Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

‘Yeah, that’s very strange,’ she agreed in a Scottish tone. ‘I’ll report it to the engineers.’

In the meantime, she put me through to the Department of Archaeology’s general office. I left another message then returned to ‘No-Man’s Land’.

Graves wakes to find himself ‘in a great dark place with a glow of dull firelight in the middle’. He gathers his courage and speaks in dimly recalled Gaelic. A tribal elder from the back of the cave stumbles forward: ‘He was like some foul grey badger, his red eyes sightless, and his hands trembling on a stump of bog oak.’ The old man speaks. Graves is spellbound:

For a little an insatiable curiosity, the ardour of the scholar, prevailed. I forgot the horror of the place, and thought only of the fact that here before me was the greatest find that scholarship had ever made.

Graves hears of the survival of the Picts – of girls stolen from the lowlands, of ‘bestial murders in lonely cottages’. Then he escapes. He flies from the hill cavern and from Scotland, back to the cloisters of St Chad’s, Oxford where he burns all books, all references to the moorlands. But, of course, Graves is tortured by the knowledge he now holds. Reluctantly, he returns to the Muneraw and finds himself once more in that hidden hillside where now a young local woman is being prepared for sacrifice. Graves fires on these strange ancient relics of men and flees with their captive. A final struggle on the edge of a ravine sees one of the remaining Picts fall ‘headlong into the impenetrable darkness’. Graves is badly injured; dazed, but still alive.

There the narrative breaks. The last chapter of ‘No-Man’s Land’ is told by an unnamed editor. Graves’ words were written before he died of heart failure. An obituary notice in The Times is quoted which remembers the great potential Graves showed as an archaeologist, though tempered with the caveat that:

He was led into fantastic speculations; and when he found himself unable to convince his colleagues, he gradually retired into himself, and lived practically a hermit’s life till his death. His career, thus broken short, is a sad instance of the fascination which the recondite and the quack can exercise even over men of approved ability.

I stepped away from the stones yet was loathe to leave. In the woodland, the extraordinary song of a tree pipit reverberated bold and fluid as a Highland stream, rattling and ranting over the low cover of creeping ivy and floods of pink campion.

The track left the trees and followed the line of the River Kellock to a sheep field that had been fenced off. I stepped gingerly over, scattering sheep up the hillside towards the incongruous and faintly unnerving sounds of traffic coming from the nearby A96. I held close to the Kellock. A farm track carved by tractor wheels ran beside the riverbank, which was smothered with the triffid-like leaves of hogweed. I glanced at the map where the track marks ran straight to the original site of the stone. Before me was more barbed wire. Beyond, through a copse of trees, I could make out a building of some sort. I followed the farm track, down to the flood plain of the river. The stones had been described as being in a plantation near the Shevock toll-bar. This was the raised triangle of land I now stood before. I looked about. Three crows flew by. Sheep stared. I tried to picture the stones earthfast on the embankment above. South ran the valley of the River Shevock; north rose the dark Hill of Rothmaise. This was no place to linger. I felt it. Something was hurrying me away. I was standing on someone else’s land. The enclosed copse with the smallholding felt full of shadows. I looked back to the map and traced the snaking, red line of the A96. I had circled in pencil the stone circle on Candle Hill past Old Rayne. I turned back to the land. Barbed-wire fencing surrounded. I walked on heedless, away from the copse until the Shevock blocked my path, then lurched ungainly over a section of fencing and clambered up towards the road.

Past Pitmachie, I crossed the bridge over the Shevock and wove into the village of Old Rayne, up past the market cross where a line of schoolchildren snaked downhill as I went up, climbing the inclines to Candle Hill where a starling greeted my arrival from the rooftop of an abandoned farm shed. I sat on one of the fallen outliers of the stone circle. The clouds of earlier were clearing. A breeze blew. There was blue sky to the north over Gartly Moor and the Hill of Foudland. I gazed back and could make out that triangular embankment of raised land, the original site of the stone.

The belief that the Newton Stone had been carved in that strange script as some form of memorial was one that had held strong since the modern unearthing at the start of the nineteenth century. There was a logic in seeing a funereal nature to the engraving; that the stone had been a gravestone and the words an epitaph. Certainly, that was what I had assumed. In a paper published in 1882, the Earl of Southesk – the writer offered no other name – had noted that when ‘trenching’ of the Shevock area had taken place around 1,837 human bones had been found ‘a few yards’ from the original site of the Newton Stone. On the sleeper train up to Aberdeen, with notions of the Newton Stone and its enigmatic engraving playing along to the motion of the tracks, I had tucked down to sleep and begun to imagine that I was indeed one of the dead and was in fact lying in a sarcophagus of some sort, starting on that journey to the next world, the narrow bunk bed and the low roof helping to frame my fanciful thoughts. I placed my most valuable possessions about me, in the soft edges of the upper bunk, as though they were some form of modern grave goods – items that I would need in my next life: iPod, mobile phone, torch, glasses, and wallet.

