Tacitus declared it "pretium victoriae" - worth the conquest,
the best compliment that could occur to a Roman.
He'd never visited these shores,
but was nonetheless convinced that Britannia was rich in gold.
Silver was abundant there, too.
Apparently so were pearls,
although Tacitus had heard they were grey,
like the overcast rain-heavy skies,
and the natives only bothered to collect them
when they were cast up on the shore.
As far as the Roman historians were concerned,
Britannia might well be off the edge of the world,
but it was off the edge of their world,
not in some howling, barbarian wilderness.
If the same writers had been able to travel in time
as well as space to the northernmost of our islands,
to the Orcades - our modern Orkney,
they would have seen something much more astonishing than heaps of pearls
The unmistakable signs of a civilisation thousands of years older than Rome.