Skeleton Hill

Both were in the royalist army commanded by Lord Hopton. The re-enactment of the Civil War battle for Bath had moved closer to the spectators, some distance from where the pikemen had first clashed, leaving the so-called dead and dying as background decorations. The setting was spectacular, high on Lansdown, seven hundred feet above the city of Bath and with views across three counties. Unconstrained by even a breath of wind, the July sun belted down, catching the flash of pike, sword and armour but overheating everyone.

The one who had spoken first was on his back on the turf and the other was face down two yards away. The stage blood on his head wound was drying. ‘Some of us had to fall, I was told.’

‘You’re new to this, aren’t you?’

‘My first time.’

‘I thought I hadn’t seen you before. You’re a mess.’

‘When I was given my uniform, the officer told me it’s expected for a new recruit to get killed at least once, so I came prepared with a bag of blood. I’m trying to look as if I took a shot to the head.’

‘I’ll go for that.’

‘You can have some if you like.’

‘No thanks. I’ll be up again soon. The reason I’m dead is that I want to cool off. I’m Dave, by the way.’

‘Rupert.’

They didn’t shake hands, seeing that they were supposed to be slain.

‘
Rupert.
For real?’

‘Of course.’ Rupert hesitated, then gave a forced grin. ‘Oh, I see. You thought the name was made up specially for this. Unfortunately, no. I’m stuck with it. Should we get up and join in again?’

‘You can if you want,’ Dave said. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘It’s the armour, isn’t it? Makes one sweat.’

‘Fancy a can of lager?’

He smiled. ‘Don’t I just? I’d die for one – all over again.’

‘I got here early and put some by.’

‘Really?’ Rupert had raised his head off the ground.

‘It’s not far off.’

He didn’t hesitate long. ‘Which way?’

‘Follow me and keep your head down. Leave your pike. You can pick that up later.’ With that, Dave got up and with a stooping gait trotted further down the hill in the opposite direction from the fighting.

‘We look like deserters,’ Rupert called from close behind.

‘So what? You bet they had some in those days.’

Their raised voices caught the attention of a couple of women kneeling beside the wounded, but they were supposed to be camp followers giving comfort to their own, the despised parliamentarians.

‘See that fallen tree? That’s where it is.’

There was no question that they were breaking the rules by quitting the battlefield. Rupert had the sense not to mention any more of his anxieties to his new friend. With luck, no one had spotted them except the women. The spectators were massed behind ropes a few hundred yards away.

The fallen tree must have been blown down in one of the great storms of recent years. Its exposed root system, stark against the sky, formed a canopy ideal to hide under. They sank down in its shadow.

‘Should still be reasonably cool,’ Dave said. He burrowed in the earth and took out a can of Heineken and handed it to Rupert.

Rupert removed the ringpull and gulped some down. ‘This is a lifesaver.’

‘Brought you back to life for sure.’

Rupert laughed.

Dave raised his can. ‘To good King Charles.’

Rupert did the same. ‘The King, God bless him.’

Even though the lager wasn’t chilled it was bliss to drink. Dave explained that on battle days he usually found a spot where he could stow some away before anyone got there. ‘In weather like this you’ve got to look after yourself.’

‘I can see I’ve got a lot to learn,’ Rupert said.

‘I’m in the cavalry normally and we smuggle the odd tinny into our saddle holsters, but you can’t risk it as a pikeman. You wouldn’t get past the inspection.’

‘What are you doing on foot if you’re in the cavalry?’

Dave laughed. ‘Slumming. I’m a Captain of Horse.’

‘Wow.’

‘If you get a boil on your arse as I have, you don’t want to think about mounting a horse. Today I’m infantry and grateful for it.’

‘Some of the men have knapsacks, I noticed.’

‘That’s the first place an officer would look. If you were desperate you could stuff a tin down your breeches. I’d rather get here early and put down my own store.’

‘And you’re serious about joining in again?’

‘That’s why I’m in it, for the fighting. Aren’t you?’

‘Well, I’m a historian,’ Rupert said. ‘They had what they called a lecture day in October and I was invited to give a talk. I thought it would be interesting to come along and get a sense of what it’s like to re-enact a battle.’

