Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

‘Oh. Waddell,’ I said, remembering my research.

‘Indeed.’

‘So it’s not Phoenician?’ I asked

‘No. It’s not. It’s old Roman cursive,’ he repeated happily. ‘It’s very useful to tease people with.’ He laughed. ‘All I can say is my interest was epigraphic. Why would someone put cursive on a monument? Why was someone doing this inAD 300?’

While I tried to fathom this, tried to fit it with all I had read, Professor Dumville had moved on. He talked some more, on the nature of insular script, a Gaelic written form that had emerged out of the new Roman cursive, before returning to the problem of the Newton Stone script.

‘There has to be a physical way of explaining the nature of the letters in that scripture,’ he explained. ‘Such that their age can be properly assessed and a better sense built of when they were carved.’

But no real archaeological study of the stone had taken place for close on a century.

‘I suspect it’ll turn out to be a fake,’ he declared firmly.

Remarkably, The Newton Stone and other Pictish Inscriptions by Francis C. Diack (1922) popped up for sale when I searched online under ‘Newton Stone’. It was twenty pounds. I bought it immediately and the book arrived two days later carefully wrapped in brown parcel paper. I pushed everything else on my desk aside. The book was really a booklet. It was just sixty-four pages long. Diack began with a familiar description:

It is a monolith of blue gneiss, rather over six feet high, and bears two inscriptions. One is in ogam letters along one of the edges and part of one of the faces, ogam being the peculiar Celtic alphabet used on early monuments in Ireland. Higher up on the same face is the other, consisting of six lines of Roman letters in cursive of the first three centuries AD.

That tied in perfectly with Dumville’s words. I read on. Diack turned to the meaning of those six lines. They could be divided into two sections. The first three lines read:

ETTE

EVAGAINNIAS

CIGONOVOCOI

I read on:

It is apparent at once that we have here proper names, and that the monument is, like every other known example of similar age, a sepulchral record, commemorating the name of the person buried there.

It was a funereal stone. The first three lines Diack read as, ‘Ette, son of Evagainnias, descendent of Cingo, here’. Only the mother’s name was given, fitting with the matriarchy practised by the Picts.

The second three lines record the name of another person. Whether they were cut at exactly the same time as the first three must be doubtful, and whether they were by the same hand, though the technique looks the same.

Those second three lines read:

URAELISI

MAQQI

NOVIOGRUTA

Diack read them as meaning, ‘The grave of Elisios, son of New Grus.’

The name of New-Grus was another form of reference linked to Pictish matriarchic traditions.

I made a cup of tea.

So if we were to accept Diack’s words, the Newton Stone was indeed used as a burial stone, though Professor Dumville reckoned it would turn out to be a fake. I flicked back through my photos of the stone, to the curved lines of the letters and zoomed in until they blurred to grey cloud. They were carved into granite. If the script was a fake, someone had taken a good deal of effort over it. I thought of those early Victorian antiquarians who had apparently found the stone. They had the time. And the money. And perhaps also an imperfect knowledge of cursive Roman.

I drank my tea. There was something else. Something I’d missed. I opened up all the files I had made from the various works I’d read. It wasn’t from those nineteenth-century ‘Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’. It was more recent. I found it. It was from Iain Fraser’s The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland:

Recent examination of the [Newton] stone has also identified a mirror symbol on one of its lower facets, and the remains of a spiral or concentric ovals towards the base of its rear face.

Then there was that third inscription: Pictish symbols carved on the back of the monument. It was yet another reincarnation for that block of blue gneiss, another rebirth for the Newton Stone as a sacred monument. Those six lines of cursive Roman writing that had so entranced with their mystery, their unknowing, were probably nothing more mysterious than the epitaphs to two men whose bodies were once laid in Scottish soils and whose souls had long since flown. The stone had then formed a slate for later generations to carve their deepest thoughts upon. The deeper mystery surely lay in who those peoples were: the Picts. Professor Dumville had called them ‘odd’. John Buchan had seen them as shrunken, hairy brutes. No one really knew. Yet inscribed on the Newton Stone were three forms of writing that were all very different, all distinct, and all associated with the Picts.

My mind was racing, excited. I started upstairs to my daughter Eva’s room, to that wooden Buddhist statue. On the stairs, I remembered Professor Dumville’s words from a couple of days ago:

‘Of course, you know there’s a history of people going loopy studying this,’ he had said, laughing again; the sound echoing rather demoniacally down the phone line. He had told stories of two well-known academics who had completely lost their minds in studying Pictish stones.

‘There’s a curse hanging over this,’ Professor Dumville had warned. ‘So watch out.’

Eva lay asleep, splayed across her bed, covers merrily askew. I could hear the gentle breath of sleep of my younger daughter Molly in the next room. In the dusky half-darkness, I found the statue and felt the smoothness, the lightness of the wood. The figure was smaller than I remembered and more crudely formed. His legs were crossed in a lotus position. His hands touched on his front and held a mirror that covered much of his chest. There was a pattern on the mirror that I hadn’t remembered: woven lines carved into the wood.

Eva snored softly. For a short while, I simply watched her. Then I returned the wooden statue quietly to the bookcase shelf, tucked Eva in and tiptoed down the steep stairs. Someone else could worry about the links between the Picts and Buddhist mirror symbols.

DOGGERLAND (#ulink_a90d06f3-6f09-5481-9847-57dc25f0a4ee)

Several months later, I began to become intrigued by a place that no longer existed. It was an ancient landscape that now lay far under the North Sea. It was a world called Doggerland. There were teasing little indicators of this world. Small pieces of dark brown organic material could be found on the Norfolk coast that were segments of peat or wood from the submerged forests and fenlands of Doggerland as it had existed as an environment, a place for people to live on and call a home thousands of years ago as the last Ice Age ended.

It was a project that had been stewing quietly away for a while. On my last birthday my old friend Ant had given me a copy of Submerged Forests by Clement Reid. The book had been first published in 1913. I had known of the work but never read it. Clement Reid was another of those Victorians who possessed a wonderfully inquisitive sense of discovery. He had studied geology and biology in the mid-nineteenth century when a biblical-based chronological approach to delineating the ancient world still reigned, forcing the history of human activity on the earth into a six-thousand-year period. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had been published in 1859. Then there were those emergent theories of geology by figures such as Charles Lyell that had also served to challenge the dating of prehistory centred on biblical interpretation. Yet notions of prehistoric worlds and their human inhabitants had remained constricted by scripture.

In 1913, Clement Reid was near retirement from his position as geologist at the University of Cambridge. Submerged Forests was his summary of work on the ancient landscapes of Britain and Europe, on ‘Noah’s Woods’ – those strange remnants of trees from the past found often with fossilised bones of long vanished animals and lumps of earthy peat or ‘moorlog’, as the local sailors knew this sea peat. These reminders of past forests were dredged from the dark depths along with the bones of the exotic and extinct creatures that had roamed them; not uncommon catches for the fishermen who worked the North Sea. Clement Reid’s Submerged Forests collated the evidence for a vast plain stretching from the Dogger Bank for miles south where now the waters of the North Sea lay. The book also raised questions way beyond matters of geology as to the nature of that landscape and of the peoples who lived there at the end of the last great Glacial Epoch and settled the lands of an emergent Britain.

Reid’s preface to Submerged Forests is a perfect statement on the necessity of interdisciplinary study, the need for a renaissance mindset:

Knowledge cannot be divided into compartments, each given a definite name and allotted to a different student. There are, and always must be, branches of knowledge in which several sciences meet or have an interest, and these are somewhat liable to be neglected. If the following pages arouse an interest in one of the by-ways of science their purpose has been fulfilled.

The obvious difficulty with exploring Doggerland was that it now lay under many metres of cold, dark, rather forbidding sea. At Easter, walking the beach with my daughter Eva seeking small reminders of those submerged forests that existed beneath the waters, I had wondered on the possibility of reaching one of the sandbanks that still rose from the North Sea during a low tide – such as Dogger Bank itself, which Clement Reid saw as the plateau that stood some thirty metres above the northern edge of the vast ‘alluvial flat connecting Britain with Holland and Denmark’.

I had checked maps. It would mean a journey of some one hundred kilometres out into the sea. My initial plan had been to sail away into the North Sea and jump out on to the debatable sands of Dogger Bank. It now seemed rather fanciful. I didn’t even know how to sail. I had an inflatable canoe. That was it. Even if I could somehow manage to persuade someone to head out into the open sea; even if I reached some semblance of land out there, I would be standing many, many feet above any signs of Doggerland and the people who lived there ten thousand years ago. The plan needed a rethink.

I turned back to the books.

In 1931, a fishing trawler the Colinda was sailing along the Norfolk coast between two raised lands known as the Leman and Ower Banks. It was night when the nets were pulled in. Among the usual odd lumps of peat and a few bones, ship’s captain Pilgrim E. Lockwood had a single piece of moorlog some four feet square. Instead of chucking it back into the dark seas, Lockwood decided to split it open with a shovel. His spade struck something solid. Lockwood broke the moorlog apart. Out fell a prehistoric antler harpoon.

The harpoon was some eight and a half inches long. A row of barbs had been carved along one edge; there was a sharpened point and a series of notches presumably to secure fastening to a shaft. You could easily imagine someone strolling the shores of Doggerland at low tide, using the ‘harpoon’ to spear flatfish or eels. Here was real evidence of life in Doggerland. The Colinda harpoon was dated to Mesolithic times, the Middle Stone Age; an era when the populace of Europe were still hunter-gathers. The more settled, sedentary farming ways of the Neolithic had yet to arrive. Mesolithic existence apparently consisted of small groups of people living in extended family units, communities able to move about the landscapes seasonally, travelling the lands from one favoured site to another: for food, for flints and for shelter.

THE MIDDLE STONE AGE.

I tried to picture a band of Mesolithic folk. It was hard to get rid of cartoon images of The Flintstones from my mind. Would they really be wearing animal skins? I thought for a moment but couldn’t imagine anything else they might be able to wrap around themselves more effectively to keep warm. I needed to get to know the people who lived on Doggerland, to understand something of the ways of the Mesolithic, the people of the Stone Age. And so that was why I was headed to the island of Tiree, off the north-west coast of Scotland. I would get to know the Mesolithic first on those isolated islands of the Hebrides – on Tiree and on Coll – where the land still held fragments, echoes of their lives. I would head to those islands for the summer as the Mesolithic peoples had done many years before. Then I would return south to Norfolk to seek Doggerland.

At Sedbergh, in Cumbria, cloud filled the sky. I was staying with my friends Peter and Susan. After a fish-and-chip supper I joined Peter as he walked Crombie, their Border terrier. We walked along Joss Lane, winding gently upwards as our footsteps echoed beside us. At the five-barred gate into the darkness of the moors beyond, Peter and Crombie turned back. I stepped on. The hills of the Howgills were just visible through the darkness. Storms were predicted for tomorrow.

I looked to the skies and saw only clouds. There would be no meteors tonight. The Perseids would flare and shower across a starlit backdrop but they would do so hidden from me. The only distant lights I could see were those of lone homesteads spaced across the river valley below. A stout footpath sign lit by torchlight pointed to Thorn’s Lane through a copse of alder and over the waters of Settlebeck Gill into darkness. I would not walk that way tonight. Another sign pointed back down to Joss Lane. I followed, stepping over giant slugs as a wooden gate thudded behind me. Rain started to fall. The heavens opened. Heavy drops, lumps of thunderous rain, broke upon my face as I stared up into the heavens; and as the torch lit that sodden sky, the raindrops transformed into celestial shards. I smiled. Light appeared to be pouring from the sky. There were heavenly sparks for me to watch falling to earth. I sent Katie a text.

‘Xx’, it simply said.