Postscript
Birdlip Mirror
P. J. Kavanagh
Around here it is easy to think of the Cotswolds rising out of the Severn Plain like a cake. A rugged and irregular- sided cake, some of the hills of the escarp- ment — Crickley, Cooper's, Cleeve — Push into the plain like yellow peninsulas, but on the whole the jutting-up is sudden, and the top of the cake smooth, give or take a few baking-cracks and valleys here and there. This is only true of the west Side, facing Wales. Approached from Lon- don, from the east, it is difficult to see how We reach such a height (where I am writing is about 900 feet) the ascent is so gradual. But standing on wind-buffeted Crickley 1-1111 you are aware of it, looking down on Cheltenham and Gloucester, and across at the slow, lumping bulk of the Malverns, Which dominate the scene: you are also aware of the slow drift of the Celts west- ,Ward, over the fertile plains and into the tar mountains, hazy, beyond. Jan Morris in her new book The Matter of Wales points out that the Romans yenetrated Wales but the later invaders, utes, Saxons, Franks, did not, so that the
darkness of the post-Roman centuries nev- er fell on Wales, she alone kept intact what Morris calls her `Celticity', as well as her Romanisation, and therefore retained, in Morris's dramatic phrase, 'the folk- memory of Europe!'
I am shy of the word 'Celts' because of the sillinesses that have attached them- selves to the idea and the general vague- ness (my own, certainly) which surrounds the movements and minglings of races and peoples during those distant times. But somebody certainly lived on Crickley Hill, and it must have been like living on the prow of a ship, forever ploughing into the green of the plain, for the wind tears at you, in nautical fashion. But recent excava- tions have shown that many people lived here, for many hundreds of years, about a half a millennium before Christ.
Looking down at the post-holes of their fortress, which the archaeologists have marked on the turf, and trying to imagine what their lives might have been like up here, I feel a familiar tickling at the back of my neck, bidding me look round; and I know what it is: the memory of the Birdlip Mirror.
It was found just behind me, not on Crickley but, I believe, in the bank on the other side of the road. I don't know exactly where and wish I did, because it is haun- tingly beautiful. It is a bronze hand-mirror, a dressing-table mirror, exquisitely punch- ed and scrolled and enamelled in red. It was found in a grave near the side of the road, is dated first century AD and is Celtic. Ever since I first saw it I have been wondering about the lives of people who could afford to make and possess such a beautiful and unnecessary object, and find in themselves the generosity and piety to bury it with the dead. It seems to suggest a settled and secure form of existence, diffi- cult to imagine in this nearly constant. wind, perched on this crag for fear of enemies; for fear, I dare say, of everything.
Perhaps the man who made it, and its possessor, were of different races? The 'Celts', Jan Morris tells us, believe there is another world, just beyond the window. Strange. I. who assume myself to be one, have always believed that. Perhaps there is such a thing as `Celticity' after all, and after all this time. And another recognisable trait: Posidonius, in the second century BC, said Celts 'are exceedingly fond of wine and sate themselves with unmixed wine imported by the merchants'. So Celtic artists, it appears, were paid in wine, and a modern scholar of the period has gone so far as to venture that the whole extraordin- ary mass of Celtic art found scattered across Europe, and the lovely thing found a few hundred yards from where I am standing, 'may largely have owed its exist- ence to Celtic thirst'.
Thus, the lovely mirror may have been made to pay a wine bill. There is a carelessness about that, a profligacy (for all the intense care taken in its making) that consoles, that blunts the sharp tooth of the wind; which is the point of art.
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