Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

The cathedral of St Machar was perfectly solid and squat, the granite frame appearing resistible to all forces: an apparently everlasting monument. Machar had travelled with Columba from Ireland to Iona, carrying Christianity across the treacherous waters of the Irish Sea. Machar was meant to have built a place of worship on this site sometime around 580 AD. I stared at patterns of the heraldic wooden ceiling, at the mosaic web of the stone walls, and thought of the notion of multiple lives for ancient stones like the Newton Stone. It ran true here. In the cathedral graveyard, I followed Sally’s map to the modern Ogham in vain, getting happily distracted by the sweet calling of a goldfinch from the summit of a grand elm tree high above the gravestones. The sky was empty; perfectly summer-blue. I stopped and sat. I was surrounded by stones that had been shaped and carved, many placed together to form a place of collective shelter, of worship; many others had been inscribed to memorialise individual lives. It was obvious. This was what we had always done with stone.

On the train south I started to really drift and wonder. That running screen of land and sky, the space the train affords and the motion of easy speed often acts as a conduit that allows thoughts to well and rise. So it was that day. In many ways, though I had reached out and touched the Newton Stone, had stood on the land where it had first been raised, I had got no nearer to answering the mystery of the script.

As we left Aberdeen I watched as the blocks of stone high-rise housing blurred into rocky outcrops patched with sulphurous yellow gorse. Sitting opposite me were a couple that I took to be from Norway. Like me they stared through the window to the drama unfurling: morning mists rolled in the space between sea and land; green fields seemed to fall into a grey void. I listened to their whispered talk, catching their excitement though their words meant nothing.

That morning on the train from Insch, two oil workers, both men in their middle ages, had talked briefly together in a language I did not know before one fell asleep against the windowpane. The other, beside me, had opened his newspaper. The words were constructed of letters that were largely familiar and yet I could not make out their meaning. I had thought then of the matter of translation, of those six lines of script upon the Newton Stone. Who were they intended for? Who was their readership? Why write them unless they are to be read by someone? Then there was another translational matter: the distinction between the person who carved the words into the stone and the person who had devised the script.

I reached up to the luggage rack, pulled down my bag and delved into the mass of papers I was accumulating. In an article titled ‘Literacy in Pictland’ by Katherine Forsyth, I found the passage I was after. Forsyth delineated three figures in the engraving process: the scriptor who ‘drafted the text’; the lapidarius who actually carved the stone; and the patron who held the final say. Perhaps in the rubbing space between the three some crucial meaning to the inscription had been lost. I caught the eye of the man opposite. We shared a polite smile and both turned back to the spectacle of the landscape slipping beyond the train window. The grey-bricked facade of a building flashed by, bearing the name The Newton Arms before vanishing into the soft blanket of a sea mist, a fret that fell over the coast, blurring the edges between shore and sea, between headlands and nothingness.

Here was another matter that was starting to bother me: seemingly strange coincidences. Or rather, if not coincidences, a building sense of synchronicity, as though there was a singularly calm and fluid motion to life and that I had just managed to sneak a vision of the underlying structures of that truth. I shook my head a little and thought rationally, thought of confirmation bias – the psychological underpinning that makes us see what we want to see, find the facts to support beliefs that ring true to us such that we make the connections that are relevant to us. So The Newton Arms sign springs out from the mist for me but not for anyone else on the 11:25 Aberdeen to London train (except perhaps someone called Newton). On the train up I had been musing on the manner in which as a traveller you seek differences, see the changes in the tint of the soil, the rises in the land, the yellow of the gorse. Yet in reality the variance is rather less than the resemblance: much remains the same – green fields and trees, rectangular houses.

I plugged in my iPod and chose Joanna Newsom whose harp strings seemed fitting. I closed my eyes:

The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow

Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh …

I drifted with the music, the mystery of the lyrics, the movement of the train and woke to the sight of a stretch of water opening beyond the windowpane almost too beautiful to bear as sunshine fell upon the shallow bay at Montrose. On my phone there was a shifting digital dot representing the train making its progress over a map of eastern Scotland. The train was now travelling at eighty-five miles per hour; now eighty-six, now eighty-seven. A constantly updating stream of information swarmed silently, invisibly about me. Yet this simple string of letters that I held in my hand, transcribed from a stone where they were carved hundreds of years earlier, remained an enigma.

Sally Foster and I had talked of the process by which it was possible to gaze back into history, to see shifts over time, movements across centuries and too easily to glaze over the fact that these eras are composed of individual lifetimes – those single units of human existence on the earth – each with their own needs, hungers and desires. One person carved these letters into the granite; one other instructed them to do so. I tried to imagine that moment. Two figures beside a standing stone. Did one of them have paper to write on? No. So how did one show the other what to carve? With a stick in the earth? With dye on bark? Scratched on to clay? The translation of those letters from one to another, from scriptor to lapidarius, was surely where the meaning was lost. If today’s brightest minds could find no meaning then there could be none. Or was that just modern arrogance? Maybe the meaning was still there. Maybe we just couldn’t see it.

