2021/087: Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain -- Charlotte Higgins

2021/087: Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain -- Charlotte Higgins

I think of Roman Britain above all as the place where these islands were begotten in writing. In a landscape that vibrates with stories, where every crag and moor, city and suburb, wasteland and industrial tract has been written into being, the Romans were the first to mould the land in prose. If it is to medieval literature that we owe the idea of Britain as a busy and productive and domesticated land, a ‘fair field full of folk’, then it was the Romans who first made it wild, a land of sudden mists and treacherous marshes, a territory of mountains and impassable rivers. [loc. 3652]

The title comes from Tacitus' account of a speech by Boudica: 'we Britons are cut off from all other men by the Ocean such that most people believe we live in another world, under another sky' [loc. 665]. Higgins spent some time travelling around Britain in a camper van, visiting Roman ruins and reflecting on the people who lived there, and the people who have written about the Romans over the centuries since their departure.

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