‘And is it?’

‘Is it what?’

‘Anything like?’

Rupert the historian smiled. ‘Not if I’m brutally honest. This is put on mainly for the spectacle, so the audience has to have a view. The real point of interest in 1643 was Sir William Waller’s brilliant tactics.’

‘Waller? He’s the enemy.’

‘Yes, and in the real battle we outnumbered him by a couple of thousand, yet he moved his army in the night and outflanked us. When our side woke up, the parliamentarians had the high position along the top of Lansdown. You saw the little copse behind the Grenvile Monument?’

‘Yes.’

‘It wasn’t there in 1643. There were clumps of trees at either extreme, where some of Waller’s musketeers were deployed, but the main route of attack was a bare hillside. Our royalist army was on Freezing Hill, that one to the north. When we attacked we had to come down from there and fight our way uphill. We took a lot of casualties.’

‘But we saw them off.’

‘Finally, and at great cost. Not much of that is being shown here. I suppose a battle on a steep hillside wouldn’t work as a spectacle.’

‘Flat ground is better,’ Dave said, looking across the plateau of Lansdown to where the sound of the action continued. ‘Safer for the horses, too.’

‘And the scale is so different,’ Rupert said, his focus much more on the past. ‘We don’t have anything approaching the numbers they did. The royalist army had come up from the West Country under Sir Ralph Hopton’s command and they had upwards of six thousand men, against about four thousand defending Bath for the parliamentarians.’

‘Is that so?’ Dave said in a voice that was beginning to lose interest.

‘Yes, today’s turnout looks pathetic beside those figures. Hopton lost about three hundred in the real battle. I doubt if we started with that many this morning.’

‘This is only a minor muster,’ Dave said. ‘We do have bigger turn-outs.’

‘Each army had masses of artillery. According to the accounts, there was so much smoke from the cannon and muskets that they couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead.’

‘Hell on earth by the sound of it.’

‘Most battles were. A far cry from this little show.’

‘Stop knocking it. We go to a lot of trouble to get the uniforms right. You should see my cavalry gear. Hand sewn.’

Rupert smiled. ‘I was given mine on loan. I know the rules. If I carry on, I’m expected to supply my own.’

‘Quite right, too. And make sure you get the proper fabric. You’ll be inspected. Real leather belt and boots. All the weapons have to be accurate replicas. ’

‘Firing blanks and thunderflashes.’

‘What do you expect?’ Dave said, increasingly put out. ‘I tell you, I wouldn’t be here if there were cannonballs flying about.’

Rupert smiled. ‘True.’

Dave said, ‘We’re putting on a show for the public, and we do the best we can with what we’ve got.’

‘The real thing wasn’t very satisfactory anyway. They fought to a standstill and nobody won on the day. You saw that drystone wall up to the left?’

‘Yeah.’

‘His musketeers used it as cover and held off the royalists until late in the evening. It’s known as Waller’s wall even to this day. If you look at it closely you can see where it’s been repaired, to fill the holes they made. When it was dark they slipped back to the city, leaving some burning tinder along the top to give the impression they were still camped there.’

‘You couldn’t re-enact that,’ Dave said. ‘Nobody would stay that long. Fancy another?’ He dug his hand into the loose soil again.

A shake of the head from Rupert. ‘One was good. That’s my limit.’

Dave was groping up to his elbow among the earth and dead leaves for his second drink. The search was increasingly agitated. ‘I can’t find it. There were six here.’ He used both hands, exploring every part of the hiding place. ‘Some tosser must have nicked them.’

‘One of the enemy?’ Rupert said.

‘You could be right. Bloody roundheads. None of our lot were about earlier, but I did see one of them.’

‘At least he had the decency to leave the two cans we had.’

‘You call that decent?’ Dave was still scrabbling in the hole.

‘There’s something down here, but it isn’t a can. It isn’t a tree root either.’ He lifted out an object over a foot in length, narrow and with bulbous ends. After picking off some caked earth, he said, ‘Only an old bone.’

