Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain

It was only a year since we had met.

The next day, I said goodbye to Peter and Susan and travelled north.

I reached the island of Tiree in the late afternoon. A horizon of low, grey, rolling clouds lay just above my head. Rain fell. Wind blew. I had driven off the ferry, turned right at a T-junction and headed east until I ran out of road. I had made a pot of tea with my camping gas stove. Now it was getting dark and I had forgotten how to put up the tent. The poles twisted and turned like the legs of some giant tarantula. Eventually the tent took form, sleek and low against the ground. I sat in the car and looked out across the dusk through the rain to the seas of Gunna Sound, the stretch of water between the island of Tiree and the even smaller isle of Gunna. Beyond, a mile or so away, lay another small island: Coll. Beyond that was the far larger island of Mull and further still Oban on the mainland.

Supper bubbled away. An emerald light flashed: a buoy out in water, marking the channel through Gunna Sound. A green light. I thought of Gatsby.

With darkness came more rain; real rain that drummed incessantly on the outer coating of the tent. I read of Mesolithic times by torchlight. Finally, just before midnight, the rain ceased and all I could hear from within my cocoon were the waves beating against the eastern tip of Tiree.

In the morning, I woke, made tea, packed up and drove back down the single track road, past the low-lying sands of Gott Bay and on down the full length of Tiree to the south-western shore and the perfect, mile-wide scimitar curve of Balephuil Bay.

I wandered the flotsam of the high-water mark. There was only a scattering of modern detritus: fishing line, a few pieces of too colourful plastic and segments of ageing rope that had sheared away years ago and wound up here on these lone and level sands. There were pockets, clusters of stones; pebbles worn to spheroids by so many more years of sea and salt. I looked to the western headland of Ceann a’ Mhara then back to the east and the peak of Ben Hynish, the highest point on Tiree. The hill was topped with a giant golf ball providing radar coverage for civil aviation way out in the open spaces of the Atlantic Ocean.

Yet I was trying to get into a Mesolithic mindset. In order to know something of Doggerland, I had travelled hundreds of miles in the opposite direction: north, to Scotland and to this idyllic island of the Inner Hebrides some ten miles long and five miles wide at its greatest girth. There was a reason. Tiree and its neighbouring isles of Coll, Mull, Colonsay and Islay have all revealed evidence of Mesolithic life. As the last Ice Age relented some 10,000 years ago, these Hebridean Islands saw the gradual appearance of hunter-gatherer bands in the region. They came to hunt the deer and wild boar that roamed the inner woodlands. They came to gather the foods of the coasts and the rivers: plants, shells, seals and fish. They came too for the flints which they could fashion into axes, blades and arrow points; into smaller tools, awls and scrapers; into microliths, small slithers of flint stone that could be embedded into wooden hafts to create specialist tools to cut and shred vegetables, to scour skin from hides.

At Balephuil Bay, I headed for the dunes and tucked into a sheltered cove, seeking to turn away from the present, to breeze back through thousands of years of human history until I arrived at a time when the sea level was some six metres higher than today and my eyes would seek out not sea litter on the tide mark but the round nodules of flint which would fit cold and clean into my hand. I closed my eyes and felt the winds on my face, heard the regular pounding of the waves. A moment passed. My eyes opened. The beach looked the same. I felt the same. I glanced about. Nothing had changed. I had only been here a day. It would take a little longer to step back thousands of years into past landscapes, into the minds of the Mesolithic.

I had selected two books to bring out with me that day from the travel library housed in a cardboard box in the back of my car. One was Mesolithic Cultures of Britain by Susann Palmer. The book consisted of many pages of hand-drawn sketches of artefacts, fragments of flints found in various sites mainly in southern Britain. The other was To The Islands by Steven Mithen, which had been fairly recently published and told of Mithen’s search for the Mesolithic of the Hebrides. Surely, this really was ideal. I settled to read in the sand dunes.

The timescales were hard to get your head around. The Mesolithic spanned from around 9600 BC through to 4000 BC. The best way to think of the Mesolithic was as a ‘period of postglacial hunting and gathering’. Before came the Palaeolithic: a period of time stretching from 2.6 million years ago when humans made a more basic use of stone tools.

After the Mesolithic Age came the Neolithic – delineated by the rise of farming as a way of life which had spread gradually west across Europe from the Near East, first emerging from the fertile plains of the Levant. It signalled a slow end to hunter-gathering.

Humans had only been farming for six thousand years. Before that, Homo sapiens had been hunter-gathering for two hundred thousand years. Earlier ancestors had been foraging an existence in Africa for two million years. I read Mithen’s conclusion on modern man:

Consequently, our bodies and brains remain adapted to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle rather than to the sedentary urban existence that is so predominant today – one in which we are detached from the natural world.

I nodded.

I read on and then flicked on through the pages. There was a photo of the very bay I was sitting in: Balephuil. Mithen and his team of archaeologists had been on Tiree. Even better, there was a photo of a site labelled as T1, somewhere here in the dunes of Balephuil, where a prehistoric pebble beach had been exposed by a storm some years back. The site probably dated to the late Mesolithic.

I poured a cup of tea. They were getting closer. All I had to do was to find T1. Then I really could stand on Mesolithic lands. For the rest of the day, I wandered the miles of dunes seeking out T1. The past remained hidden, so I walked the beach scavenging the wrackline before turning to the rock pools on the point where the limpets lived, steadily stepping into the Mesolithic mindset.

In the morning, I woke to find my body was covered in hives: patches of pale, raised skin, with angry red edges, a hand-span width in places. They had begun the day before as though strange insect bites on my legs. Now they had spread, an archipelago of islands had risen on my skin. They didn’t itch but they didn’t look good either. I needed to see a doctor. Oddly, further reading of Mithen’s To The Islands had actually directed me towards a local Tiree doctor who held a fascination for all things Mesolithic: Doc Holliday.

I followed a signpost to The Doctor’s House down a bumpy track to the doctor’s surgery. Doc Holliday was on holiday. I was to wait in the waiting room. A moment later, I was called through to see another doctor who prescribed antihistamine for the hives. I asked of Doc Holliday.

‘Ah,’ she said with a smile. ‘Just ask at the reception when you hand the prescription in.’

The receptionist turned out to be Doc Holliday’s wife. I explained how I had heard of him.

‘If you’re here for the Mesolithic, he’ll definitely want to see you,’ she said. She smiled and wrote his number on a piece of paper. Then she gave me my medicine. Such was the simple perfection of small-island living.

I sat in the car and opened the sunroof. The sun had come out this morning, banishing the grey. Tiree lay flat and green beneath blue skies. I rang the number. Doc Holliday answered. He had a meeting later but would happily meet me in the local museum at Scarnish in fifteen minutes. Perfect.

Doc Holliday drove up in a red car with a green emergency light on the roof. He wore a light grey suit and sported matching grey beard and glasses. There was a quiet, intense intelligence to him. We sat in the museum and he asked what I was after. I talked of seeking the Mesolithic of Tiree, of linking those people to the peoples of Doggerland. He listened attentively; nodded. He couldn’t have been more accommodating. He told me of the Mesolithic sites I was after, marked them on my map for me before taking me into the museum archive and opening a wooden case, one of a stack of antique boxes containing the archaeological collection of George Holleyman, an RAF policeman posted to Tiree during the Second World War. Seven Stone Age flints sat on a bed of cotton wool. All had apparently come from Balephuil. A label stated:

These flints are almost certainly of Mesolithic age, that is made by the hunter-gatherer groups who populated Scotland before the arrival of the first farmers in the 4th millennium BC. Microlithic (small stone) tools like this were used all over northern and western Europe at this time.

Doc Holliday and I sat and talked more of the Mesolithic.

‘You have to imagine Tiree not as it is now,’ he explained, ‘but covered in woodland; trees stunted, twisted by the winds.’

Pollen analysis had shown the extent of the coverage. I asked which species had been revealed. Doc’s eyes stared out before he spoke as though reciting an incantation.

‘Alder, birch, hazel, willow, oak, ash, juniper,’ he said.

There was abundant fuel, readily available.

‘You see, the population would be determined by the worst climate rather than the best,’ the Doc explained. ‘You have to have enough resources to get through winter.’

The Mesolithic would overwinter on Mull or perhaps on the mainland at Oban, tucked down from the storms and the cold in more settled camps. Then they would adopt a more migratory nature once the spring came round again.

‘The entire population of Mesolithic Scotland would only number perhaps five thousand.’

It would be a small collective, perhaps forty or so – an extended group or family – who would head to Tiree in the summer months for flint-knapping. Flint was so vital to the Mesolithic and a seam of flint ran right across the southern tip of Tiree through to Ireland. Doc Holliday traced the extent of the vein of rock with his hand over the map. That was why the Mesolithic came here – for flint.

Nodules of flint would be gathered in places like Balephuil and then worked, knapped. Doc explained the process.

‘First, you take the head off, like an egg.’

His left hand swept over an imaginary flint stone.

‘Then you work the skin off the flint,’ he said, chopping down with the side of his hand. ‘Until you are left with the cortex.’

Flint fragments could then be broken off and retouched to refine edges, points and blades. It was skilled, precise work but essential to produce those tools vital for catching, cutting and cleaning food. Stores of flint blades could be built through the summer for the following seasons.

Doc had to go to his meeting. I had to return to Balephuil. We shook hands and said our goodbyes.

So later that morning, I stood on a Mesolithic beach, two hundred yards inland from today’s high tideline. It was a perfectly warm summer’s day: blue skies and fluffy white clouds. I crawled on a bank of pebbles that ran for twenty yards or so, protected by towering sand dunes ten metres high. I walked barefoot – toe to stone, on all fours, eyes a foot above the ground, peering for flakes of flint. A bumblebee alighted on a golden daisy beside me. I knew immediately – declared out loud that it was a Great yellow bumblebee: a Hebridean rarity.

All day after leaving Doc Holliday, I worked the bank, building a small collection of stone fragments that I laid out on a pad of paper – the larger to the left, smaller to the right, a middle line that might be shell or flint. I smiled at myself, at the ordering, the creation of lines of findings exactly like some Victorian amateur collector. But I had yet to feel the sense that I had truly stepped back into the Mesolithic mind.

I scratched with a broken pencil, scuffing at the surface and pulling out fragments of flint last touched six thousand years ago or so. I pictured a Mesolithic hand holding and dropping. Time had passed. Then my hand had touched and lifted the very same stone splinter from the ground.

It was midday. It was time to leave.

I had been searching the site all morning. It was as I walked away, stepping over the ancient pebble beach, that I saw it.

Grey.

A ghostly grey square of flint sat flat on the surface before me. As soon as I lifted it from that prehistoric beach something shifted. In that moment the cold touch of a past world became tangible – a Stone Age hand touched mine through time. Thousands of years shrank into a second.

It was an arrowhead. An inch or so square, the stone had so obviously been worked away at, carefully retouched to form the sloping edges of the point. The base too had a series of tiny shelves, minute steps where the flint had been delicately chipped away.

That night, as a storm blew in from the north-west, I stared by torchlight at the beauty of that arrowhead. The tent was pitched in the green marram grasses of the dunes, planted between today’s beach at Balephuil and the Mesolithic beach of six thousand years ago.

The next morning, I met up with Doc Holliday once more in the museum to show him my finds.