Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

‘The big house,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the name of the people.’

She sounded nervous.

‘They’re not local,’ she added.

I asked how I might get to see the stone.

‘The house is just off the A96,’ she said. ‘Ask at the security gate for them to let you in.’

Now, I stood at the gate. Here was the moment of truth. I rang the buzzer and listened intently beneath the swoosh of cars on the main road a few feet away. There was no answer. I pressed another button on the keypad and there was a faint ringing tone like a distant telephone. It stopped.

There was a pause. A silence that lasted too long. Then nothing.

‘Hello?’ I asked.

I pressed the button again. The ringing tone started up again.

‘Hello,’ a voice said cheerfully.

‘Oh, hello,’ I said. ‘I spoke to a lady a while ago about coming to see the Newton Stone.’

There was another silence.

‘Hello?’ I said again.

A long tone rang out through the speaker. The gate shifted, squeaked rustily.

‘Come in,’ said the woman’s voice.

Magically, the gate began to slowly open before me. I stepped forward.

The gate opened on to a path, which wound down a soft incline into another world that seemed as though a kind of paradise. Birdsong rang out. A flycatcher flitted about in the still bare outer branches of a beech tree. The path led to the edge of a stream. On the far bank the skeletal remains of last year’s giant hogweed stood tall among this year’s wide young fronds – their broken frames fragile, delicate and leaning rather a-kilter. A beech hedge ran to my right. A line of broad-leafed limes ran beside the riverbank. I crossed a bridge over the river, pausing inevitably over the water before proceeding. An avenue opened before me, formed from the leaves, the branches of beech trees, which produced a distant focal point to which I slowly headed.

Newton House stood beautifully positioned before me. It was Georgian square, stately and solid beside a pea-shingle driveway. A small, rectangular sign stated ‘Newton Stones’ and pointed past the house to a smaller pathway of pale gravel, edged with sections of beech hedge that wove into woodland. Deep green rhododendron bushes bunched out into the spaces left by Douglas fir that reached high above – their bare lower trunks wonderfully sinewed. Over the ground lay a copper brush of last year’s beech leaves that soon transformed to a carpet of pink campion. The path ended.

There were two standing stones. Each stood two metres tall; each was topped with a wig of soft, green moss. Posies of yellow primrose had been planted about the stones. To the side, there was a white, metal-framed bench and a table in the form of a slab of slate resting on foot-high sections of beech trunk. For a moment I did not know quite what to do. Here before me was the Newton Stone. Here was the strange script.

I stepped closer, reached out a hand and touched the granite with my forefinger, stroked the edge of the stone as though it were some wild animal that needed greeting, gentle reassurance I was friend not foe. There was nothing of the coldness to the touch that I had anticipated.

I stepped away. The stone was the colour of cloud. In places, the surface of the stone was patched of whiter, paler shades formed by some long Latin-named lichen. The Ogham script was easily made out: a series of engraved lines, each two, three inches long; each close to horizontal and running parallel down the edge of the stone. The script appeared as a line of scars, a tribal marking that ran the length of one side of the stone. To the trained eye, these lines in the stone were far less controversial. They now made sense; they could be read. On the front of the stone was the undeciphered writing. I stared. There seemed a sinuous sense to much of the script. The letters looked as though they flowed together naturally enough and yet here before me were words that the greatest minds could not fathom, that not the wisest archaeologists or philologists, the most esteemed professors of linguistics, could make head nor tail of. There was the fylfot, the mark in the centre of the engraving: a swastika by any other name. Yet that symbol meant something so much more sinister to our modern eyes. To pre-twentieth-century eyes, the pattern was one formed by four Greek symbols: four capital Gamma signs placed together – a gammadion.

I peered at the first line of script. The initial letter looked like a lopsided C. Then an I. Then two Fs? I stopped. I had done all this before to photographs of the script. I leaned my head to the side a little. Did the script run from left to right or from right to left? I reached forward, traced each letter with my finger, then leaned my head closer, starring into the fissures of the carving.

Between the two stones, secured into the ground was a metal plaque. I brushed the bosky detritus of beech leaves and twigs away to reveal the following words:

The enigmatic carved stones are not in their original position. The symbol stone bearing a double-disc and a serpent and Z-rod is Pictish. The other stone bears Oghams – a Celtic alphabet along its side and an inscription in a different alphabet on its face. Readings of these two inscriptions are a subject of controversy.

This monument is protected as a monument of national importance under the AM Acts of 1913–53.

– Secretary of State for Scotland

On the second stone, far easier to make out, were two distinctive symbol markings: the snaking pattern of a serpent-figure, and above the double circles of a second, stranger sign.

I walked away and sat on the metal bench.

It was a beautiful setting. Mixed woodland. Beech, Douglas fir. Bluebells. Birdsong. Whitethroat and chaffinch calling. I sat and ate my lunch. There was something gloriously reassuring in that quotidian task of eating, of stepping away from the solemn presence of that standing stone a few feet before me and those illegible six lines carved across its chest. I listened to the birdsong, glanced about me at this picnic spot and then remembered: it was a folly; nothing more than an imagined site, a constructed landscape: a glade in the wood – the ancient stones framed by a beech hedge; the primula; the bench and the slate table. I laughed out loud at the ease with which a few accoutrements can create a sense of solemnity. I was sitting in a Victorian grotto.

