Surviving the Iron Age TV Prog

Submitted by Andy B on Thursday, 03 May 2001  Page Views: 22096

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From The Scotsman: A test of their mettle, by Jim Gilchrist [email protected]

Next time the microwave acts up just when you want your croissants defrosted, or the central heating gets temperamental, think yourself lucky. You could be one of the 17 volunteers - 18 if you count a large, hairy wolfhound - who spent one of the wettest autumns on record trying to survive in a recreated Iron Age settlement in remote Wales for a BBC series.

Never mind your romantic, post-Riverdance Celtic-ethno-chic; it was itchy, cold and vomit making ... "Hell on Earth," as one participant summed it up.

This fly-on-the-wattle-wall series, Surviving the Iron Age, which starts next week, involved the volunteers - seven men, seven women and three children - spending almost seven weeks last year trying to recreate the lifestyle of their Celtic forebears of 2,000 years ago, in authentic roundhouses built on a genuine Iron Age hill fort site at Castell Henllys, Pembrokeshire.

Three of them were following in the muddy footsteps of more immediate antecedents, being the children of participants in a similar venture in the Beeb's 1970s series Living in the Past. Perhaps their parents didn't tell them the facts of ancient Celtic life, or were they just gluttons for punishment?

"Nasty, brutish and short," is how Professor Barry Cunliffe an archaeological consultant to the programme, describes real Iron Age living. However, the programme begins with the unsuspecting participants arriving at the encampment, delighting - initially - in the woolly clothes (no underwear) provided for them and the dark but cosy-looking roundhouses - even debating in lively terms just what leaves might be best for bottom-wiping in those robust-looking Iron Age toilets - situated a good 500-yard run (and run, at times, would become the appropriate word) from the camp for hygiene's sake.

The participants, all of whom had been chosen for skills deemed essential to surviving under these circumstances - they included farmers, blacksmiths, nurses, survival specialists ... and a perpetually cheerful and laid-back young neo-Druid and goatherd, Chris, who says "Wow!" a lot.

The opening shots show them all at the hotel where they stayed the night before travelling back 2,000 years, holding an indulgent "last supper" and dispensing with refinements such as bras, watches, deodorants and, of course, the telly.

The BBC left them with enough food for three days; then they had to feed themselves with the raw materials provided, or starve. Strictly speaking, though, these latter-day Celts had it easy - they didn't have to hunt, their lamb was slaughtered for them. All they had to do was butcher it, and learn how to deftly wring a chicken's neck. But within the first week they were succumbing to the weather, open confrontations over the running of the camp and food poisoning.

"I can't deny that it was hard," says Dave Rickard, a consultant ecologist and musician, who took part with his wife Anne and their 12-year-old son, Christopher. "But a lot of circumstances conspired to worsen things. The local farmers had never known such a wet autumn, so that wasn't a good start."

Some of the fundamentals laid on for them by the BBC proved wanting. "The shoes they gave us were ostensibly authentic, but they were the wrong material and they weren't suitable for the gravel paths at the camp, which is a visitor attraction the rest of the time. Obviously gravel wouldn't have been there in the Iron Age." So acute did the footwear problem become at one point that the BBC had to dole out wellies.

Despite what some of the ersatz Iron-Agers have said since, however, Rickard reckons the food provided was top-class and he dismisses talk of malnutrition as "rubbish".

"We had organic goats' milk cheese, whole lambs, pots of local honey. OK, the vegetables were boring - kale, kale, beans or kale. And I'm not saying the meals were brilliant because that was a learning curve. We're used to cooking with wholefoods, so perhaps it wasn't so much of a culture shock for us as for some of the youngsters who only knew how to work a microwave."

Cooking, or lack of it, prompted the first near-crisis, after they ate undercooked chicken and the camp was stricken by food poisoning: "Quite a few of us went down with incredible diarrhoea. I've never suffered anything like it in my life - it was like Niagara Falls, all night. But we were both as right as rain by midday the next day."

