British journalist Charlotte Higgins (It's All Greek to Me) has always been fascinated by the classical world, but that fascination didn't extend to Roman Britain. She thought of Britain as an unglamorous outpost on the edge of the Roman Empire--an opinion shared by most Romans of the time. A visit to Hadrian's Wall changed her mind. Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain is the story of her search to understand Rome's 360-year occupation of Britain and its influence on the British sense of history and identity.
Higgins travels across Britain in an unreliable camper van, searching out traces of ancient Rome. She walks the tourist-friendly Hadrian's Wall, and tracks down the ruins of Londinium through modern London with the help of a map published by the Museum of London. She visits small museums, major museums and a tourist trap called Iceni Village. She interviews archeologists, museum curators, farmers-turned-innkeepers near Hadrian's Wall, and a full-time Roman centurion who appears at museum events and school programs. She considers the unexpected cache of Roman "postcards" known as the Vindolanda tablets; an influential 18th-century forgery of a Roman text; and re-imaginings of Roman Britain by later generations of British antiquarians, poets, military engineers and composers, including Benjamin Britten's soulful Roman Wall Blues, composed for a radio play by W.H. Auden.
Under Another Sky weaves Britain's history and contemporary landscape together into a complex and fascinating account that is part travelogue, part history and wholly charming. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins