
Finding Flatlands: a journey through prehistory

Walking along a woodland track one Sunday afternoon to look at some ancient earthworks typical of many sprinkled around the English countryside, I had little idea that I was embarking on a poetry project that would take the best part of seven years – more if you count late stragglers.
A cycle of poems in three ‘movements’ set in prehistoric East Anglia, Flatlands was published in 2010, but, like the region’s terrain, its way was often marshy and fogbound. I’d been interested in the pre-Roman era long before the collection was conceived, and the first poems were really random pieces in search of a voice and style. It was when I started to visit sites such as Norfolk’s Grime’s Graves and the Flag Fen excavations in Cambridgeshire on a vague quest to find cohesion for those initial efforts that the idea of a structured sequence began to gel.
For anyone who hasn’t been there, Grime’s Graves is a stunning place to visit – a moonscape of grassy craters that are the sunken tops of disused mineshafts filled in by flint miners who dug out the rich bedrock four or five thousand years ago. The area itself is a bleak, majestic heathland, but the most astonishing quality for me is that, as you climb down a shaft that’s open to the public, and peer into the narrow underground galleries where the miners crawled, the place is so intact that you can almost imagine the workers packing up their tools – pick-axes made of antlers, shovels fashioned from the shoulder blades of oxen – at the end of a shift the day before.
It was with such people in mind – early farmers, tribal warriors, villagers in their smoke-filled roundhouses - that the cycle started to find its narrative rhythm, and the idea developed of a stripped language that could speak for a time when there were no written records. I thought of voices rising out of the landscape, hinting at their stories, their experiences, then fading like ghosts back into the woods and fenlands. With the cycle spanning more than 2,000 years from the late Stone Age to the Roman invasion and Boudica’s rebellion, I had two main intentions: first, to try to dramatise the lives of these remote ancestors and, second, that the poems, in large part, could be read as metaphors for our own emotional existence.
Perhaps the most important early piece was ‘Thames Idol’, positioned near the start of the cycle and essentially the poem that establishes the overall metaphorical theme. In Colchester’s imposing Castle Museum, built on the foundations of the Romans’ Temple of Claudius that inflamed the local tribespeople, one of the prize exhibits was the so-called Dagenham Idol, a battered pinewood figure that has been radiocarbon dated to around 2,500BCE (now on loan to Valence House Museum, Dagenham). One of the oldest human representations found in the country, it’s almost like a child’s doll, though the expert consensus seems to veer towards some sort of fertility symbol. While the figure’s gender is ambiguous, the poem’s voice is that of a female god who tells the reader to ‘Find me in your own time/find me in your own face’.
A cycle of poems in three ‘movements’ set in prehistoric East Anglia, Flatlands was published in 2010, but, like the region’s terrain, its way was often marshy and fogbound. I’d been interested in the pre-Roman era long before the collection was conceived, and the first poems were really random pieces in search of a voice and style. It was when I started to visit sites such as Norfolk’s Grime’s Graves and the Flag Fen excavations in Cambridgeshire on a vague quest to find cohesion for those initial efforts that the idea of a structured sequence began to gel.
For anyone who hasn’t been there, Grime’s Graves is a stunning place to visit – a moonscape of grassy craters that are the sunken tops of disused mineshafts filled in by flint miners who dug out the rich bedrock four or five thousand years ago. The area itself is a bleak, majestic heathland, but the most astonishing quality for me is that, as you climb down a shaft that’s open to the public, and peer into the narrow underground galleries where the miners crawled, the place is so intact that you can almost imagine the workers packing up their tools – pick-axes made of antlers, shovels fashioned from the shoulder blades of oxen – at the end of a shift the day before.
It was with such people in mind – early farmers, tribal warriors, villagers in their smoke-filled roundhouses - that the cycle started to find its narrative rhythm, and the idea developed of a stripped language that could speak for a time when there were no written records. I thought of voices rising out of the landscape, hinting at their stories, their experiences, then fading like ghosts back into the woods and fenlands. With the cycle spanning more than 2,000 years from the late Stone Age to the Roman invasion and Boudica’s rebellion, I had two main intentions: first, to try to dramatise the lives of these remote ancestors and, second, that the poems, in large part, could be read as metaphors for our own emotional existence.
Perhaps the most important early piece was ‘Thames Idol’, positioned near the start of the cycle and essentially the poem that establishes the overall metaphorical theme. In Colchester’s imposing Castle Museum, built on the foundations of the Romans’ Temple of Claudius that inflamed the local tribespeople, one of the prize exhibits was the so-called Dagenham Idol, a battered pinewood figure that has been radiocarbon dated to around 2,500BCE (now on loan to Valence House Museum, Dagenham). One of the oldest human representations found in the country, it’s almost like a child’s doll, though the expert consensus seems to veer towards some sort of fertility symbol. While the figure’s gender is ambiguous, the poem’s voice is that of a female god who tells the reader to ‘Find me in your own time/find me in your own face’.