For this was not the original site of the Newton Stone. The stone had been discovered by shepherds back in 1803 half a mile or so south on the side of a hill overlooking Shevock Burn. The stone had been brought here in 1837 and placed in the present position in 1873 as the perfect Victorian garden ornament – an ancient monument with unexplained inscriptions. Not that there weren’t learned antiquarian gentlemen already offering their theories. I had trawled the British Library. Only sixty years after the Newton Stone was unearthed there was already excited speculation. Writing in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Alexander Thomson of Banchory noted with a certain evident pride how:

It is provoking to have an inscription in our own country of unquestionable genuineness and antiquity, which up to this time, seems to have baffled all attempts to decipher it.

That was in 1863. Conjecture flourished. The eminent ‘Dr Mill of Cambridge, one of the most profound oriental scholars of the day’ saw the inscription as ‘in the old Phoenician character and language’.

I took a bite of my sandwich and looked back to those six lines of inscription then rose and returned to the stone, touched again the rough edges of that first letter, the lopsided C. The same questions swirled. Who had made these words? What did they say? Who were they carved for? Who was meant to read them?

Even to my ill-tutored eye there seemed something distinctly Oriental in the swirls and whirls of the lettering. The Phoenician theory was one that had held for a good while. L. A. Waddell was a Victorian antiquarian and linguist whose elaborately entitled work The Phoenician origin of Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons: Discovered by Phoenician and Sumerian Inscriptions in Britain, by pre-Roman Briton Coins and a mass of new History had first been published in 1924. Waddell claimed not only to have deciphered and translated the Newton Stone script – which he dated to 400 BC – but saw the monument as evidence of Phoenician colonists who were the ancestors of the ancient Britons.

I rather liked the notion of Phoenicians reaching the north of Scotland on one of their expeditionary trading missions and their decision to stay, to settle here. It was a fanciful one, of course. I mused a moment on Waddell’s theory, sat there beside the stone, and imagined a young Phoenician traveller who falls in love with a local lass. He will stay, he declares. He cannot leave. Time passes. He prospers, grows old. He has spent a lifetime here. He prepares for his final journey, the one to the undiscovered country. He commands a stonemason to carve a message into one of the vast standing stones. He remembers pieces, fragments of his native language.

It was time I moved on. I packed up the picnic and placed my hand on the stone. It was an odd gesture, I thought later, and yet I did so automatically all the same, as though touching the shoulder of a friend in farewell. The pale gravel pathway continued on through gladed woodland. The map had shown a track running down from the grounds of Newton House, from what were referred to as ‘Sculptured Stones’, away south through open fields to further woodland, running directly to the original site of the stone. Strangely, the map also indicated the track would pass a mausoleum within the grounds.

It was while on the trail of the Newton Stone, tucked away in the recesses of the British Library, that I had discovered John Buchan’s The Watcher by the Threshold.

The work was a collection of stories first published in 1902 and all set in Scotland. In a dedication to his friend Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan stated:

It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories. Meantime, to you, who have chosen the better part, I wish many bright days by hill and loch in the summers to come.

J. B.

R.M.S. Briton, at sea

September 1901

It was the first of the stories – ‘No-Man’s Land’ – that most intrigued. Buchan’s tale tells the sad fate of a young Oxford academic, an archaeologist called Mr Graves, who is holidaying in his Scottish homeland. Graves is entranced by the Picts:

They had troubled me in all my studies, a sort of blank wall to put an end to speculation. We knew nothing of them save certain strange names which men called Pictish, the names of those hills in front of me – the Muneraw, the Yirnie, the Calmarton. They were the corpus vile for learned experiment; but heaven alone knew what dark abyss of savagery once yawned in the midst of this desert.

Graves tells of his own journey into the heart of this landscape. He meets an old shepherd and his wife who talk of lost lambs, of sheep found dead with a hole in their throats. Graves laughs at mention of the Brownie – those mythical, half-forgotten beings; shrunken, ancient men who were said to still live in the wildest spaces of the moors. He heads out for a place called the Scarts of the Muneraw:

… in the hollow trough of mist before me, where things could still be half discerned, there appeared a figure. It was little and squat and dark; naked, apparently, but so rough with hair that it wore the appearance of a skin-covered being.

Graves has met the Brownie – those remnants of the still-surviving Picts. He flees in terror but is chased, bundled to the ground and knocked unconscious.

I had paused my reading to check up on the Picts. They were a people of north and eastern Scotland dating from pre-Roman times until the eleventh century or so when they merged with the Gaels. These were Buchan’s Brownies. Then I had rung Professor Dumville’s phone number again.

‘The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Please check and try again.’

I had been expecting a Scottish voice to answer. Instead the recording was oddly clipped – the Standard English of an imperial English voice from a century ago – in fact, a voice rather well suited to a figure like Buchan’s Oxford academic Mr Graves. Professor Dumville seemed to have vanished from all possible communication. I rang the main university switchboard. The operator tried the number. The same imperial English voice answered.