A History of Ancient Britain

by Neil Oliver

Creswell Crags

Ice Age cave dwellings, between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

Aveline’s Hole

Cave at Burrington Combe in the limestone of the Mendip Hills, in Somerset,England.

West Kennet Long Barrow, in Wiltshire,

Neolithic tomb or barrow, situated on a prominent chalk ridge, near Silbury Hill, one-and-a-half miles south of Avebury.

We in the north and west of Europe have benefited, for millennia, from the constant arrival of the new. At the end of the last Ice Age our hunting ancestors penetrated the land that would become Britain. They were alone there for a long time but were eventually joined by those who could teach them the skills of agriculture and stock-rearing. Later came the magicians who could source and conjure metal, and after them a steady flow of incomers, bringing more and more of the modern world. Ideas of all kinds blew in like seeds, and kept on coming.

the vast majority living in these islands are the direct descendants of those pioneers who reclaimed the land from the ice 12,000-odd years ago. There have of course been a few invaders over the years – a handful of Mediterranean Romans, some Angles and Saxons, a few Vikings and some Normans. But the genetic fact is their DNA has made about as much impact on the British bloodline as a few teaspoonsful of water added to an overflowing bath.

For most people in modern Europe, slavery is an evil associated with Africa. But it happened in Britain and Ireland too. In relatively modern times – at least from the seventeenth century onwards – Barbary pirates preyed on those coastlines. The examples are as numerous as they are heartbreaking. In 1631 the entire population of the village of Baltimore, in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland – 109 men, women and children – were taken by African pirates, loaded onto ships and sold in the slave markets of North Africa. Not one of those souls ever saw the old country again and between 1630 and 1730 it is estimated Barbary pirates took a million Europeans from their homes and sold them into slavery.

It may well be that the first wine tasted in Britain was enjoyed at Hengistbury Head.

the hill forts of Dorset reveals the reality of the last stands. Hod hill fort was the spiritual home of the Durotriges tribe.

It is more than 2,000 years since Caesar’s legionaries first splashed ashore on a beach in Kent; 4,500 since the arrival of people with metal tools; 12,000 since the first hunters after the ice and 33,000 since the time when the oldest modern human being we know about lived and died here. It is half a million years since Boxgrove Man closed his eyes for the last time on a Britain roamed by elephants, lions and hyenas.