Brigantia

A Mysteriography

Guy Ragland Phillips

Marching victoriously northward from the Thames valley across the Chilterns and the flat lands of central England, the Roman Army came to a halt on a line running roughly from the Wash to the Chester Dee. This was the southern frontier of Brigantia, the mysterious, powerful Celtic State that streched from here up to the Tyne and Solway and beyond.

The relations between Brigantia and imperial Rome make a dramatic story in themselves, yet they form only one episode in the long chain of connected and continuous features and events traced by Guy Ragland Phillips in this book. He shows Brigantia not merely as the realm of Queen Cartimandua, but as an area which exhibits in many strange forms the continuity of culture from an era thousands of years before the Roman invasion up to the present day. This story of Brigantia's peculiarly persistent culture involves the investigation of many, still unsolved mysteries.

Brigantia's development through all its stages is at once highly individual and enlightening for the evolution of all human societies. Ragland Phillips shows that surprising relics and unconscious remembrances of Brigantian culture still survive today. He points to new ways of looking at relics of the past, be they folk-lore and legend, patterns of baffling alignments, or urns found in gravemounds. He guides us over places that can actually be visited, landscapes that can actually be seen, monuments that still exist.

In calling his book a 'mysteriography', Ragland Phillips refers to the total cat's-cradle of developments that have made Brigantia and its people special as well as exemplars: the trail leads from the pagan spirit of Brimham Rocks to a traitor queen, an army of ravens, a tree that screamed and bled - and to a witch-letter of 1974.

Guy Ragland Phillips, grandson of the nineteenth-century artist Atkinson Grimshaw, is a former leader-writer for the Yorkshire Post. Now retired, he still lives in Yorkshire, formerly part of the State of Brigantia. His work has been published in journals which include Country Life, The Dalesman, and The Ley-Hunter.

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