1 - The Offshore Islands

Summary

THE VIEW FROM AFAR

The existence of Britain and Ireland posed a problem for the geographers of the Classical world. Their experience was limited to the Mediterranean and they had devised a scheme which saw the cosmos as a circular disc with the sea at its centre. For Hecataeus of Miletus, the land extended northwards into what is now Europe, southwards into Africa, and to the east as far as India, but beyond all these regions there was a river, Oceanus, which encircled the earth and marked the outer limit of the world (Fig. 1.1). Only the dead could reach its farther shore. There were two routes communicating directly between the inner sea and the most distant margin of the land. One was by the Arabian Gulf, whilst the second led through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic (Cunliffe 2001a: 2–6).

Strictly speaking, the two islands studied in this book were beyond the limits of the world and so they could not exist, yet, as often happens, theory came into conflict with practical experience. Long before the expansion of the Roman Empire there were reasons for questioning the traditional cosmology. Although it is no longer believed that Stonehenge was designed by a Mycenaean architect, there seem to have been some connections between Britain and the Aegean during the second millennium BC, although these links are confined to a few portable artefacts and would have been indirect (A. Harding 2000: chapter 13).