah it sounds like a way back but then compared to around here i mean they we measured time in quite different ways i mean so this is old red devonian sandstone that we're standing on i think it's 365 million years old um and all this would have been a sort of shallow lake at one point in the player scene so no he's really quite recent isn't the old offer where's the border the board is directly behind us so you can feel the weight of the mountain behind us but the border here is partly a functional geography and partly a function of the mind there's always something odd about borderlands isn't it it is it's uh like the edge of an island really it's a shore between two cultures and you know what if we'd been up here 2000 years ago i bet someone like you would have been telling someone like me similar stories from the previous two or three thousand years it's a lovely thought as well as on the black hill borderlands also inspired bruce chatwin's seminal travel book in patagonia with its tales of welsh immigrants settled in the vast south american region that straddles chile and argentina and here on the crest of hergest ridge high up on the path there's a little piece of wales that will be forever well we should see [Music] this is typical borders country isn't it really brisk wind blowing got these fantastic views as far as the eye can see nothing at all growing but bracken well not quite nothing actually because look at this you've got this absurd clump of monkey puzzle trees why well apparently about half a century ago there was a local gardener who realized that the winter temperature around here is very similar to the winter temperature in argentina which is where the monkey puzzle trees grow naturally so he planted them and they've certainly flourished so in this funny little oasis you're suddenly in patagonia i'm sure bruce chapman wouldn't really have approved [Music] leaving this puzzling patch of forest behind i'm in search of a section of the dyke regarded by many as the finest on the route both for views of the dyke and the surrounding spectacular landscape that leads to flankfair hill [Music] but before i get there i'm stopped in my tracks by a beautiful oasis a riot of color on an otherwise verdant landscape and the woman behind this stunning floral scene connects yet another distant land with offers dyke [Music] this gorgeous little cottage hello oh hello hello it's fantastic how long have you lived here uh 30 years wow did you create this garden yourself yes uh yes i did with my family staggeringly beautiful thank you it's a bit wild oh the two things i i can see the dazzle of color and the big open sky wonderful open skies and i always say i live here because the earth meets the sky without interruption that's absolutely true were you born in england no i was actually born in uganda and i was ugandan refugee when i was a child so my family were kicked out of uganda and then uh i grew up in west london south all right southall girl uh but i couldn't wait to get back to somewhere that was rural because we'd come from rural africa and tabe by the lake and so i just longed to go go somewhere that reminded me of home and was home one of many tell me where land for harry hill is how do i get uh down this track and down the hill that's great hope you didn't mind me popping in no it's fantastic it's a bit unexpected though see ya thank you bye from uganda via london to offers dyke tahira has certainly come a long way to find her perfect home but the beautiful familiarity of the landscape belies the ambition of the man who gave the dyke its name king offer had a vision a desire to reach into the arab world and establish an alliance far beyond the borders of britain office dyke is a spectacular ancient earth work that splits the nations of england and wales many believe it's a defensive structure others show of strength made by the king behind its name while the 8th century king offer led the english kingdom of mercier through a golden age this progressive ruler had ambitions to spread his minders touch much further afield [Music] because we've got virtually nothing written down precisely who offer was and what he did remain a bit of a shadow but we do have two tangible pieces of evidence a dyke and a coin not the cute little penny which i showed you at the beginning of the program but an extraordinary gold one which is lodged at the british museum [Music] the gold coin of offer is a very significant object in the history of ancient britain the coin's design at first glance resembles the gold dinar but it is in fact not of arabic origin it was actually engraved struck and issued in england by king offer i'm enthralled about how this incredible centuries-old link with the arabic world came about you know of all the archaeological finds that i've handled over the years this is one of the two or three that when i saw about it my jaw absolutely dropped really i just think it's amazing and then what's written around the outside it says muhammad rasoolillah which basically means muhammad is the prophet of god that is so extraordinary 8th century and you've got this mercian king king of a third of england or whatever and he's got round his name on a coin that he's produced muhammad is the prophet of god yeah was he a convert to his love there's a theory that that happened but i think it's baseless really what do you think um if you wanted to trade with a civilization that controlled around you know the land around the mediterranean yeah you wouldn't need to use a gold coin so he thought well you know they use dinars possibly i can use one too so as far as awful was concerned looking across the english channel the muslim empire would have been massive wouldn't it well you're talking from portugal and spain south of france all the way across the top of africa middle east as we know it central asia all the way across to pakistan that's that's huge isn't it wonderful that you've got this tiny little window into offers life here we are standing on the dike and we now know that offer recognized that the muslim empire was out there and for some reason maybe a bit diplomatic he acknowledged it by writing about it on the outside of one of his coins exactly i think it's it's been lost in time it's it's a tragedy that we we don't know our past and our european history really now in the 21st century you know we still think muslims and islam is new but 1200 years ago it was there you know at the doorstep really and in inside europe right here on this dike they were aware of it that's right amazing [Music] one of the annoying things about doing a long walk like this is that the whole procedure does tend to get a bit insular you're constantly being confronted by the things close to you and even the horizon looks like you're looking at the whole world so it was really reassuring to come face to face with office coin and know that the man who built this dyke wasn't only thinking about this area but was in some way engaging with rome the far side of the mediterranean and maybe even baghdad and beyond the idea is tantalizing offers gold coin connects cultures across continents in an age twelve hundred years ago when such an achievement might be thought improbable to think what little we know of this enigmatic ruler if only his story had been written down but it wasn't and i must satisfy my curiosity with a walk along the great dyke that honors his name what lies ahead is a link that honors a much more modern like northwest of the town of knighton in central palace county named after the ancient welsh kingdom i approached the vantage point of beacon ring and i have time at last to reflect on this beautiful fertile land and my journey along offers dyke my intriguing final destination lies ahead at first glance this hill is just a dense circular wood flanked by jarring modern-day transmitter masts but there's more to it than that this would have been an amazing strategic viewing point in the old days but you've got england laid out in front of you there then you've got the border and you've got wales all the way along there it's called beacon ring but there's something rather curious about it it's an old hill fort but it wasn't just used in the iron age it's crammed full of history the britons fought the northumbrians here it was used in the war of the roses but look it's jam-packed full of trees you've got beaches you've got conifers what is a forest doing in the middle of an iron age hillthought and as i'm about to find out from a custodian of this beautiful welsh landscape this peculiar juxtaposition of the old with the new crowns this elevation in more ways than one paul i'm sorry to uh to disturb your work but this does seem a bit odd to me i've seen hill forts with one or two trees in but you've got you've got a whole cops in here haven't you well it's actually a plantation that was put here in 1953 and partly to commemorate the coronation of the majestic the queen and what would it have looked like well it's a combination of spruce and uh beech trees and the monogram e2r is picked out so you can see that from the air but you said it could be seen from the air but it just looks like a great big mound of trees now well it does from here and it's slightly overgrown um they've reached maturity and our program over the next few years is to try and uh remove them gradually as we have done here with the with the vegetation on the ramparts and return it to its natural grassland state it's intriguing isn't it we've got a bold statement by one monarch in the dike and then we've got a bold statement about another one on the hill fort which you're about to whip out we're going to gradually return it to its earlier natural state i think that's how i would put it have you mentioned it to the palace i'm afraid not no i should okay i mean i really should on the ground the effect is invisible from the air it's remarkable enjoy this unique view while it lasts [Music] trees spell out e 2 r elizabeth regina [Music] these trees are mere saplings when compared with offers dyke's amazing 1200 year history as i've discovered on my walk this ancient route defines the very essence of what it means to be