A parallel world of lost majesty that once encompassed Europe

 
Celtic chief Vercingetorix
Alamy
10 October 2013

The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe by Graham Robb (Picador, £20)

You might start by feeling sorry for Graham Robb. He had already explored the history of France in a string of wonderful biographies and great prize-winning bicycle journeys around the country. Then, a few years ago, he wanted to push the story back into the pre-literate centuries of what the French call proto-history, where history is written only in myths and place-names and landscapes. He would make a bicycle journey along the Via Heraklea, the fabled route of Hercules from south-west Spain, across the Pyrenees, through southern France to the great white wall of the Alps where Hercules had smashed his own pass at Montgenèvre.

So far, so simple: it would be another in the sequence of courteous, humane and eloquent books Robb has been writing for the past 20 years. But then he was hijacked. In his thatched cottage in Oxfordshire, the broadband up and running, entranced by Google Earth, and its magical combination of flyover landscapes and exact coordinates, bearings and distances, something else started to emerge.

It looked to Robb — this serious, cultivated, literate Oxford don — that in the Iron Age, before the Roman invasions of Gaul, there had been a Europe-wide surveying system that located key centres of life and religion on the intersections of solstice lines — the lines on which sunrises and sunsets occur at midwinter and midsummer — and other meridians running across them. The whole continent was covered in a grid that mapped heaven on to earth. The Celts — or their learned priests, the Druids — had rearranged life so that everything in it would reflect the patterns of the cosmos itself.

As Robb realised, this was something no one (or almost no one: one or two professors from the Sorbonne are allies) had thought of before, perhaps because without computers it would have been impossible. Had he gone mad? Or had he found the governing secret of the Celtic Iron Age? Had he found on his computer screen “the comprehensible whisperings of a vanished civilisation”? Or was the whole thing a terrifying attack of self-delusion? Was this just ley-line mania writ large?

He is such a warm, gentle and generous writer, with no faux scholarly tosh or solitary ecstasy riffs, that this agonising question keeps floating up into the surface of the book. He compares himself to “a shepherd clutching his crook after the sheep have run away”. Answers don’t grab him by the throat but “gaze off into the distance like a sphinx”. When things don’t turn out quite as the theory might demand, he experiences “an oddly liberating sense of disbelief”. The one long bike journey in the book, along a North-South meridian across France, starts at a beach on the Channel almost inevitably called Loon Plage.

I don’t know how any of us can tell if the theory is true. It is a little unsettling that the central node of the conceptual map of Celtic England turns out to be the meadows and cricket pitches of the University Parks in Oxford where Robb has done most “ruminating” for this book. But Robb’s own calm eloquence is deeply persuasive and the idea that in pre-Roman Europe there was “a parallel world of lost majesty” is worked out so systematically, with so many astonishing coincidences, that by the end of it I was cheering.

Pre-Roman Gaul was not filled, as the Romans would like you to have thought, with drunk, sex-obsessed, ludicrous-trouser-wearing, mutually sodomising Obélixes, but with a subtle, finely tuned civilisation which the genocidal, materialist vulgarians led by Julius Caesar did their best to destroy. If Graham Robb has discovered that Ancient Gaul was arranged as a reflection of the universe, then that amazing discovery, and this heroically courageous publication of it, is a wonder and a marvel.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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