Sarum: The Novel of England

by Edward Rutherfurd

What Hwll had witnessed was the creation of the island of Britain. The great forest which he had tried to cross lay off what is now known as Dogger Bank, in the North Sea.

The land that Hwll’s ancestors had crossed was all gone, and for the whole of his short life, he had no longer been living on a peninsula of Eurasia, but on a new island. Because of that arctic flood Britain was born, and for the rest of her history, her people would be separate, protected from the outside world by a savage sea.

he reached the high, chalky cliffs of the south eastern tip of the island. This time they did see what they had been looking for: jutting over the horizon was the clear outline of the tall, grey shoreline of the European mainland. It was there: but it was unattainable.

though he did not know it, Hwll was one of the last of his kind. All over the northern hemisphere, the Palaeolithic hunters, the wanderers of the tundra, were gradually being displaced as the warm forests crept northwards and more sophisticated Mesolithic forest hunters like Tep took over the land.

“This is where I will stay,” he said. He had found Sarum. For the great plateau he had reached was Salisbury Plain, the huge, empty tract of high ground where all the natural land roads in southern England meet.

though hares existed, there were no rabbits, nor would there be until the Normans introduced them six and a half thousand years later.

Hwll had seen an auroch only once before, when he was a boy in the tundra; now only two hundred paces away stood a single beast grazing quietly by the river bank, in front of a small clump of trees.

elsewhere, the story was very different; for some time before 5,000 B.C., the greatest revolution that the western world has ever known took place. It started in the Middle East and from there it spread over most of Europe: this revolution was the introduction of farming.

the Sumerians – were building the world’s first hill towns.

It was a pattern that was to be repeated for thousands of years in the troubled history of Europe. Again and again such invaders – sometimes a party of raiders, sometimes an entire people – would come sweeping into western Europe with terrifying force; they came from Scandinavia, from the Germanic plains, from the distant steppes of central Asia; some stayed and settled, others came, ravaged and departed.

This night, as every night, the astronomer priests of Stonehenge were busy measuring the heavens.

No place on the island was more hallowed, and pilgrims would come down the chalk ridgeways many days’ journey to visit the sacred plateau.

For this was the spacious city of New Salisbury. It was not a fortified hill, like the old Norman founding town, nor a semi-fortified burgh, like the older Saxon foundations. It lay in a broad valley; it contained large, open spaces; it had no defensive wall, no castle keep; it was built for comfort and for trade.