english and welsh and will no doubt continue to do so for many generations to come this impressive frontier may have been built to draw a line between england's sword-wielding patron saint and the fiery red dragon of wales but over the centuries it served to strengthen the national pride and cultural identities of both these border peoples and allowed us step by step to truly celebrate this historic boundary i'm finishing my journey here where the flow of history meets the flow of a river like the ancient dyke a slow-moving river meanders between both countries blissfully oblivious to any modern border i'm at the end of my journey now this is welsh pool and over here is the largest sheep market in the whole of europe it doesn't look much at the moment but it's sunday so it's closed over here is the river seven i walk 90 miles or so and ironically i've ended up by the side of the same river as the one where i started this walk has been about trying to discover something about this strange border country that we call the marches and also to learn a bit more about king offer have i succeeded well as winston churchill once said in studying offer we're rather like a geologist who instead of finding a fossil finds only a hollow shape in which a creature of unusual strength and size undoubtedly resided [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled for more than 5 000 years he's quite small isn't he he's small but he's mighty small but mighty hello walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts and romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend [Music] of all the archaeological finds i've come across when i heard about it my jaw actually dropped i'm on a quest to connect the clues and rediscover the stories hidden among britain's ancient pathways i want to find out what it is that tempts today's travelers to go back in time and rediscover these mystic tracks [Music] do you recognize the north star not the brightest star in the sky but it's probably one of the most useful it's a bit like me [Laughter] smell a leather you can still smell it 1900 year old leather isn't that absolutely amazing this week i'm in derbyshire walking the port way a prehistoric path through the peak district i want to know what this journey across the heart of england can tell me about the history and legends of ancient britain through the stories songs and stone along its track [Music] these are the paths our ancestors once followed the ancient tracks that we in britain can still walk today [Music] the peak district is a geological wonderland of remarkable rock and stone so it's appropriate my journey along its ancient port way path that connects caves carvings and quarries begins at a rather imposing rock rich with local legends of the spiritual and satanic this is the hemlock stone some stories say it was an object of worship carved by druids while another legend had the devil himself hurled the hemlock at a particularly pious priest [Music] when you come straight at it out of the forest it does look pretty impressive but whether it's to do with devils or druids or a rather efficient piece of natural erosion the great midlands novelist d.h lawrence wasn't very impressed by it look this is a copy of sons and lovers from 1960 rather pleasantly racy cover that i think anyway he says about the hemlock stone it's a little gnarled twisted stump of rock something like a decayed mushroom standing out pathetically on the side of a field but rock and stone are key to understanding this part of england lawrence's ambivalence is perfectly in character but he protests too much this place is remarkable and the hemlock stone marks a perfect connection for me between the physical nature of this area and the people who lived here communities as resolute and proud as the rocks that shaped this land my journey takes me from the hemlock stone along the ancient port way track from the edge of nottingham through the magnificent mineral-rich landscape of the peak district national park with its diverse geological bedrock to one of the region's most dramatic viewpoints mantor along the way i'll enjoy the beautiful songs of this ancient land have a bird's-eye view into a terrifying abyss that unearth my very own hidden treasure i'll bless them i can see two little faces [Music] alongside d.h lawrence this magnificent landscape has inspired such other literary giants as daniel defoe and arthur conan doyle but way before these great writers immortalized this beautiful land the centuries-old path that i'm walking on served as a key trade route from the ancient bronze age right up until the middle ages so why is the port way called the port way well we're slap bang in the middle of england here so it's pretty doubtful whether they would ever have been an enormous medieval port anywhere around here i'm sorry this little gap was made for someone slightly slimmer than me this is the port way proper and it could be that the word portway is simply an anglo-saxon word for main road there is another rather cute idea that it means port as in a harbor or a protected place somewhere that was a haven for the weary traveler it's very poetic but i'm not quite sure how strong it is as an explanation however the land locked port way got its name this land's subterranean nature inspired conan doyle to describe derbyshire as hollow could you strike it with some gigantic hammer he wrote it would boom like a gigantic drum [Music] and the underground theme picks up here in the mining town of worksworth where inside mary's a beautiful 13th century church i'm about to see britain's oldest lead miner when you come to a little place like this you might well think why has it got such an enormous church and the answer of course usually is because at one time or another the area was making a lot of money and that's certainly true of works worth its money came from lead the interior of this church is like one of those charity shops that's so well stocked that when you get in there you can't believe your luck look at this carving which is set into the stone you see they call it the queen of hearts because of the heart-like shape of the body and there is another one on the other side of the door which is really funny but that's goliath and then there's tiny little david above him i really can't imagine that that david could have defeated that goliath can you and there's carvings all around this gorgeous church but there is one carving here that is very much simpler is actually my favorite in the whole church [Music] rosa who is that little chap right this is toad man of bonsol what man the old man to old man oh to old man yeah um a bunsel a bonsall which is a lead mining village just down the road from us what's so significant about him we think he could be the oldest representation of a lead minor anywhere in the world how do you know that's a lead minor and not just some bloke carrying a stick yeah he's got his uh pick and his kibble his basket for carrying the lead in it it looks like his lunch box yeah he could have taken his sandwiches as well yeah it's tantalising isn't it that we don't know how old he is he's like a voice calling us from the very distant past yeah it's a real mystery i mean it's sort of part of the beauty of him in a sense that we can't date him but it's sort of literally tracing um you know our ancestors he's quite small isn't he he's small but he's mighty small but mighty i like that thank you for me this small but mighty toad man represents the centuries-old miners whose rich pickings were traded along port way's ancient track the industry continued through generations with everything from humble homes to glorious cathedrals clad with derbyshire lead you can see the hardiness etched on the faces of these men who risked life and limb earning a living extracting this precious bounty they'd often be cut off from daylight for days at a time chipping and drilling away at some redoutable rock face this job is only for the hardest of the hard [Music] all around this area are hundreds of vertical lead ore shafts plunging more than 30 feet below ground but it's above ground where i'm about to experience my very own piece of classical rock wow look at that it's like the opening bars of a symphony they say that derbyshire's most famous export is derbyshire itself huge hunks of it being hacked off and sold you can see the evidence can't you all along this rock face picks and axes countless millions of them attacking these rocks and see up there see that that pipe blokes used to dangle from there on ropes and drill holes so they could whack the explosive in more money being made see i always think of derbyshire as completely landlocked with merseyside about 60 miles in that direction the wash about 90 miles over there but what these rocks tell us is that where we're standing now was once a prehistoric tropical lagoon that was teeming with life and is now full of tiny bits of fossilized sea creatures the most fascinating from my point of view being that that is the tooth of a little shark which once swam along the coast of derbyshire about 300 million years ago [Music] this immense quarry face provides a traveler like me with a glimpse into the area's fascinating past and it was the chronicles of one such fellow traveller that offered a unique insight he may be most famous for transforming his global journeys into the story of the world's most famous castaway but it was his homeland that provided inspiration for the travelogue a tour through the whole island of great britain it was of course daniel defoe i think for most people like me daniel defoe has always been the bloke who wrote robinson crusoe full stop but then he writes the tour what's that all about the tour i think came at a period of his life really towards the end he's in his 60s and i think the tour really is an accumulation of bits and bobs facts and figures and also his only memories and experiences of earlier travels around the country and he's accumulated all these bits and bobs and he puts it together i think in the three volumes that are the tour it's funny isn't it because today we're so used to bill bryson and all the other travel writers who go around britain reflecting it in a whimsical and ironic way but presumably in defoe's time there were many of these people well no there were a few travel writers but there were antiquarians so they were going to i'm going to tell you about britain's past but defeat i think was doing something new he was trying to give you on a kind of view of the country as a whole as it is now and also its future so it's partly a travel account but also partly a state of the nation what do you think of derbyshire derbyshire really interested in because what he wanted to get to and in fact what he does throughout the tour is to try and attack or critique the kind of ancient myths of britain he calls them the wonderless wonders what were they so uh there's places like uh elden hull there is uh mantour there's uh the giants tomb and and these places a lot of these places he sees as mere products of nature he says well this is perfectly natural there's nothing incredible curious about that we're explaining through rational means with his detailed and exhaustive travelogue defoe explored all around the peak district dismissing the so-called seven wonders and instead delighting in writing about the obscure both natural and man-made the defining profound experience for defoe would come at the end of a long hike to the atmospheric harbor rocks he'd been in search of a fabled giant's tomb but what he saw that day and what he scribbled in his journal had stopped this hardened traveler in his tracks defoe writes when we came close up we saw a small opening not a door but a natural opening into the rock and the noise we'd made brought a woman out with a child in her arms and another at her foot says i good wife why where do you live here sir says she and points to the hole in the rock here says i and all these children live here too yes sir says she they were all born here pray how long have you dwelt here then said i my husband was born here said she and his father before him i asked the poor woman what trade her husband was she said he worked in the lead mines i asked her how much could he earn a day there she said if he had good luck he could earn five pence a day defoe was awestruck he discovered a family of cave dwellers living a life of almost primeval simplicity they wanted for nothing said the writer it was a lecture to us all this stark truth sent him onwards questioning the very meaning of life [Music] the beautiful yet challenging character of derbyshire's ancient portway path is defined by people of indomitable spirit who have forged identities among its rugged landscape this influence and the working-class roots of one of britain's literary giants came to revolutionize the modern novel and shock the establishment to its core above the village of middleton stands mountain cottage the final home in england for an arthur to read the written word the creator of the semi-autobiographical sons and lovers and the notorious lady chattelli's lover d.h lawrence was born in nottinghamshire in 1885 the son of a minor but unlike many of his childhood contemporaries it would be words not rocks that the writer would come to mind frieda lawrence once said that if you wanted to understand her husband you had to know that he came from the midlands which he called the naval of england a strange black country with an underworld quality which is rather frightening which rather sums up how i've always felt about his work and it's this dark undertone that persists as i delve deeper into lawrence's life here in the peak district it's a lot more dynamic it's got two big universes stephen this is now a beautifully renovated house it is with these great bold artistic statements surrounding it but it wasn't all sweetness and light when lawrence was here was it completely different i'd imagine certainly he talks about having to break water on the well to get breakfast the eggs freezing in the pantry in christmas 1918. so it was a fairly rough fairly basic cottage i think he'd been expelled from cornwall along with his wife for suspicious activities why suspicious activity they thought he was signaling to german submarines when he hung out the washing and his wife of course was german and and an object of suspicion she had letters from germany via switzerland and uh clearly they were a very dubious couple how long did they stay here a year just a year i think they were both itching to leave britain and uh in in 1918 they they went abroad and effectively stayed abroad for the rest of the time and yet all the time that he was away he was writing about this part of the country wasn't it it's extraordinary isn't it how how vivid the memories were for him of what he called his heartlands and even his last novel lady chatelier's lover is set in a kind of derbyshire and possibly uh based on renishaw park near a bowl's over what do you think his legacy is well he's he's retained a lot of street credibility he's still the poet or or the writer of about animal liberation about animal welfare about industrialization about gender balance so he although he was writing 100 years ago or more he touches on topics which are still relevant today [Applause] while lawrence gave the oppressed and vulnerable a voice he and his wife freda continued to endure their own battle against discrimination here at the old lock up a police station turned guest house lawrence frieda who was listed as an alien had to report once a week during the great war and what's now the laundry room was once somewhere much more ominous [Music] now this may not look much like a prison cell anymore but it was the stark contrasting parentage of his barely literate coal miner father and well-educated lace-maker mother may well have shaped lawrence's love-hate relationship with his homeland he wrote the real tragedy of england as i see it is the tragedy of ugliness the country is so lovely the man made england is so vile but in the end it was lawrence's ability to create groundbreaking prose from this earthly influence that guaranteed him lasting fame far beyond these shores and in a way his unique lament for his motherland echoes through the ages reaching a new generation who share an impulse to instill a sense of place at the heart of their craft [Music] you huntsman that did hunt farewell you gallant forkness everyone the chief of all did live at smitten [Music] so to conclude both [Music] a lot of the places in the song are pretty close to here the place names are just they're the places are named so wonderfully for great meaning and great historical significance um and all of these places they kind of prepped up in everyday life where did you find the song well i've actually bought the book this is the holy book of derbyshire published in the mid-1800s it looks as though that edition was published in the 1800s i'm afraid it's a little bit worse for wear i've been carrying it up hillsides too much so it's the elegy and by leonard wheatcroft he was a schoolmaster the song has 19 verses so that song actually has 19 verses so you found the lyrics but you wrote the music i did i wrote my own tune to them which is very much within the folk tradition actually but i think it was kind of the the habit of the time um really to mention as many places as possible and it would become more popular in all those places because everyone wanted to sing about the place that they were from i know you go all over the world now don't you china nashville wherever do you come back here much i come back all the time i can't help myself there's some kind of historical ties to the land um but i just love them and i love the history behind them and for example down from mamtor you've got loose hill at the end of the edel valley and then across from there wind hill and loose hill is actually lou's hill originally and there's this idea that these two armies had a battle between these two hills at one point on either side of this valley and when hill won the battle and loose hill lost the battle so all of these place names and all of these places have such wonderful history and once you feel kind of tied into that it's very hard to leave those that are left the lord proves [Music] and just as bella hardy has woven beautiful music around the port way stories here in the picturesque lumsdale valley another history plays out amongst its faded buildings and encroaching forest this was where visionary inventor sir richard arkwright harnessed the power of nature and pioneered a new era in british history although there are only remnants left now these buildings were part of that huge explosion of productivity that we call the early industrial revolution it was here that the water frame was invented a massively important invention both for britain and overseas because for the first time it harnessed the power of water to spin cotton on an industrial scale at the height of the industrial revolution there were at least seven mills crammed into this narrow dale at the top of which still cascades a quite stunning waterfall the stones have long since returned to the wild and the water mills have relinquished their powers giving way to nature's original plan i too must move on while on the port way i've seen how man has imposed himself on the landscape but at the other end of this tunnel i'll find out for myself the story of the vengeful power of nature and a simply heartbreaking romance [Music] the landscape and history of england's peak district evokes a delicate dance between man and nature stones and superstition literature and industry and here back on the ancient port way track i'm constantly captivated by this beguiling balance between the old and new and near birch over at the base of cratcliffe rocks is a stone chiseled curiosity within which dwells one of derbyshire's most remarkable custodians in the middle ages travelers on the port way like me were dependent on the hospitality of strangers so the church came to their aid by employing locals to fulfill the task and the people who provided this invaluable service the humble hermit [Music] is on the side of this rock yep look there's a stone wall here iron railings i bet they're victorian and uh can i get in hey yep