When I stepped from the stone circle on Candle Hill two wagtails mobbed me, fluttering about my head. The open road ran south down the hill. Two goldfinches flew alongside, rested a while on a fence wire as the sun broke out from behind cloud, their black and red striped hoops reminding me of coral snakes. At Strathorn Farm, an old boy sat high in a tractor, slowly raised a hand and reversed. A heap of metal detritus was piled about the farm sheds in that way some old farmers have of simply dumping unwanted goods all out in the open: a lawn mower; a Flymo with fading 1970s orange; bits of metal pipes twisted to tortuous angles; a rusting washing machine; discarded gas canisters. A collection of waste, all weathering slowly away, seeping back to their residual minerals, metals. I thought too of the sense that though I now walked this ancient roadway boldly towards three Pictish stones planted somewhere over the wooded horizon, that I too in time would slowly weather back to my residual parts, until my calcareous deposits too would leach and litter the land.

I wandered on towards the Elphinstone estate. Two oystercatchers stood upon red-tinged clods. A yellowhammer called from a phone wire. Down a hawthorn-lined lane in the estate lands, a miasma of St Mark’s flies filled the air such that I was forced to walk along through a cloud of long, shiny, black bodies, each one dangling dark legs that hung as though paralysed from the fly’s torso. The religiosity in naming these creatures after St Mark supposedly comes from their emergence close to the saint’s day of 25 April, and yet the manner in which each fly flew with wings wide and pendulous legs dangling reminded of a shrunken dark cross, a crucifix. I pictured St Mark being dragged about the streets of Alexandria, a rope tied about his neck, his black-robes hanging dirty about his lifeless form, and wondered if this image wasn’t the inspiration for the beatification of these flies by Carl Linnaeus when he had named them Bibio marci in his tenth edition of the Systema Naturae back in 1758.

The flies vanished. I stepped back into woodland where the bare pine carpet was littered with tiny, bright green posies that were bunches of new growth snipped from the higher branches of the pines by the flocks of finches and that now lay like votive offerings – minute nosegays or scattered sea anemones lost in the woods. Each was perfectly soft to the touch, the young needles in gentle clumps, the severed attachment turning brown in the air. I picked several from the floor, some truly no bigger than an agate stone, smelt each one, and put them into my shirt pocket. When I found them later that day they had already lost their soft lustre.

By Logie Elphinstone House I found the three symbol stones. The setting was stunningly elegiac. I sat on the bare earth, sheltered under a canopy of elephantine-limbed beech trees, surrounded with sprays of bluebells interspersed with the pale heads of albino-white variants and the dying embers of daffodils. A single red tulip burnt crimson like a dying sun. In the peace of that space I massaged my aching feet and watched two tree creepers flit from one huge beech trunk to the moss and lichen cover of another. On the stones there were those strange symbols that told the archaeologists they were Pictish. Each was half the size of the Newton Stone. They had been found in 1812 when the nearby Moor of Carden was planted. Later that century, they had been placed with due reverence in this setting. A line of shrunken tombstones had been added. These stone lozenges, each perhaps nine inches across and a foot and half tall, each bore the name of faithful pets – dogs, I assumed.

Fitting with the notion of a place of the dead, the sense naturally emerged that beneath each of the three larger Pictish symbol stones there lay too the body of some brave and loyal being. These stones had various lifetimes, various roles not only for separate generations but for separate eras of human existence on this land, for distinct and different peoples. In the short time since they had been prised from the peat in 1812, these three stones had served as sections of wall in the plantation boundary and then later as some form of mock burial markers in an Edwardian pet cemetery. I wondered how long they had lain upon the Moor of Carden. Had they been carved there or elsewhere? With these wondrous whirls and circles, these sceptre lines so straight, these crescent curves of a moon, the symbols were mesmerising. I thought back to the Newton Stone, to the turns and curls of the script that I had travelled all these miles to see. How many times had the Newton Stone been moved about these lands? How many hands had sat and touched that hard stone and prepared to etch into its dark surface their own lines, the messages of their peoples?

