A MILE SOUTH OF JOHN O’ GROATS, two whimbrels looking like curlews down on their luck flew across high fields low and flat and fast (40 mph – I measured them for a few moments with my car’s speedometer as their flight paralleled the road). Then Orkney rose up apparently out of the land, then the land fell away and Orkney lay on a sea the blue of goddess eyes. In my mind, goddess eyes are the shade of Pentland Firth blue where Orkney lies on a May morning of sunshine and skylarks. So why, on such a day, would I be looking for a tomb?

Whenever I travel to Orkney now I do so with two people on my mind, both called George, both rooted in these islands, both dead to my great sorrow, so journeys to Orkney have acquired a memorial edge.

One is George Mackay Brown, the gracious Bard of this place, and in whose words Orkney travelled the world – still travels the world. Admirers of the man’s quietist, wondering writing, who seek out Orkney in something of the nature of pilgrimage, have had their eyes opened on an Orkney not seen by others, a quietist, wondering Orkney whose stories are told in symbols – cornstalk, skylark, tinker, skull, fish, harp, star, eagle. George Mackay Brown is, by a considerable margin, the writer I admire most, the inspirational well where I drink deepest. In particular, I reach again and again for his poetry, and especially his posthumous collection, Travellers (John Murray, 2001). