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REVIEW BY CHRISTOPHER EVANS
Thoroughly researched and well-written, this is simply a very good read, one informed by its author’s long experience of archaeological fieldwork. In it, Mackay tracks down the route of Boudica and her rebel followers, as well as the legions that tried and eventually succeeded in squashing the revolt. As its title announces, various journeys structure the account. Unlike, for example, W G Sebald’s and Robert Macfarlane’s renowned ‘walking books’, Mackay’s treks are not just by foot, but also by car, bicycle, and even train. Punctuated by extensive quotations from Tacitus’ and Dio’s accounts of the rebellion, these dual narratives – Classical sources and Mackay’s personal chronicle – are what drives the volume.
Clearly aimed at Boudican aficionados and ‘informed’ lay audiences, its format follows a pattern that for some time has been widely employed in more popular history. While accrediting relevant individuals and key publications, referencing proper is kept to endnotes (allowing the text to flow), and illustrations – one map aside – are confined to an eight-page colour-plate inset.
Arising from his archaeological background, Mackay has a well-honed eye for landscape, and is strong when exploring the nuances of site-find assemblages (for example, the Snettisham Hoard and Colchester’s Fenwick Hoard). His appreciation of below-ground depth, and the extent to which things lie buried and have been lost, is informative – particularly in the case of Londinium where, when descending into the Underground or a Marks & Spencer basement food hall, he relates their levels to what had lain there at the time of the revolt.
In Chapter 7, he cites M R James’ short story ‘A View from a Hill’, with its time-travelling Victorian antiquarian, and later returns to the story’s line of ‘seeing through dead man’s eyes’. Echolands has its personal and ancient ‘ghosts’, and abounds with imaginings. This enables sites, such as Stonea Camp, Longthorpe’s Roman fort, and Colchester/Camulodunum, as well as the book’s key events, to convey the perspective of both Roman soldiers and the rebel natives.
The book is obviously the fruit of a long-standing quest on the part of its author: he describes himself as a ‘hunter of AD 60’. It also reflects his interests in military history generally. Detailing battlefield tactics, both sides’ atrocities, and subsequent vengeance, analogies are cited from more recent British campaigns (for example, the Indian Mutiny, Isandlwana, and the Somme). Chapter 8 includes a passage from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, quoting its narrator Marlow’s line that the Thames ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth’. Mackay clearly wants to frame the era of Britain’s Roman Conquest as ‘dark lands’, comparable in respects to the colonial Congo. While lightened by Echolands’ personal narrative style, what Mackay is essentially chronicling is a period of the nation’s ‘dark heritage’.
Falling hard on the sacking of Londinium and Verulamium, in Chapter 10 we get to the crux of the book and the location of the revolt’s final battle. Acknowledging Grahame Appleby’s 2009 paper that disputed Graham Webster’s Mancetter identification on a number of grounds – notably the otherwise unaccountable frequency of lead slingshots in the area – Mackay would have it by Prae Wood, just north of Verulamium. His ascription is further detailed in one of the book’s appendices. Including the volume’s only map, this gets us to Echolands’ one significant shortcoming. Without maps and plans it is impossible fully to appreciate the many journeys and landscapes that are outlined, nor fathom the layout of the sites and towns related (acutely so in the case of Colchester). ‘Imaginings’ alone are not enough; graphics are needed to render them intelligible.
With Jim Leary’s Footmarks: a journey into our restless past (2023) receiving similar comments, one suspects that such personal journeying archaeological accounts will become more commonplace. Certainly, they seem an appropriate vehicle for archaeology to reach wider audiences.
Echolands: A journey in search of Boudica Duncan Mackay Hodder & Stoughton, £25 ISBN 978-1399714112