result yes christ on the cross about what four foot high and apart from this damage to the legs it looks in pretty good nick doesn't it particularly is it supposed to be 14th century a little niche there for the candle and this i think would have been the hermit's bed whoa it's not memory foam is it but when he woke up every morning the first thing that he would have seen would have been this emblem of the crucifixion in the 13th century pope innocent iv decreed that all such hermits had to be appointed by bishops they'd often be given servants and pensions not bad for a lone cave dweller there's no coincidence that the hermit lives so close to the port way he was actually paid to guide people along it how do we know well there's a place called haddon hall which is about four miles away and there's a note from its kitchen that says 23rd of december 1549 payment to yi hermit for supplying 10 rabbits and later on ye cratcliff hermit this is cratcliff paid four pennies for guiding of people to haddon [Music] i always thought of hermits as stern and solitary figures but the cratcliff hermit would have been a highly sociable creature constantly helping out the port ways lost or needy travelers like me [Music] today's travellers though won't be welcomed by a hermit to the nearby village of winston though they may enjoy the unexpected sight of a man dressed as a woman and a centuries-old tradition so old in fact that no one knows where it came from morris dancing [Music] isn't it wonderful that even in a region with as earthy and dura character as the peak district where men were men and women were women we can still stumble across something as magnificent as morris dancing [Music] [Applause] [Music] back on the port way now and back in character surprise surprise i'm heading back underground again as my journey draws me relentlessly into another tunnel so much about this view across the valley from monster head epitomizes the very ideal of romantic england but in 1863 its tranquility came to a crashing halt with the arrival of a thrusting new railway line and although it connected communities and attractive visitors not everyone was happy with this groundbreaking feat of engineering john ruskin who was england's foremost critic on culture certainly didn't hold back he said you enterprised a railway through the valley you blasted its rocks away heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream the valley's gone and the gods with it and now every fool in buxton can be in bakewell in half an hour and every fool in bakewell at buxton which you think a lucrative process of exchange you fools everywhere [Music] there's no pleasing some people but ruskin's reservations aside i think the midland railway line added something thrillingly dynamic to this landscape reaching across valleys and boring through mountains today though steam trains can only be seen in the archive this abandoned track has now been reimagined as walking routes and cycle paths teaming with whole new generations of travelers and like a moth to a lamp i'm drawn to the subterranean once again these are the tunnels of the montsell trail an eight and a half mile stretch blasted through the peak district with the distant light at the end of the tunnel i find myself thinking that this once pitch black feat of engineering was then the preserve of hurtling steam trains but now is accessible to all not least to one of derbyshire's favorite sons oh phil you're just puttering a lot i'm used to seeing you s speeding at the speed that's right yeah yeah i'm having an easy day today so it's really real nice i can tell you're local i can hear it in your ex yeah i'm sorry about it well i'd make no apologies to be fair i'm really proud of where i'm from and it's a beautiful part of the world you know i've been all over the world playing sport but i'm always glad to get back to derbyshire it's a very special in my heart do you use this place very much yes i've been along this path several times you know it's old railway line and now it's got resurfaced and it's just absolutely lends itself to pushing wheelchairs on and actually getting into the countryside which obviously wheelchairs and such like don't go through fields and well so this is like a nice corridor through the middle of nowhere which is absolutely amazing you know it's great what is it about derbyshire that gets you going well for me it just gives me a great sense of well-being you know you got into the country the people are really friendly always some all speak to you and smile and that and that's just nice it's just a nice thing it is fantastic when you go through the tunnel and come out the other side and whoa there's the light yeah i mean on a day like today it's beautiful yeah and like you say you know going through a tunnel it's kind of cold and dark in there and then you come out and particularly the other end where the you know where the viaduct is it's just breathtaking it's lovely i'll leave you to have a look okay thank you see you bye as i leave phil behind to reacquaint himself with the tunnel it's incredible to think what he would have been faced with a hundred years ago not now though the railway era is long gone and for locals this dramatic place has opened up a whole host of new possibilities and perspectives back on the ancient port way now and the drama isn't going to let up any time soon the pretty village of eem is about to offer up the port way's darkest story yet a tragic tale played out in all its beautiful stained glass glory in this 17th century church this is saint laurence's in 1665 eem was a pretty prosperous place very successful over 700 people lived here meanwhile in london plague was sweeping through the whole town in eem there's a cottage that we now call plague cottage and in it lived mrs cooper her two sons and a tailor called george vickers there's george down the bottom there with his scissors and his ruler he received a parcel of cloth from london which was damp so he opened it up hung it near the fire gradually the cloth dried out and presumably in doing so that activated the plague ridden fleas vickers was soon dying there he is on his deathbed and pretty soon the people of eam realized that they were absolutely engulfed by the plague they decided that they would have to make the ultimate sacrifice they would have to quarantine from then on the people of eem couldn't get out and the outsiders couldn't get in which was particularly difficult for these two people emmett siddell and roland torre who were lovers and they used to meet on either side of the quarantine line but gradually emmett's folk started dying six out of eight of her relatives had gone and she said roland we can't meet anymore because you'll get infected and you'll carry the disease out and so he walked away broken-hearted and it wasn't until 14 months later when the quarantine was finally lifted that he walked back into the village looking for his sweetheart and she died too the plague of raged for 14 months and claimed the lives of at least 260 villagers by the 1st of november 1666 it had run its course and claimed its last victim [Music] 350 years later we can only speculate why the people of em did what they did was it because of their christian faith was it out of hard headed realism was there a lot of peer pressure going on well i suspect all those three factors came into play but what we do know is that by making the ultimate sacrifice the people of this village made sure that the folk throughout the rest of the peak district wouldn't be swept away by this terrible disease i'm glad to be out in the open again but i suspect that won't be for long up ahead the port way has something else in store a plunge into the deep mighty rocks gouged from the earth mark man's intrusion on this epic landscape by carving out these cathedral-like quarries the people of the port way have fashioned an unlikely beauty from its rocky expanse but nature too has penetrated this rock-solid surface to create an even more awe-inspiring abyss [Music] the elden hull is a chasm that plunges 60 meters deep into the bowels of eldon hill eldon is one of the highest limestone hills in the area and dominates the landscape it was believed to be the fortress of the elves and the local people thought this bottomless hole reached into the very center of the earth and thus to the abode of the devil himself [Music] in the 1720s daniel defoe visited eldon hull and he was so impressed by its depth by sheer terrifying profundity that he said all the other natural wonders of derbyshire paled into insignificance compared to it he wrote what nature meant in leaving this window open into the infernal world if the place lies that way we cannot tell but it must be said there is something of horror upon the very imagination when one does but look into it and so frightening is this horrific gash you don't expect me to explore its inky depths i mean ordinarily i'd be up for it but for now i'll leave it to the experts i'll keep watch up here right you ready to go mate i'm ready off you go there so where we are now is here on the surface and then there is a 60 meter shaft down to this cavern place here and then there is another plunge another 60 meters down to some water there but we don't know that for sure off my army of potholers go to investigate the innards of this underworld [Music] it's no surprise really that in the past such a gloriously evocative place spawned so many dark legends wait there's something down there maybe just maybe i've bagged my first elves we got them yep we have two of them two fantastic from the blossom should we shall we go back up onto the surface and yeah can i have a look at them i'll bless them i can see two little faces oh whoa whoa whoa yeah it's only a young one isn't it yes i'm not surprised you want to bite me ouch yeah should we just let them trot round oh they're walking fine aren't they they should be all right that's a relief keep an eye on them though we don't want them going straight back down again are they the only birds you've ever found down there no we found birds down there a few times frogs is what we find mostly down there hundreds of them