Coast presenter Neil Oliver loves to beat the bounds of time. This month he is in Kingston to share the secrets of Britain’s past. Rosanna Greenstreet listens in...
As presenter of the popular BBC2 series Coast, archaeologist and historian Neil Oliver travelled the length and breadth of Great Britain. It is entirely possible that he has seen more of our archipelago, in a shorter time, than anyone else alive. Last year he published The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places and is about to embark on a speaking tour based on the book. Given that Hampton Court Palace is one of his hundred hot spots, it is only fitting that Kingston’s Rose Theatre should be among his autumnal ports of call.
“I have seen thousands of places and heard thousands of stories,” he reflects, during a break in filming for the second series of Rise of the Clans for BBC Scotland. “People ask: ‘How did you pick the hundred?’ And I say: ‘I didn’t – they picked themselves.’ The unforgettable places, the ones that lingered against my eyelids: these are the hundred. Through them, I give my idiosyncratic personal take on the story of the British Isles.”
Stories have always fascinated Oliver. Growing up in a working-class household in Dumfriesshire, near the Anglo-Scottish border, he quickly found that family tales sparked his interest in the past.
“Feeling connected to history started when I was a boy. Both my grandfathers survived the First World War: my mum’s dad died long before I was born, but my dad’s dad was still alive when I was in my teens. He had shrapnel behind his ear and a wound in his arm, and he’d been at Passchendaele and the Somme. When we studied the war at school, it struck me that this wasn’t something that happened to strangers long ago – this was family history. It fascinated me that for want of the bullet taking a slightly different path, or the shell being a bit closer, I simply wouldn’t exist.”
Neil went on to gain a masters in archaeology at the University of Glasgow, which is where he met his wife, Trudi. Later, finding it hard to make ends meet as an archaeologist, he retrained as a journalist and worked on The Scotsman, The Guardian and the Edinburgh Evening News.
Yet his love of the past persisted. Together with his friend Tony Pollard, Oliver decided to self-fund a dig in the battlefields of the Anglo-Zulu War in southern Africa. The idea led, in 2002, to the BBC TV documentary series Two Men in a Trench, which saw the pair visit historic British battlefields and bring the action to life using state-of-the-art archaeological techniques. Several books followed and then, in 2005, Oliver was made lead presenter on the highly acclaimed Coast.
He spent a decade on the UK show and, with his distinctive Scots accent and flowing locks, became something of a celebrity. In addition to those 10 series, he made three in Australia and three in New Zealand, at times taking Trudi and their three children along for the ride.
“We spent six months in Australia, where the children went to school in Sydney. Then, for three months in New Zealand, my wife homeschooled them. Now my daughter is 16 and my sons are 13 and 11, so it’s less straightforward to take them out of school.”
Coast aside, Oliver’s presentational credits include The Last Explorers, one episode of which saw him travel to Antarctica in the footsteps of little-known Scottish naturalist and polar scientist William Speirs Bruce. It was a journey not without its terrors.
“My month on the yacht in Antarctica was petrifying because of the exposure. I’ve also abseiled down terrifying cliffs and crawled through tiny tunnels in the Great Orme copper mine, near Llandudno, in North Wales. That was very unsettling. But, touch wood, I haven’t come to grief yet.”
Such is Oliver’s preoccupation with feeling close to past events, he is never happier than when trudging across a field where a battle unfolded, or along a beach where invaders arrived.
“The big attraction of archaeology is making physical contact,” he enthuses. “You can walk the battlefield at Culloden, or occupy the spot on Iona where Saint Columba built his cell, more than 1,400 years ago. You can stand in the Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey beside the tomb of Margaret Beaufort, knowing that you’re next to the mother of Henry VII – victor of the Wars of the Roses – and the grandmother of Henry VIII.”
At the Rose, Oliver will transport the audience to such significant periods as “the coming of the first farmers, the arrival of the Romans, the Norman Conquest in 1066 and on to the English Civil War and the rest”.
His earliest site is in Norfolk where, in 2013, the Happisburgh footprints – the oldest known hominid footprints outside Africa – were briefly revealed.
“Happisburgh is being severely eroded. From time to time, the loose sediment of the cliffs collapses onto the beach to reveal ground surfaces that have been buried for thousands, if not millions, of years,” he explains.
“A set of prints there was identified as having been made by a group of people who walked across soft mud about 900,000 years ago. They were not fossilised, they hadn’t turned to stone: they were just soft mud buried beneath many metres of sediment which had kept them like flowers trapped between the pages of a book.
“The prints were briefly visible. Then the tide came in and, shortly after their first appearance in almost a million years, they were gone. But archaeologists had time to photograph them and take casts.
“We get so het up about Europe and Brexit, but there were people living here nearly a million years ago. King Solomon had a ring with the words ‘This too shall pass’ to remind him that, given enough time, he would be history. What’s happening now is terribly important, of course, but there’s a long story before us and it’s helpful to be reminded.”
And Oliver, a brilliant storyteller with a passion for the past, is just the person to do it.
The Story of the British Isles in 100 Places, Rose Theatre, Kingston on Nov 22. To book: rosetheatrekingston.org