These stones were reused across time. Perhaps these stones were picked out as they had stood as the chief standing stones in the stone circles that ringed the hilltops of the lands, those Candle Hills where fires burnt furiously on sacral days and nights. The Newton Stone had first been raised from the soil for its shape, its size, its standing. Then many, many generations later, the stone had been selected again, to be shifted, brought down a hillside to begin a new existence: the rebirthing of the Newton Stone as a surface for scripture; in time a palimpsest to three forms of script, three formal writing systems, each carved across the body of the stone. Here was the journey from an existence of preliterate sacred significance to becoming a literary landscape, an inscribed monument. Beside those three Pictish stones, I lay back against the soil, closed my eyes to the fractured light of the beech leaf canopy, and stretched my bare feet out into the cold, cooling leaves of bluebells. I thought of the hands that carved those lines, sought Buchan’s strange shrunken men.

I returned to Insch along the B9002. A steady line of passing cars told of commuters back from Aberdeen. At the modern ruins of the Archaeolink Prehistory Park weeds rose from an empty car park and a sign in the smart, new, glass-fronted bunker building told the site had been abandoned due to lack of funding. I paused and looked north across the railway line to where my map told of further sites: another Candle Hill rose beside a series of fine black dots marked Stone Circle and an outlying single dot labelled Standing Stone. More vast stone markers hauled and framed into the landscape by peoples long forgotten. I had already passed a sign to the Maiden Stone back on the turning to Garioch. Yet none of these neighbouring stones held that same cursive script as the Newton Stone.

I walked on. On a bridge over the railway line I stared west and suddenly noticed that in the sky a series of inky black streams of cloud now rested over the land like vast dark sheets or veils formed of gossamer thin threads that seemed to waver in the air. I had never seen anything like them before. The clouds – for these dark waves could be nothing but – appeared to be formed from translucent silk shrouds that were falling gently from the sky. The single, dark body of a crow flew beneath while beyond the sky was pale blue with banks of foaming white cloud like seahorses rising from the waves of an incoming Atlantic storm. I found myself transfixed by these strange cloths of cloud which were certainly made more dramatic that afternoon as they lay above and seemed to mimic the flowing motion of the hills below and where in the distance I could clearly make out the Gothic ruins of Dunnideer Castle, the remains of a thirteenth-century fort that sat on the highest hillside overlooking Insch and consisted of what appeared to be a single triumphal arch, a window of light framed by stone – an ancient solitary dolmen.

When I returned to the Commercial Hotel in Insch, I climbed the three flights of unstable stairs to my rooftop room. I lay on the bed and when I woke after a short sleep it was to find that soot-fingered dusk was finally falling on the day. Through the skylight in the bathroom it looked as though the world was on fire. I opened the window in the roof and gazed south towards the Garioch Hills where it seemed an inferno was burning beyond the still green hillsides and as if the flaming embers of those furious fires were reaching up to the sky, for the undersides of the clouds blazed with unholy colour, blushed as they were with an incredibly unnatural and bloody hue; deep shades of fiery reds, incarnadine and darkening with every second that I stood and gazed.

The following day I was due to meet Sally Foster in Aberdeen. She had assured me the mysterious Professor Dumville would be there too. Yet there were still sites around Insch to see. As I packed, I juggled the options. I would march to the Picardy Stone – another classic Pictish symbol stone two miles or so north. The map was splayed on the bed. The neighbouring hillside was labelled as another Candle Hill topped with a stone circle: if there was time I would nip up the Hill of Dunnideer, get a close up of that strange Gothic arch.

Past the edges of Insch, the road north rose steadily, flat and empty. I walked at marching pace. There were the remains of another stone circle on the hillside west. I headed on. The road fell into a dell where birdsong blew over me from a sheltered glade soft as cherry blossom. I did not halt but strode on down a perfect avenue of beech trees which reminded me of the passageway towards Newton House the day before and which, even in the clear light of that morning, held a strangely sinister sense, an oddly tangible touch of malevolence that I could only trace to a feeling induced by the emptiness of the road, the overarching, enclosing nature of the beech trees as they framed the way ahead, funnelling me towards a distant vanishing point. I passed a sign pointing to the Leys of Largie. The Picardy Stone appeared in the edge of a green field between two beech trunks, coloured the same tone of grey as the trees. I stumbled over the stile. The stone had been encaged. I stepped into its enclosure, touched its shoulder. There were some of those same Pictish symbols carved on the body of the stone: a serpentine shape; two elaborate circles or discoid figures; and the outline of what looked like a hand mirror. An information board for Historic Scotland stated:

Welcome to the Picardy Symbol Stone

A Place of Burial

Beneath this Pictish symbol stone are the remains of a small burial cairn,

probably erected 1,300–1,500 years ago. An empty grave-shaped pit was

found under one side of it.

On the grey stone stile, I balanced a cup of Thermos tea. A still had descended. The winds had died. I glanced up towards the heights of another Candle Hill, then over to the Hill of Dunnideer. There would be no time to climb either. The Picardy Stone was within view of both. Was that significant? The Newton Stone – even at its earlier setting where it was found in 1804 – was on low ground. It could be seen from the high points but was sited where people actually lived. You wouldn’t live on the hilltops. You might head there for special occasions. Yet the symbol stones and the Newton Stones were on the low ground. They were placed for daily viewing. You didn’t bury the dead on the high ground. You went up there on specific, special occasions. To speak to the Gods. To celebrate and to appease.

I touched the Picardy Stone a final time, stepped over the stile down to the road. What of those Pictish symbols? I thought of a carved, wooden figure I had at home that my daughter Eva had loved to hold when she was only a toddler and which still rested on her bookshelves. It was a Buddhist statue I had bought from a street trader in north-eastern India many years before of a man sat cross-legged, in the lotus position, meditating. In his hand he held a hand mirror to see the reflection of his soul. That mirror and the symbol on the stone seemed remarkably similar. I walked on, strolling now back down the avenue of beech trees. So what was I saying? That there were Buddhist links to the Picts? I was heading down the same road as those Victorian antiquarians of the past who had seen Phoenician in the Newton Stone script, who had traced an Eastern ancestry for the ancient people of Britain. It was easy enough to do.

In the wide field beyond the beeches parallel ridges ran through the red, iron-rich soil. Three tractors traced the lines. Passing here earlier I had seen a lone farmer pushing single potatoes into the topsoil of a drill: stooping and rising; stooping again. And though he had surely only been testing the depth to set the tractor to, I had immediately thought of that learnt motion of labour, that mechanical precision built into muscle and passed down through time, generation to generation until our time when those patterns of history were splayed and broken. I thought too of the words of Seamus Heaney’s ‘At a Potato Digging’ where:

Centuries

Of fear and homage to the famine god

Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,

Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

We no longer worshipped at that altar; no longer knew that fear. We had come so far from those days. I wondered, as I wound back to Insch, whether it was indeed still possible to step into the feelings, into the thoughts, the fears, hungers and desires of our ancestors, of those people who lived here one thousand, two thousand years before.

A yellowhammer was sat on a post singing his song. I walked past only feet away.

‘Please stay,’ I whispered under my breath.

His head turned. I do not know if he heard me but he did stay. On the rise of the hill heading back into Insch, I looked east across to where the Newton Stone lay, made out the Matchbox cars and lorries criss-crossing on the A96. The buzzard was there; tracing widening circles in the sky. Below, on the roadside I could make out the copse of three pine trees, their dark-topped canopy and from that distant place heard the pale cries of those buzzard chicks though only the wind blew about me.

When I met Sally Foster later that day in Aberdeen her office floor was patterned with sets of third-year archaeology exam papers laid out like pale gravestones. Sally sat serenely at her desk amid the layers of paper.

‘So you did get to see the stone?’ she asked with a smile.

She knew of the difficulties of getting to the site. I told of clambering over barbed-wire fences to the original site of the stones on Shevock. Sally laughed.

‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘Professor Dumville was due to join us, but he’s had to leave for Liverpool.’

I started to wonder if he really existed.

‘He sent his apologies,’ added Sally as though reading my thoughts. She picked a card off the table. ‘And he’s given me his mobile number for you to call.’

At lunch we picked over ideas on Pictish stones.

‘They’re unshaped, previously used,’ Sally said.

The notion of multiple lives for these ancient blocks held such practical sense. At first they were hauled to become standing-stone monuments. The inscriptions on the Newton Stone could easily reflect different periods of time entirely; separate carvings holding distinct meanings and senses for different generations, for different peoples living in that same landscape.

Sally had to return to her marking.

‘You must have a look at the cathedral,’ she said. ‘There’s even a gravestone inscribed with Ogham – a professor of mathematics, I think.’

She drew directions to where the Ogham gravestone would be. Her detailed directions were like a tiny treasure map. I thanked her again and headed off through the cobbled medieval alleyways, wandering through the botanical gardens before finding myself at the biological sciences department where the bones of a blue whale filled one wall.