and what about animal bones because we know don't we that a long time ago the farmer was complaining they kept losing livestock yeah so all the time and so we've been digging this over the last two years and we've been finding animal bones all all the way down through the rubble and then made mayday bank holiday we actually found some human bones down there you're joking uh there's about 50 bones all together a full jawbone which is what you know we we knew they were human from that so dundee university checked him out to get an idea of of uh you know when it was that that they died but the very fact they were 16 meters down it must be 250 years ago do we know how many different individuals there was a there was an adult and a child are they going to be dated they are going to be dated so um nottingham university are going to be looking into that they're going to do some radiocarbon dating on it so hopefully soon we'll we'll have an idea well we may not have found any great archaeology this afternoon but we've rescued two birds what could be better here they go my newly liberated jackdaw friends will soon again have the perfect bird's eye view of this magnificent natural wonder while i however being a glutton for punishment have decided to plunge back once again into another rocky abyss in search of buried treasure [Music] the creek cliff cavern is a series of caves considered to be the finest of their type in britain and it's here where blue john britain's rarest mineral is excavated [Applause] gary hey tony joking me with that is there a blue john seam here gary well it's right in front of us just here in the wall what is it just this dark muddy stuff all the purple and the yellow you can see all that's blue john what is blue john it's a type of fluorite um in here it's a very rare type of fluorite you only find it in this one hill nowhere else in the world and it's also very good for ornaments and jewelry and things like that and why is it called blue john well it's a corruption on the on the words blue and yellow it was a the french who called it the blue and yellow stone back in the 1700s they were working the stone turn it into all sorts of ornaments and things like that and when they ran out of the stone they'd say send us some more of that blue and yellow stone over some blur and it got lost in translation yeah it became blue jean that's right you fancy you go all right yeah yeah let's go he's first of course you can hear that i'll try and catch it when it comes i was going to say i don't think come smashing on the floor [Applause] whoa there you go look at that tony oh that's lovely isn't it oh god bless you hold on that really is heavy isn't it yeah it's heavy stuff blue oh that's beautiful isn't it that face is great well done you're a minor so what will happen to it now it'll go outside we'll have to dry it out for a few months and then we'll decide whether we're going to turn it into bowls or jewelry you know earrings bracelets all that sort of stuff right i'll put my order in have a nice bowl please see what i can do fruit bowl okay for the bananas so yeah see you tony it's amazing to think that while dinosaurs stamped the ground above and supercontinents were still fused together this beautiful gem was taking shape millions of years of earth's magnificent violent evolution is embedded in its very fibre [Music] i'm heading back on the road for one last time to discover how one tarmac stretch has relinquished its ribbon-like appearance to the rugged beauty of mother hill or mamtor [Music] due to its constantly shifting shale this celtic hill fort is also known as shivering mountain its ceaseless battle against heavy rains causes smaller mounds to collect around its base and when remnants from a nearby lead mine were used to build a road landslides eventually terminated its track mann's engineering once again defeated by nature [Music] this is the a625 between sheffield and manchester well it was the a625 between 1819 and 1979. just imagine a little over 40 years ago this would have been rammed with cars and buses and caravans and police vehicles now it's completely slumped look on my work she mighty and despaired [Music] and so as i depart this wondrous wild terrain where dervish's ancient port way cuts across the peak district i've discovered how rocks and stones have shaped the people while mother nature has crafted its landscape humankind and the might of its industry have carved their own stories but ultimately millions of years of natural evolution will always have the upper hand this ancient place will continue to tell tales etched deep into the stone long after we're gone [Music] [Music] britain is crisscrossed by an amazing network of ancient trackways these remarkable routes are our oldest roads and have been travelled for more than 5 000 years he's quite small isn't he he's small but he's mighty small but mighty man walked by pilgrims and traders hunters and invaders celts and romans saxons and vikings each track is bound up in myth mystery and legend [Music] of all the archaeological finds i've come across when i heard about it my jaw actually dropped [Music] i'm on a quest to connect the clues and rediscover the stories hidden among britain's ancient pathways i want to find out what it is that tempts today's travelers to go back in time and rediscover these mystic tracks [Music] do you recognize the north star not the brightest star in the sky but it's probably one of the most useful sprint lively [Laughter] smell a leather you can still smell it 1900 year old leather isn't that absolutely amazing this week i'm tracing the roman road of deer street north from the english county of northumberland to the neighbouring scottish borders from hadrian's wall to the antonine wall i want to know what this journey from britannia to caledonia can tell me about the history and legends of ancient britain through the stories sounds and sights along its path these are the paths our ancestors once followed the ancient tracks that we in britain can still walk today [Music] i'm in the very north of england where a brooding sky meets a strikingly bleak and beautiful landscape stunning wild scenery stretches seemingly unbroken for miles and miles this is a borderland that was so strategic the mighty roman empire was compelled to build this great road one of their major arteries running north from york and crossing into scotland their auspicious plans forged a fascinating path and nearly 2 000 years later people can still follow its ancient course the anglo-saxons called this track deer street nobody really knows why although diera is the ancient word for yorkshire so maybe it just means the yorkshire road but whatever its origins this is no ordinary path this marks the site of the great road north built by the roman army between a.d 79 and 81. [Music] the romans were superb engineers constructing thousands of miles of roads in britain they connected forts and settlements across this rugged landscape and created a border that divided britain and ultimately defined the two nations of england and scotland i'm going to travel north following deer street through hadrian's wall before crossing the border into scotland continuing across the lowlands and finishing my journey west of edinburgh at another roman frontier the antonine wall [Music] along the way i'll contemplate the infinite night sky hear the call of the distant past [Music] experiment with poisonous potions and confront fearsome roman invaders my dear street adventure begins in northumberland as i approach britain's greatest roman monument hadrian's wall this iconic boundary was built by the roman army on the orders of the emperor hadrian following his visit to britain in ad122 the roman empire stretched all the way from present-day iraq over in the east down to the sands of the sahara in the south but its northeastern border was right here at hadrian's wall 70 miles long stretching all the way across northern britain this massive wall was a monumental mark to the power of the roman invader on this side was the safe stable roman province of britannia over here were the barbarians caledonians right here where i'm standing was as far as rome was concerned the very end of civilization [Music] britannia wasn't only protected by the war but by maze-like forts like this the incredible vinder lander this hugely significant archaeological site was built abandoned and rebuilt over the centuries and today archaeologists continue to unearth its many hidden gems most days you seem to find something amazing have you got anything today we do we have a lovely roman shoe from the side they're incredible because each one's a little window into the life that took place here but the most important thing first of all is smell a leather you can still smell it i really can quite clearly smell that that's leather how old is that again well this shoe is about 1 950 60 years old smell that get your schnoz around that viewers that leather is nearly 2 000 years old it's like quite extraordinary it is and it's very well preserved so we can pop it out the bag it may actually have walked up deer street possibly i mean these guys get to vindolando half of them at least by coming up deer street this is their main route coming up and down and some of the guys here actually serve as guards the governor of britain so that's their way to work each one of these shoes gives us incredible detail about the populations we're here because we have as many if not more women and children shoes from the forts than we have men's showing us is not just a male preserve their whole communities are here in my pocket here i've got a little bit of bronze that's popped out a little bit earlier piece of roman armor why is it so brilliantly clear well that's been found in the same condition as the shoe this is from anaerobic oxygen free levels so you get no rust no decomposition that's in the same state it would have dropped almost 2 000 years ago i could just stay here looking at your fines all day but i'm going to have to get back on my way again good luck with your hike it's cheers take care nice to see you to feel touch and smell the leather soles of the same shoes that walked along deer street is pretty amazing this is a tangible connection with the roman communities who made the arduous expedition and settled here at the furthest outpost of the empire and it's a contemporary literary connection that links hadrian's wall with the epic game of thrones during a visit here in 1981 its writer george r r martin was inspired to conjure his own colossal wall i stood up there and tried to imagine what it was like to be a roman legionary martin wrote standing on this wall looking at these distant hills it was the sense of this barrier against dark forces it planted something in me but perhaps the word barrier is misleading as i continue along the wall a succession of adjoining roman constructions makes you rethink your perceptions of this infamous boundary [Music] so what is this building this is a mile castle this is caulfield's mile castle and there would have been one of these every roman mile old whole over hadrian's wall and these are basically fortified gateways can we tell much about how it was built there were three legions involved in building hadrian's wall the second the sixth and the twentieth legions and they seem to have been divided up into work parties but the wall itself is pretty elegant isn't it well this particular milecast is beautifully made there's some very nicely dressed stones what i don't get is that the wall goes east west but there were still roads going north south weren't there beyond the wall it wasn't like the berlin wall where you had no activity between the two sides patrons always never intended to stop north south movement these mile castles were intended for people to be able to get through hadrian's war is built right the way through the territory of people who are living here quite happily before and there was always going to be movement backwards and forwards so hadrian's wall actually welcomes the passage of people goods and livestock my ideas about this frontier are certainly being challenged and as i return to deer street my walk continues to retrace the footsteps of those ancient travelers who used to trek along this untamed terrain so how did you know how far you'd gone along dear street well every thousandth double step i suppose that's a double step they used to put up a cylindrical marking stone and as the latin for a thousand is m-i-l-l-e this is a roman miley stone but not only did it have on at the distance covered it also had the name of the emperor who was around when it was carved although frankly this one's been so eroded i don't think we'll ever know who commissioned this it's only just been found and it's been re-erected it's rather nicer isn't it and at least it means i know that i'm on the right road my ancient satnav set to north i head into the otterburn ranges a place where natural beauty meets the battlefield and where the tranquility of this stunning landscape is frequently broken by the sound of gun fire and low-flying aircraft for this is one of the uk's largest military firing ranges the land is tightly controlled by the ministry of defense so i've been given special permission to enter the battle prize and the sound of war have been piercing this silence for centuries long after the romans had left this was still the major north south political route this was the road up which the english came when they wanted to put down the scots for instance in the year 1298 the english king edward the first known as edward longshanks marched up here with his army when he wanted to put down the rebellion led by the legendary william wallace sir william wallace was scotland's braveheart a patriot warrior who embodied the very essence of scottish independence and rallied the troops behind his banner in july 1298 the scottish and english armies met at a decisive battle near falkirk where the scots were defeated the sun had finally set on william wallace's fight for scottish freedom and under the very same sky that i'm walking now an epic moment in scotland's misty past drifted into history and folklore if archaeologists want to reconnect with the ancient past they just dig a hole right but here on deer street at night i can do the exact opposite i just tilt my head back and i can make the most authentic link possible with my long lost ancestors by looking up at the night sky [Music] this window on the past is one of britain's most spectacular and protected stargazing sites i know the stars aren't static but would the constellations the romans saw be pretty much what we can see up there now uh very much saying many of the constellations we see were named by the romans and many of the planets like um mars the god of war venus the god of beauty what was the significance of the stars to the romans i think many people when they looked up at the night sky they were trying to work out what was going on but they're also trying to use them to predict the future so i think astrology was big in roman times as well and then also um navigation they had a huge empire and to navigate from one place to the other i'm pretty convinced they must have used the stars it's funny isn't it i i'm trying to make an imaginative leap of 2000 years but that's peanuts compared with what's up there well if you take into account that our galaxy the milky way contains 300 billion stars and it's about 13.6 billion years i think yes or 2000 years is a bit of a drop in the ocean there is an immense joy in just looking up and with all our street lights and everything else we sort of lose track of that and just sort of the movement of the stars the changing of the seasons it keeps us grounded somehow yeah so by looking up we get a better understanding of our place do you reckon that one might be the north star it's hosted because we haven't got that many stars out there but it's pretty far north i think you're right i think that is the north star yay it's not the brightest star in the sky but it's probably one of the most useful sprint like me [Laughter] the universe has no boundaries but back on deer street the end of england and the call of scotland lead me to ask seriously what is a border anyway [Music] with britannia behind me i can almost hear caledonia's call [Music] i'm continuing my journey north along the ancient roman track of deer street towards scotland people who make this anglo scottish commute are familiar with the crossing at carter bar but i'm venturing a few miles east keeping on my dear street path to unite with a fellow walker and someone who might help me work out why a border is a border it's pretty good walking down there isn't it it's lovely fresh fresh and breezy and clear and not raining [Music] it's another roman camp over there that lozenge-shaped thing yes i think it's probably three overlapping roman camps and according to the map there's also roman fortlet that skyline is more or less the border between scotland and england following the watershed do you know even if you hadn't told me that was the border i think i would have sensed that in some way it's border country yeah it's kind of wild and untouched isn't it and that's why they presumably decided they'd draw a line and say there's this side and there's that side and there's this this no man's land in the middle when you say wild did there used to be a lot of smuggling border reavers that kind of thing yep yeah the fact it was unpopulated made it quite easy for the the raiders from either side to drive away their neighbors sheep and cattle and horses they'd come over at night and uh round them up and when they got hungry the women fake would serve a dish of spurs on the table say there's no food here's your spurs get riding we need more mutton on the table should we get our spurs on and get to the border let's do that yes and as i approach the border i can really sense a unique identity here personified in history of course by the wild spirit of the border rivers these fearless clans emerged in the middle ages to rebel against both the english and scottish crowds somehow the border didn't divide the people living along it but united them is this it it is indeed there's the promised land that way it's a bit of an anti-climax well that's what you say it's a land of milk and honey well it may be but you don't know it's the land of milk at home it doesn't say scotland there and england on this side of the gate it's nothing it's it's better marked here than some places along the border some of the wildest spots is the odd rotting fence post sticking out of a bog and that's all you've got how long has this been the border this bit it probably since the middle ages but there's other stretches where it wasn't decided till the 18th century when the lawyers of the landowners neither side got together to decide what was the borders of their estates this may seem slightly heretical but given that we're not fighting each other anymore at least not for the moment is there much point in a border well generally speaking they are fairly arbitrary lines on the map and the way that they're used in the world today is as if they um supply some kind of moral authority yeah as if you on that side are the undeserving we in this side of the deserving and you talk to people they don't identify themselves as scots in english they might either describe themselves as borderers or reavers i suppose i better get on and head into the heart of scotland yep good luck on your journey [Music] so borders define a sort of no-man's land or perhaps more of an every man's land where people can live peacefully side by side with barely a thought for a dividing line [Music] pushing north now and still following the ancient roman road i've arrived nine miles south east of the town of jebra to find an ancient celtic earthwork this mighty hill fort looked down on the roman road where thousands of roman soldiers would have marched by a stone's throw from its ramparts surely then this is where centurions and caledonians would clash a battleground strewn with fallen warriors on top of that hill is a massive iron age hill fort called woden law which would have been built by the local people who lived around here the path along which i'm walking which you can't really