I changed the music, scanning through the familiar albums for an old favourite, finding Bob Dylan’s Desire and choosing ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ before settling back as the first chords broke. South of Arbroath the beaches ran wide and empty. I stopped gazing when I heard the line ‘Your voice is like a meadowlark’. That coincidence thing was playing games again.

Past Kirkcaldy, past Kinghorn, the North Sea opened revealing an islet peaked with a red and white striped lighthouse. Sunlight splintered from the slate roofs like spray off the waves. In the distance the Forth Bridge looked like a Meccano simulacrum. The Norwegian woman opposite was pointing at the window, whispering heatedly to her husband. Was she talking so quietly because she didn’t want others to hear or because she was being polite, a foreigner in a foreign land; the manners of the traveller? I followed her finger and saw the lighthouse. The island was Inchcolm – home for hermits for a thousand years; burial site for Scottish nobles. More bones and stones.

At Edinburgh, a man sat beside me, placing a large plastic box on the table which contained a small black cat. I caught its stare between the frets of the cage. A feral, wild eye met mine. Just before Berwick where Scotland drew to an end we passed by another golf course. Bunkers of yellow sand stood out from a green baize. Ahead I saw a woman was preparing to drive on the raised dais of the tee.

Then something strange happened: she struck the ball just as she appeared adjacent in my window view such that as the train sped on, it did so at exactly the same speed with which the golf ball flew, which meant that for a few still seconds the ball became a silent companion, travelling along through the open airs to fall on the open space of the fairway and come to a halt perfectly framed in my viewpoint as that woman golfer had been some specks of time earlier. The entire event lasted no more than perhaps six or seven seconds. The sensation of being suddenly immersed in a world that no longer ran on the same lines as it had done a short time before was undeniable. I turned to the black cat. It stared back, held my gaze.

A little while later the train passed on to the bridge that straddled the River Tweed and so I crossed from one country into another. That return into England occurred precisely as the opening bars of a new song opened in my ears; a jangling melody that was soon accompanied by the meandering voice of Polly Jean Harvey warming up:

I live and die

through England.

I listened spellbound. The words rang out to frame a perfectly synchronous moment of travel. The song was ‘England’. I stared through the window to yellow sunshine, to a green countryside; to Elysian fields speckled with wild flowers beyond which rolled distant blue waters topped with white horses. An idealised England.

It leaves

sadness.

…

Remedies

never were,

remedies,

not within my reach.

I cannot go on as I am.

The threnody that runs through the heavenly, Arcadian vision of England seen by Wordsworth or Blake or Edward Thomas, ran here too. I stared with watery eyes. The sudden intensity of the moment was unanticipated.

England

…

It leaves a taste,

a bitter one.

A few days later, I rang Professor Dumville. An Old School voice answered. I explained who I was and he apologised for not making the Aberdeen meeting. I said I wanted to know his thoughts on the Newton Stone.

‘Well, it’s certainly acquired a sense of mystery,’ he said.

His voice was deep, confident and fully of authority.

‘Exemplifies in spades the notion of the Picts being odd.’

Scattered across my desk were various articles collected from Sally Foster beside various other pencilled notes. One piece of paper was labelled ‘Ques for DD’. I couldn’t find it.

‘Thing is, the archaeologists have gone all PC about the Picts,’ he continued. He seemed happy enough to talk. I was sure the sheet was somewhere in the pile.

‘I was first shown photographs of the stone way back when taking my MLitt, as a graduate. “What is that script?” I’d been asked. “Old Roman cursive,” I’d answered. “That’s what it is.” But then that means it was carved before 300 AD.’

Professor Dumville’s words were worth waiting for. His chatty honesty was utterly refreshing.

‘If it’s not a fake …’ he added.

I stopped.

‘A fake?’ I asked.

I hadn’t even questioned the script’s authenticity before. I found my sheet. The first question was a good one. Why was it that a recent paper on Pictish stones was using a transliteration of the Newton Stone script from 1922? The answer was simple.

‘There’s been no modern work done on the stone. The family wouldn’t let anyone in to see. It’s only been in the last year or so that the house changed hands. The new owners seem rather friendlier. Did you get to see it?’

‘Yes,’ I said, rather proudly now I knew so few had managed to.

‘So what of that work from the 1920s?’ I asked. ‘Is it all wrong?

‘Well, Francis Diack was rather demonised,’ said Dumville. ‘But now he’s starting to be considered. Good starting point, really.’

I asked more on the aspect of the script itself.

‘Well, it’s been read as Greek, Palmyrine, Phoenician. You name it …’