Beachy Head, Ancient Barrows and the ‘Alembic’ of Romantic Archaeological Poetics

Abstract

This article identifies for the first time the ‘lone antiquary’, which Charlotte Smith refers to in her poem Beachy Head, as Rev. James Douglas, one of the most significant and interesting early archaeological writers. My contention is that not only do Douglas’s specific findings and theories about stratigraphy, fossilisation and the culture of Britain’s earliest inhabitants contribute to the historical, antiquarian background to Smith’s poem but also that the transformative nature of his poetics informs her work. In particular, both Douglas and Smith are concerned with the relationships between facts and fancy, rubble and aura, scepticism and belief. I argue that the barrows, which Douglas excavated and upon which Smith mused, were an important site for the development of the Romantic archaeological imagination and, as such, represent a suggestive contribution to the new Material Romanticism critical turn.