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The cumulative thinking from ethnography, near-contemporary literature and later tradition suggests the prevalence in native societies of an animistic world view: spirits, often capricious, sometimes malign, inhabited animate and inanimate objects – birds and animals, springs, rivers and dark pools. They were to be found in trees, rocks and caves,

the young St Patrick, son and grandson of British Christian priests (one of them also a town official), before his fateful abduction by Irish slave raiders at the age of about sixteen. Patrick’s is the sole unambiguously British narrative voice from the whole of the fifth century.

By the end of the fourth century the temple at Uley Hill had partially collapsed and been demolished. It was now rebuilt on a more modest scale, as an L-shaped structure.o Within another generation or two, at some time during the fifth century, it was replaced by a timber building that looks for all the world like a basilica, with accompanying bapt

During the first and second centuries CE the sacred enclosure at Uley acquired a solid timber shrine at its centre – square in form, like so many other contemporary ceremonial monuments identified in Britain and on the Continent. Subsequently a square stone temple, of considerable grandeur, directly replaced its predecessor on the hill top, eventua

Birdoswald’s excavator, Tony Wilmott, suggests that the whole sequence takes the fort’s life into the sixth century and he explicitly makes the connection between the remodelled south granary and the architecture of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ mead hall. Was the prototype of Heorot, that poetic stage for feasting, patronage, celebration and warrior-bonding,

It is a conspicuous fact that, with few exceptions, the boundaries of the many historic townshipsv that lie along the line of Hadrian’s Wall do not butt up against it, as one might expect of such a great physical barrier, but straddle it.33 Historical geographers have established that the origins of many historic townships and parishes lie in their

Signs of life in the towns, villas and forts of late Roman Britain are increasingly visible to archaeologists, despite a paucity of convincingly dated material. But describing the lives of the bulk of fifth-century Britons is by no means straightforward; and the picture is complicated by the arrival, in the second quarter of that most obscure centu

After the second century the limitanei or frontier troops would have been recruited largely from local youth under the command of professional officers from the Middle East or from beyond the Rhine frontier.

Later I stopped writing a little while ago, because I heard a noise at the door, as if someone were inserting the key in the lock. Caught unawares, I didn’t know where to put the notebook. I looked around, but all the furniture appeared to be of glass, transparent. Wherever I might hide it, the notebook would be visible. I turned this way and that,