Goodreads asked Angus Watson:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Angus Watson I wrote an article on Iron Age hillforts for the Telegraph. I’d become fascinated by the relatively recent period, roughly from 800BC to 43AD, when Britain was a very busy, populous and advanced place covered in towering hillforts, but about which we know pretty much nothing. There would have been huge wars, epic love affairs, magnificent intrigues etc. but all the stories have been lost because the Iron Age Brit didn’t write (as far as we know), and the 400 years of Roman occupation that began in 43AD wiped out all oral histories (subsequent Saxon, Viking and Norman invasions probably didn’t help).
As I walked up the gigantic, prehistoric fortress of Maiden Castle with big bearded historian Peter Woodward, we had approximately this conversation:
Me: ‘So was it like Conan the Barbarian, with muscled men rescuing virgins from snake cults?’
Him: ‘As far as we know, yes. The visuals in a film like Conan the Barbarian are probably about as accurate a picture as we have of the Iron Age. ’
At that moment, I decided to write a book set in the Iron Age.

flag