Imagining the Ancient Britons: Victorian Adventures in Wye-Land

Abstract

Depicted in the mid to late nineteenth-century periodical press as wild, remote, and ‘intensely national’, Wales was perceived as a place of quiet mystery, geographically and socially distinct from the industrialisation of Victorian England. The borderland territory of the Wye Valley – what the Victorian journalist and historian, Barbara Hutton, called ‘Wye-Land’ – has been inhabited for over 12,000 years and preserves an ancient British identity in its rich archaeological landscapes. Developments in mid Victorian archaeology and anthropology precipitated a rise in the number of prehistoric excavations, which popularised knowledge of how ancient Britons lived and died. Drawing from articles in the late Victorian periodical press, and the activities of the Cardiff Naturalist's Society in the 1870s, which included the study of geology, botany and archaeology, this paper suggests that the observation of natural phenomena in the late nineteenth century was closely associated with the study of past human societies. I identify the changing interpretations of prehistoric sites – from early Victorian notions of barbarous druids, to more informed and sensitive appreciations of ancient British societies, whose sympathetic relation to the landscape fostered imaginative connections between late Victorians and their ancestors. This transition away from perceptions of being wholly distinct from prehistoric activity, shaped late Victorian pastoral journalism and encouraged a more integrated vision of the relationship between past and present human activity in the region.