Bill Billinghurst who cooked the meal, suffered the most - prompting the programme's producer to intervene and call in a doctor. The doctor's services were also required when another team member collapsed while carting buckets of water up the long haul from the river to the camp (eventually, the BBC put in a standpipe at the camp).

But perhaps most upsetting was the eruption of ill-feeling over the running of the camp which threatened to disrupt the project during its first week. Rickard's wife, Anne, who was voted chief of the settlement (prompting the site manger, Phil Bennett, to observe that such a democratic procedure would have been somewhat unlikely during the Iron Age. "You would have been born to it or killed for it."). Sickness, the weather and the initial failure to establish basic essential routines, such as storing dry firewood and collecting water, perhaps all conspired to prompt a blazing row between the Rickards and the Billinghursts, both nurses, who later left the project with their children. The programme shows Bill Billinghurst yelling the odds at the Rickards during a gathering while Anne, near to tears, declares that she no longer feels safe.

"I think Anne was chosen as a sort of Mother Earth figure. In fact, I think Yasmin [Billinghurst] actually voted for her, but Yasmin later said she felt the camp should be run military style, which was totally alien to what everyone else thought and what we were there for.

"During a meeting Bill just lost it. He threatened me and was quite aggressive to our son, Christopher. In fairness, they had been unbelievably stressed, and I won't take that away from them: they had two young sick kids, they had the darkest house, and trying to treat sick kids in almost pitch dark can't be easy.

"And, of course, Bill himself was ill for several days, and Yasmin was trying to give up smoking. These were not ideal conditions for living in harmony, especially when it's pouring with rain and there's mud everywhere."

One can't help feeling that the original Iron-Agers might have used more summary methods to settle their domestic disputes. Anyway, the Billinghursts left, Anne remained leader by general consent and, with hostilities behind them, the "time travellers" got on with trying to cope with pre-Roman day-to-day life, although one other member, 19-year-old Ceris Williams, was taken to hospital with suspected meningitis. Williams, whose parents took part in the BBC's 1970s series Living in the Past, has since insisted that she would have stayed longer if she could.

So they stuck the course, and ended up celebrating the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain by dancing round a blazing wicker man - though not, one hastens to add, one containing any dissident project members.

Comfortable it was not. Another volunteer, Brenda Phillips, recalls: "It was hard to stay clean and eventually you stopped bothering. You gave up washing and just went to bed wet. The weather was horrendous. It was like hell on Earth." At one point, a health inspector threatened to shut down the project if the camp wasn't cleared up.

Everyone missed something, says Dave Rickard - things like cups of tea and more vegetables. One group of younger members "escaped" briefly to a pub, where the landlord took pity on them and bought them drinks.

Looking back, however, Rickard, an enthusiast for sustainable development, can be philosophical: "Well, we did survive, and certainly the second half, once we'd gelled as a group, was much more enjoyable. The hostility was just early on."

A primary reason the Rickards did it, he says, was for the benefit of their son, Christopher, whom they educate at home and who had expressed interest in "living like an Iron Age boy". For him, says his father, it was sheer 24-hour education.

It also gave them a sense of the transience of possessions, he believes: "At the hotel, a couple of the girls still weren't wearing make up the morning after we finished. I don't know if they're still not wearing it but they said then that they didn't see the point any more. And we were looking at knick-knacks for sale and saying to ourselves: 'What are these for?'

"I'm very involved with promoting sustainable development and I think this certainly prompted a few thoughts about just how far away we've moved from that in the 20th century."

After such a rough time-ride, he surely couldn't be looking back at the Iron Age through rose-tinted spectacles, could he? "No. I'm rather of the opinion that while their life would have been very, very hard, and wouldn't have lasted very long, they achieved an awful lot.

"Having spent two weeks trying to make our own iron and producing about enough to make a brooch, I now appreciate their knowledge and skills in producing enough iron for their time to be called the Iron Age.

"We didn't achieve anything near that. We got just a glimpse of what they did, we survived, made a TV programme and that was it."

His son Christopher, remains enthusiastic about the experience: "I missed an electric blanket," he admits, bluntly, "and chocolate, and fish and chips. But I'd do it again."