‘Some animal must have buried it,’ Rupert said. ‘A fox, I expect.’ Dave held the bone in both hands. ‘Well, whatever this was, it was bigger than the fox when it was alive.’

Rupert said, ‘It’s a femur.’ Not wanting to sound too much of an academic, he added, ‘Thigh bone.’

‘But of what?’

‘Might be a deer.’

‘You know what?’ Dave said. ‘I’ve just had a spooky thought. It could be human.’

‘Up here on Lansdown? How would it get here?’

‘This is the spooky part. What if it belonged to one of the soldiers who was killed in the battle?’

There was a moment when nothing was said. The sounds of the fighting were distant now, muffled by a sudden breeze.

It was Rupert who spoke next. ‘Nasty.’

‘But not impossible?’

‘You could be right. There must have been corpses scattered all over the down. The army would have buried their dead up here before they moved on. They were in a campaign. They couldn’t take them home for burial.’

Dave shook his head. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it? Here we are, all dressed up and playing soldiers, and this was a guy who really bought it.’

‘That does put a different perspective on the day,’ Rupert said. ‘If it is human.’

‘I’ve a gut feeling it is.’ He placed the bone respectfully between them, as if he didn’t wish to handle it any more. ‘What shall we do with it?’

Secretly excited by the find, Rupert decided to appear indifferent. ‘Put it back, I suggest.’

Dave was a bit of a mind reader. ‘One of them archaeologists might be interested. There could be more stuff buried here.’

‘I rather doubt it,’ Rupert said. ‘The tree was growing over it.’

‘Three hundred years ago that tree wasn’t here.’

‘I don’t know. How long does a tree live?’

‘They could arrange a dig here and find more bones, even some of his armour.’

‘Along with your missing beer. Should confuse them.’

Dave shook his head. ‘Some bastard had the beer.’

‘I wasn’t serious.’

‘You’re right,’ Dave said. ‘I vote we leave it here. We can’t join in the battle again with a thing like that in our hands.’

‘You agree to bury it again?’

‘Leave the poor guy in peace.’

‘That’s the decent thing,’ Rupert said. ‘I’m with you, Dave. He’s rested here for over three hundred years. We don’t have any right to disturb him.’

Dave dug out more of the leaf mould and they replaced the bone at about its original depth and covered it.

‘RIP, whoever you are,’ Dave said.

‘Amen to that,’ Rupert said.

They slung their empties a respectful distance from the internment and returned to the battle.

After the fighting was over, the King’s Army picked up their casualties, assembled behind the standard and made a dignified withdrawal from the field, marching to the slow beat of a single drum. The cavalry went first, followed by the artillery hauling the guns and then the foot soldiers and finally the camp followers, mostly women. This wasn’t true to history, but in contrast to the noise and confusion of the fighting it made an impressive spectacle for the crowd watching from higher up. There was spontaneous applause. The parliament army would make a similar exit later.

When they reached the road that runs along the top of Lansdown, the marchers broke step and headed back to the car park at the racecourse where they’d left their transport: rented buses as well as horse boxes, vans and flat-top lorries for the cannon. Many had come in their own cars. While some loaded up and stowed away the weaponry, others attended to the horses or prepared barbecues. At least a couple of hours would pass agreeably in banter and debate about the fighting.

Rupert, new to all this, took his cue from the regulars, assisting where he could before slipping away to his car and changing out of his sweaty battle costume into a cool shirt and shorts. He was still curious about the femur Dave had unearthed. If, as they had speculated, it was part of the remains of a Civil War soldier from the original battle, this was an exciting find. In all the years he’d spent as an academic he’d never felt the touch of the past in such a direct way.

There was a good chance of finding more bones – perhaps a complete skeleton – lower down. And, if so, surely there would be metal objects preserved, a breastplate, a helmet or a sword.

How pleasing it would be to bring a group of students to the site and supervise them in a dig. Good for them and good for his career. He could visualise himself writing a paper about the discovery, giving a slide lecture, doing an article for
History
Today
.

First – not wishing to make a fool of himself – he would need to establish beyond doubt that the bone was human in origin. And then find out if it really was as old as he hoped. Carbon dating ought to establish its age. The university had the technology, so why not make use of it?

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