see because it's covered by grass is deer street which was constructed by the roman army so what's the connection between the two when we made blackadder back and forth in the year 2000 we were all the romans on hadrian's wall and charging towards us came about a thousand red-headed men with beards and kilts that to me is how we english see the caledonians is there any remote truth in it oh no no no no there's a whole series of myths bundled off into that um i mean one of the problems comes from the very name itself caledonians is a name we know from the roman sources but it does seem to be an iron age name it's originally a celtic word it means the hard men or the shriekers hardman shrieker my point is made partly true but it's in the 19th century the word gets used to mean everything north of hadrian's wall so who would the people have been who would have been living between present-day edinburgh and hadrian's wall the only sources we have are roman ones and how much do you trust the romans because of course they're writing propaganda they're not writing history but if you trust them you'd say the people around about here were a group called the sul govai what would the selgova have been like what we know really comes from the archaeology and the archaeology gives quite a good picture of the iron age in this area changing through time so middle of the first millennium bc they're probably living in hill forts like that by the time of the roman period they're living in smaller farmsteads small communities with a central place where the tribe comes together would they have had a relationship with the romans they must have done surely there must have been something you don't put that many thousand soldiers back and forth through a country without some kind of relationship and one of the relationships will have been soldiers buying or extracting supplies from the locals so rome is a threat but it's also an opportunity yeah they've got nice stuff you have a market you can trade for things you can take some of these wonderful roman raw materials melt them down turn them into their own stuff and they develop a lifestyle that mixes the roman and the local in this frontier zone this edge of empire and you've found evidence of that yeah we find it especially in roman artifacts coming off iron age sites it's a lovely example from a wee pharmacy just over there and there they're making local prestige goods really flashy bronze horse gear they're also making roman broaches [Music] these very marketable objects discovered near deer street revealed that the indigenous people of the scottish borders were in fact using the roman road to trade goods and while doing so they absorbed the exotic styles of the roman empire and created their own unique frontier culture [Music] after the romans left deer street still remained in use for a long time didn't it yeah in the medieval period if you wanted to have a ramy head down deer street first stop corbridge burn it to the ground the roman roads were the best roads in this country until the 18th century many of the would-be kings around this area are taking on latin names or using the latin language and the church the church is a good example early christianity draws heavily on roman models so long after rome is a threat it's still an idea in the mind and in fact the landscape the romans marched through would still have resounded to the sound of this iconic celtic instrument called the karnix the fear of an indigenous culture swept away by the might of the roman empire seems to be encapsulated in its haunting calls this magnificent instrument has been rediscovered recrafted and brought back to life the ancient cry of a far-off people and the end of an epoch as the romans marched in this really is an epic place and as its extraordinary primeval whale sends me off along my dear street path i'm off to witness the restoration of scotland's ancient landscape absorbs to water scots spectacular views and ascends the tantalizingly named fatlips castle [Music] the romans marched on northwards with the caledonians wisely learning to coexist the way was paved for a rather less fearsome and rather more efficient invasion of the scottish lowlands [Music] and just a few miles north of the english border is whitten edge a spectacular feat of engineering that cuts dramatically through the landscape providing travelers like me with a walker's paradise [Music] this was the major road north between the first and the fourth centuries and it's easy to imagine isn't it the legions leaving york and marching onwards and onwards and onwards until eventually they disappeared into the misty realms of caledonia as you can probably see i'm rather enjoying myself so many roman roads have been covered over with tarmac over the years so to be on this flat straight very very ancient road is frankly a bit of a buzz [Music] everywhere the roman legions conquered they utilized the natural resources to meticulous effect they quarried local stone to build their roads and walls hunted the landscape to feed their armies and cut down trees to construct their forts it's incredible to think that thousands of years before the romans this landscape was blanketed in forests of birch hazel and pine by the time the romans arrived at least half of the natural woodland had been stripped away today only four percent of scotland is covered with native trees in order to redress this destruction today's dedicated ecologists are embarking on the mammoth task of restoring scotland's ancient landscape i'm swinging west of deer street to this 19th century sheep pen or stell to meet one man with a commitment to reclaim the past [Music] it's not a bad old view is it not bad considerably different than it looked less than 20 years ago all this up until millennium day 2000 was all bare open sheep walk not a tree to be seen a few tiny little clumps left only in places where sheep and domestic stock could not gain access how did all this start then this started with a group of us we have planted circa 600 000 native trees and shrubs how did you know what to plant we were able to analyze the pollen record stored up in a high peat bog and this record goes back about 9 000 years from that we can then extrapolate what we think the most common species were and roughly what kind of soils they were on could the stuff that you've introduced adversely affect the ecology that was already existent since we have started managing this everything has got markedly better there is more of everything you've got vast areas of heathland recovery heather blabery on the tops you've got alpine and notable flora they have all now came down slope and are colonizing previously bare ground was this a lot of softy lefty ecologists sort of yes really a bunch of tree huggers who want to do some trees to hug what kind of animals and insects do you see around here now that you'd have struggled to find 20 years ago huge explosion bird life largely due to our planting trees and the insects that then use the trees all the plant life now is now flowering regularly under grazing a lot of plants never get a chance to flower [Music] you're not some southern hippie who's come here telling scots people what to do though are you quite definitely not i come from generations of border shepherds and i'm in fact the first in my family not to become either a shepherd or a cattleman here in the southern uplands of scotland so essentially what you're doing is the exact opposite of everything that your family has devoted their lives to how did they feel about that my father actually passed away lifelong shepherds i'd want him round to the idea and his sort of exact quote was luke sun plant your bloody oaks the sheep are done really and plant oak trees he has producing this panorama of indigenous plants and trees and i'm delighted too to help revive this ancient landscape what is it they say about small acorns so this little fella is going to become part of the woodland community yup so i whack it with my heel a bit yes see how naturally i planted that yeah it's not bad i'm gonna go now i've been slightly midge bitten and i'm a bit wet but it's been worth it isn't it yes thanks for looking after me [Music] today this land is of course at peace but some of the most iconic buildings in the borders were built as great fortifications to maintain control of the scottish lowlands one such edifice is this much-loved local landmark it had fallen into a sorry state of disrepair but much like the replanting of the lowland forests restoration work has sympathetically revived this rather seductive sounding structure [Music] this place is actually called fat lips castle and nobody quite knows why but i've been given three different explanations see which one you think is the most plausible number one is that there used to be wild goats around here that had fat lips and one particular goat saw the english coming and bleated so loud that it warned everyone in the castle the second one is that the family who owned it had hereditary floppy lips and the third is that one particular owner used to like snogging the women as they entered the castle which one frankly i think they're all rubbish cartons like this were built throughout the scottish borders and used as lookout points and places of refuge they gave warning during centuries of turbulent clan feuds and english invasions [Music] well we may not know how it got its name but it's pretty obvious why it was built here this is border country and you needed something strong and defended something that would make sure that no one could ride over the hill come up here and give you a fat lip [Music] i could stay up here and enjoy this spectacular view all day but more architectural gems lie further along deer street's ancient track i'm continuing north to the river crossing near melrose the site where centuries of engineering excellence converge in this field full of crops which look to me remarkably like turnips there once stood a mighty roman fortress called trimontium which was built in order to protect the crossing of the river tweed which flows all the way down there you can see that bridge which the victorians