Flag Fen, which spawned a small grouping of poems in the middle of the collection, is an impressive archaeological site with reconstructed roundhouses. At first glance the excavations are a mish-mash of sodden bits of wood being teased out of the mud. However, the timbers have revealed a hugely ambitious structure - a kilometre-long defended causeway built during the Bronze Age when farmers sought to protect their pastures from neighbouring groups as rising waters encroached on the land. A vast timber platform, described by the site's excavators as being the size of Wembley Stadium, took the defences across a stretch of water. As with many other lakes and rivers, the site seems to have been viewed as a sacred place, and it has yielded an array of jewellery and weapons apparently deposited as ritual offerings.
Many of the Flatlands pieces are imagined settings rather than being site-specific: refugees from the Belgic tribes of Gaul crossing in their boats to England; ‘cattle watchers’ following trackways; a graveyard where the dead are left in the open to be taken by animals, their bones picked by birds. Other poems witness a widow’s grief beside the funeral pyre of Iron Age king Addedomaros, whose burial site may have been the Lexden Tumulus in Essex; villagers of the Iceni tribe from the Norfolk/Suffolk region as they face a cruel winter; captured tribespeople on their way to be sold on the continental mainland as slaves.
Many of the Flatlands pieces are imagined settings rather than being site-specific: refugees from the Belgic tribes of Gaul crossing in their boats to England; ‘cattle watchers’ following trackways; a graveyard where the dead are left in the open to be taken by animals, their bones picked by birds. Other poems witness a widow’s grief beside the funeral pyre of Iron Age king Addedomaros, whose burial site may have been the Lexden Tumulus in Essex; villagers of the Iceni tribe from the Norfolk/Suffolk region as they face a cruel winter; captured tribespeople on their way to be sold on the continental mainland as slaves.

Camulodunum, the proto-urban community where Colchester now stands and where Boudica brought her warring hordes to settle scores against its Roman occupiers, is the backdrop for the final grouping of poems. This heavily fortified Iron Age complex with its farms and industries was the seat of Cunobelin – Shakespeare’s Cymbeline – a powerful king who appears to have held sway over large parts of south-east England. Running through the settlement, which would have been a thriving market place before and after the Roman invasion, was the River Colne where boats brought raw materials for all the workshops – tile makers, smithies, leather producers and so on.
A pair of remarkably preserved tombstones of two soldiers who served in the Roman occupation army are housed at Colchester’s museum. One, found in 1868, is of a centurion, the other, discovered in the 1920s, is that of a cavalry officer from Thrace, in the region of modern-day Bulgaria. It is thought that the stones might have been desecrated during Boudica’s revolt. Two partner poems under the collective title ‘On the Street of Tombs’ are based on the carvings, which, for the book’s purposes, offered a personalised slant on the invasion. It’s ironic that two of the earliest individuals pictured in the country, and whose names we happen to know, are not native Britons but part of the force that came to subjugate them.
The cycle’s bloody climax sees the enslaved population working to build the Temple of Claudius watched by the ‘dead eyes’ of compatriots who have paid the price of rebellion with their heads. Boudica then faces, in a moment of dark contemplation, what could be her last battle at an unknown site as she stands ready to ‘flay the legions’.
The setting of the final poem, ‘Blackwater’, is an Essex estuary where the voices of the cycle, which at the start are embodied in the literally earthbound flint miners, now dissolve ‘out of sound’ into the sea and sky.
This article was first published on the Salt website.
A pair of remarkably preserved tombstones of two soldiers who served in the Roman occupation army are housed at Colchester’s museum. One, found in 1868, is of a centurion, the other, discovered in the 1920s, is that of a cavalry officer from Thrace, in the region of modern-day Bulgaria. It is thought that the stones might have been desecrated during Boudica’s revolt. Two partner poems under the collective title ‘On the Street of Tombs’ are based on the carvings, which, for the book’s purposes, offered a personalised slant on the invasion. It’s ironic that two of the earliest individuals pictured in the country, and whose names we happen to know, are not native Britons but part of the force that came to subjugate them.
The cycle’s bloody climax sees the enslaved population working to build the Temple of Claudius watched by the ‘dead eyes’ of compatriots who have paid the price of rebellion with their heads. Boudica then faces, in a moment of dark contemplation, what could be her last battle at an unknown site as she stands ready to ‘flay the legions’.
The setting of the final poem, ‘Blackwater’, is an Essex estuary where the voices of the cycle, which at the start are embodied in the literally earthbound flint miners, now dissolve ‘out of sound’ into the sea and sky.
This article was first published on the Salt website.