A local professor has invited Silvie’s family to tag along on a summer archaeology course that will attempt to replicate the daily lives of the Iron Age Northumbrians. A violent, racist man, he reveres Iron Age Britain as a symbol of purity, believing it represents a culture before it was sullied by invaders from other lands. But his interest isn’t especially benign. He’s taught Silvie how the ancient people would have lived-which roots can be eaten, which moors can be usefully foraged-and how they would have died, found preserved in bogs with ropes around their necks, hands, and feet. A bus driver by trade, her dad is an amateur expert in pre-Roman British history. Seventeen-year-old Silvie’s father has an unusual hobby. ( From the publisher.A teenager and her working-class family join a group of experimental archaeologists and must face the sinister connections between their own circumstances and the brutal lives of the Iron Age inhabitants of Britain. When the group builds one of their own, they find a spiritual connection to the past.Ī story at once mythic and strikingly timely, Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall urges us to wonder how far we have come from the “primitive minds” of our ancestors. The ancient Britons built ghost walls to ward off enemy invaders, rude barricades of stakes topped with ancestral skulls. Mixing with the students, Silvie begins to see, hear, and imagine another kind of life, one that might include going to university, traveling beyond England, choosing her own clothes and food, speaking her mind.

He has raised her on stories of early man, taken her to witness rare artifacts, recounted time and again their rituals and beliefs-particularly their sacrifices to the bog. The students are fulfilling their coursework Silvie’s father is fulfilling his lifelong obsession. They are surrounded by forests of birch and rowan they make stew from foraged roots and hunted rabbit.

In the north of England, far from the intrusions of cities but not far from civilization, Silvie and her family are living as if they are ancient Britons, surviving by the tools and knowledge of the Iron Age.įor two weeks, the length of her father’s vacation, they join an anthropology course set to reenact life in simpler times. 'The light blinds you there’s a lot you miss by gathering at the fireside.' A taut, gripping tale of a young woman and an Iron Age reenactment trip that unearths frightening behavior

Ghost wall moss