Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

In Ancient Wonderings, I perpetually sought to peer over the shoulders of those whose work filters our understanding of the ancient world. So I read the academic papers and books of leading archaeologists and scientists. I met them and listened to them as they spoke about their work. Their precision and patience has refined our vision of how British people lived and died and were buried and remembered in prehistoric times. I learnt by going to the places where the ancient past was still most visible and then tucking down away from the present world and digging down within, digging inside to realise what it is, what it has ever been, to be human. That process involved becoming immersed into a landscape, spending time in that world by day and by night – walking the terrain, getting to know the lie of the land: the geography, the geomorphology and the geology. To know a place you must start local – by reading its literatures and histories, listening to the voices of its peoples – steadily building an understanding and knowledge of a specific landscape, gradually unearthing a deeper topography. Then, and only really then, can you hope to venture back in time to try to see how that environment might once have looked. And only then can you begin to imagine the people and their ancient practices in that place so many years ago. It was at such times that I saw clearest – flowing through deepest time, seeking to see into the ways of past generations.

James Canton

March 2017

an illegible stone …

that is where we start.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’

Four Quartets

STONE (#ulink_7073ef7a-cf9f-5031-9138-1b86f5119a39)

I had fallen under the spell of a stone. It was in May half-term that I found a window from teaching. To find that stone I would venture to the north-east of Scotland and so I headed north until I reached the town of Insch.

Yet I had no map. When I asked where I might find one, the two women in the chemist’s looked to each other. They could have been twins. Both had short grey hair and glasses. Their faces were round and friendly. Had I tried the DIY store? I had. What about the post office? I had tried that, too. They smiled.

‘Mmm,’ they both said.

Then one spoke.

‘What about the garden centre just down the road. They might have one.’

‘Ay, they might,’ echoed the other.

The day was grey. I walked to the edge of the town where a new housing estate was rising from the earth and then for two miles more along the B992, skipping from the tarmac of the road to the grassy bank each minute or so as a car whooshed past. A buzzard circled above. In a copse of spruce trees an incessant mewing told of young buzzard chicks. I continued to dodge the sporadic traffic and soon reached the A96 with the choice to walk north to Inverness or south, back to Aberdeen. Instead, I turned down the slip road to the Kellockbank Country Emporium. The ladies from the chemist were right. By the bars of chocolate and racks of magazines, lay just what I wanted: Ordnance Survey Explorer maps 420 and 421.

There I stood. I had travelled some five hundred miles to this windswept place in Northern Scotland, beside an A-road some twenty miles north-east of Aberdeen. I was there to see a stone – a standing stone; a stone that held a story. The only problem was that there was a locked gate between me and the stone and I didn’t have a key.

The tale of that stone had been lodged for years, tucked away. Every once in a while the knowledge would work its way to the surface of my thoughts. Then, I would find a way to tell the tale:

‘There is a stone in Scotland …’ the story would begin.

About a year ago, I had found myself in the Rare Books reading room of the British Library in London, sometime in the afternoon of a warm day in May, and rather drifting away from the research I was meant to be undertaking on an explorer of the Arabian desert. Thoughts of that stone had arrived unexpectedly in my mind. I had ordered up some books on what I remembered was called the Newton Stone.

The facts were simple: the Newton Stone was a block of granite, or rather blue gneiss, something over six feet from top to toe on which there are carved two inscriptions. One is in Ogham script – a Celtic writing system that appears as a series of scratch-like marks torn into the side of the stone. A second, more prominent, script is engraved into the face of the stone consisting of six roughly horizontal lines of writing. Each line consists of some form of exotic lettering from an ancient language: a series of swirls, curves and curlicues carved into the surface of this mass of granite. What those letters say remains a mystery. That text has yet to be deciphered.

It seemed unbelievable that there could be a piece of written script sat on British soil that no one in the world could understand. There, in that hub of all known knowledge – in London, in the British Library – I gazed incredulous that those simple lines of script before me held a message which all our centuries of collective study had been unable to fathom.

A week on, I sat at home in my study. The Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland website simply stated that:

The ogam-inscribed stone (The ‘Newton Stone’) is of blue gneiss, 2.03 m x 0.5 m, and bears at the top six horizontal lines of characters and an ogam-inscription down the left angle and lower front of the stone.

No indication of mystery there. A second monument that sits alongside the Newton Stone was described as a Pictish symbol stone. The stones were in the garden of Newton House, some twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen. I rang Historic Scotland.

‘We can’t give out owner details,’ said the woman from the scheduling department.

She suggested I try calling the post office in the nearest village. I rang Old Rayne Post Office and elderly lady with a soft Scottish accent answered.

‘I’m afraid we’re not a post office any more,’ she said.

She suggested I rang the Old School House. I did. Another softly spoken voice told me to try Old Rayne Community Association.

‘They’ll know.’

I found their number and left a message on their answer machine. It wasn’t going well.

Then I received an email from Sally Foster. She was an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen who I had contacted asking for advice on the Newton Stone.

Dear James

I’m afraid that I don’t know how to contact the owners, other than to write to the occupiers of the house. Historic Scotland’s scheduling team will have full details because the monument is scheduled.

I’m dashing for a train now and will return to your question about best sources for latest thinking when I get back next week.

All the best for now.

Sally

She remained good to her word. A week later, a second email offered a list of reading and an intriguing lead:

My colleague Professor David Dumville has some new but unpublished ideas about one of the Newton stones, so I am copying him into this.

I emailed Professor Dumville immediately. Then I turned back to Newton House. Surely it was possible to find a phone number. I rang directory enquiries. A young Indian voice answered.

‘What is the name you are seeking, please?’

‘Newton House, please.’

‘Business or residential?’

‘Erm … residential.’

‘And the name?’

I hesitated; confessed I knew no more.

‘I need information to find the number,’ she stated.

She was fast, efficient: New World. I pictured her in a call centre in Bangalore. I was slow, blithering: Old World. I thanked her and hung up.

Two weeks on, there was still no reply from Professor Dumville. I emailed him again and then rang the archaeology department at Aberdeen.

‘He’ll be back next week,’ a voice informed me.

The following week I tried again. No answer. I tried a second email address. An online search had come up with a phone number for what seemed a fishery based at Newton House. The phone rang for an age. Finally, a woman answered. I said I was trying to visit the Newton Stone and wanted to speak to the owners of Newton House.