built in order to let 19th century travelers cross it it does have something of the roman about it doesn't it it's well engineered it's confident it's massive but sadly like the roman army it's now history [Music] this magnificent 19 arch leaderfoot viaduct once conveyed railway passengers across the river tweed now the railway is no more so i've got this extraordinary brick colossus all to myself today as i stand on this bridge and listen to the burbles of the river tweed i can bask in the delights of the serene scottish borders and in doing so i'm walking in the footsteps of a true scottish legend a man who spent a lifetime embracing the wonders of this region and whose classic historical novels include ivanhoe the lady of the lake and the robin hood of scotland rob roy it is of course sir walter scott this place is called scott's view and the story goes that sir walter loved this panorama so much that whenever he was passing he would stop here until eventually his horses would pull up without being given any instruction to do so and even when he died in 1832 and his funeral cortege was going past on their way to dribra abbey which was his last resting place the horses just stopped walter scott enjoyed traveling through the borderlands collecting stories poems and songs passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation and it was in his mythical landscape that he built his home the truly breathtaking abbotsford house this remarkable residence encompassed everything scott adored about his homeland and this love of scotland was immortalized in verse he wrote very enthusiastically oh caledonia stern and wild meet nurse for a poetic child land of brown heath and shaggy wood land of the mountain and the flood land of my sires what mortal hand can air untie the filial band that knits me to thy rugged strand from the modern point of view this house is a bit balmy isn't it it is a bit scott himself called it his conundrum castle it's very much an antiquarian's house and in one sense scott takes that very seriously because he's passionately interested in history but there is a part of him where he's poking fun at himself he knows this is a bit overdone he was so successful wasn't he um he was the jk rowling of his day in terms of sales throughout the 19th century down to about the 1880s scott outsells everyone else what do you think it was that people liked so much about his work at that time he's one of the people that brings back ghost stories the gothic at a time when scotland is beginning to be seen as a place that's primitive and attractive scott is writing about these wild and wonderful and mysterious places and he's also a great teller of ripping yarns is it fair to say that he was one of those late 19th century people who reinvented a notion of scottishness if not for the scots certainly for the rest of us part of scots genius and even though today sometimes blamed for creating a version of scotland scotland with two t's scott following robert burns is the man who broadcasts to the wider worlds the notion of what scotland is which still substantially we have today this custodian of scottish history and cultivator of caledonian culture will be forever revered among his compatriots and as i travel further into scotland's law i'll be finishing my journey at the water's edge if i don't fall foul of an ancient potion first in medieval times this section of the ancient roman deer street between edinburgh and the abbey town of jedbra gained the latin name via regia or royal way it was in fact by then a very important route of pilgrimage and here at its midway point scotland's king malcolm iv founded a resting place for weary travelers called sutra isle deer street and via regia transported not only pilgrims great armies and livestock into this area but also herbs and spices from the far-flung corners of the globe it may seem like a desolate place today but sutra isle was once a center of medical excellence the largest hospital in medieval scotland once stood here just by the side of deer street it was run by the augustinian monks and it was surrounded by vast church lands which funded its medical activities it's just a tiny little byway now but in those days it would have been full of travelers and pilgrims imagine the sounds and the smells and the noise not like today guys [Music] augustine monks were actually the leading practitioners of herbal medicine they were completely self-sufficient growing their own herbs for both the dining table and the infirmary incredibly more than 200 different plant species some used in medical application have been found at the sutra site this is wild hemlock a poisonous little beauty that still survive from those ancient times i'll leave the sampling of that to someone else [Music] and today just north of sutra at edinburgh's royal botanical gardens playing with potions comes with the territory modern-day botanists have recreated the hospital's ancient herbal garden cultivating this quite dazzling display of herbs poppies and of course hemlock i'm about to take part in a cookery class from the distant past and rather riskily i've offered myself up as a guinea pig for a medieval potion made from delicate red poppies [Music] the poppies are our homage to a an ancient medieval formulation that was known as dwell and it included opium poppies which these definitely aren't these are our common red fuel puppies but the dwail itself had opium poppy hemlock hembene mandrake root so all the really quite potent herbs it would knock you out for hours about 12 hours and it was used as an anaesthetic an anaesthetic i find that really interesting actually because for years i've been making documentaries about various aspects of medieval medicine and the assumption always is that everybody who underwent any kind of operation would be screaming with agony no they weren't they were out for the count and for hours on end and and if this noxious little nostrum didn't kill them they would regain consciousness and they would make a full recovery just minus one or two limbs perhaps you do realize you've just debunked 12 years of my work sorry about that tony but we're not going to make some kind of killer anesthetic we can make a very simple very safe red field poppy syrup so it's just a small amount of the field poppies going in to warm water gotta change the color yeah this is our indication that some of the compounds are are coming out of the poppy how does this do that's done we can strain out the petals of the it's poppy lovely color exquisite yeah really nice we're going to add sugar when this dissolves we'll have our red field poppy syrup there we are wow that was very nice i could put myself to sleep with this yeah absolutely can you imagine taking that just before you snuggle down into bed at night that would just bring you a very restful sleep thank you very much very welcome [Music] there's no rest for the wicked allowed anyhow i need to keep a clear head if i'm to reach the end of my walk [Music] i can feel in my bones that we're nearing the end of deer street it must have terminated somewhere around here because we've got to the sea that's the firth of fourth [Music] we think it probably ended just up there at crammond which was a key strategic roman force although the only evidence of the romans left there is some shadowy earthworks next to a church actually that's not quite the only evidence it's a bit of a struggle to get up here can you see that sign that historic scotland have put up the worn carving above has been supposed to be an eagle carved by the roman garrison of crammond whether it is an eagle or whether it's even roman is uncertain that is roman isn't it that is definitely roman couldn't be anything else well i'm convinced you certainly need to be eagle-eyed to be absolutely sure [Music] but one thing is certain kramend served as an important strategic harbour for the roman garrisons who were stationed along yet another imposing war the mighty roman empire was defined by its ever expanding borders and in 140 a.d just over 20 years after the construction of hadrian's wall his successor antoninus pius made another push a hundred miles north building a turf and timber frontier between the firsts of clyde in the west and fourth to the east but the antonine wall turned out to be the roman army's final assault into caledonia and in the end nothing more than a last gasp for the mighty roman empire presumably the antonine wall was built to protect the province of britannia from the caledonian hordes but within 20 years this great bulwark this wonderful engineering project that was pushing the roman empire forward and attempting to stabilize its northern border had failed and the antonine wall was abandoned then the roman army went into retreat back down deer street until finally they got to the safety and security of hadrian's wall once again i've been on a wonderfully epic journey along deer street's ancient roman road the connection with land and history is tangible from gazing at the boundless night sky to contemplating centuries of bloodshed and a haunting call from the mists of time like all great journeys this has been an experience and an education a chance to reflect on deer street and the britain it dissects i've always known that somewhere around about the scottish border there were two massive walls which stretched from coast to coast and were built by the romans but it's only now i'm beginning to appreciate that that's only half the story because at right angles to those walls are roads roads which people have constantly rebuilt and maintained and unlike the walls they're not about stopping people preventing them from having access the roads are about movement they're about cultural exchange it's roads that unite us roads that give us knowledge and trade ultimately it's roads that civilize us [Music] you

Channel: TRACKS - Travel Documentaries

Views: 185,705

Keywords: classic history, ancient history, walking through history, sir tony robinson, ancient paths, documentary history channel, ancient roads

Id: 5RvE7b7tZYM

Length: 324min 51sec (19491 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 27 2022