At least the Romans had a reason to hold that line – and that reason was the Celts.

Hannibal and his Carthaginian army – the Second Punic War.

It was Agricola who had headed north to subdue the Celtic Caledonian tribes. Tacitus wrote De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae – ‘About the life and character of Julius Agricola’ – to heap praise upon his wife’s father. Part of the sucking up required ensuring the great general was challenged by worthy foes, and Calgacus – literally, ‘the swordsman’

The Iron Age people of west and central Europe lived right on the edge of history. The first written records of these people and their beliefs were not written by them, but by their neighbours to the south – the literate civilizations of the Phoenicians, ancient Greece and Rome. It’s the Roman literature in particular which perhaps gives us the

Over five centuries, then, we have records of the Celts (or Gauls, or Galatians) of Europe. These written records emanate from a literate Mediterranean culture that is attempting to define its barbarian neighbours to the north and west; this is very much an outsiders’ view of the Celts. But, crucially, it’s all we have to go on, in terms of written

Ten years later, in 1978, the dig started. The archaeologists found layers and layers of stone protecting an underlying burial chamber. In fact, it was a double chamber.

‘We’re finding more and more evidence of these people and their culture, but we’ve also got archaeological evidence of something else that Herodotus mentions. He talks about the Celts and the Kunetes living here, in the far west, and it’s clear that he’s writing about a contemporary situation. But he also mentions a civilization that has really

But when Lucan describes the recall of troops from Gaul, he allows himself a diversion to mention Celtic gods and the ‘accursed blood’ spilt in order to propitiate them: ‘Savage Teutates, Esus’ horrid shrines, / And Taranis’ altars cruel . . .’ The Celtic names of these gods appear to be descriptive. ‘Teutates’ probably means ‘the god of the

Like most societies, the Celts had their priests – people who mediated between the material and the spiritual worlds. They were, of course, the Druids. Julius Caesar, getting up close and personal with the Celts in the first century BC, described the role and power of the Druids in Celtic Society. He said that the social elite in Gaulish society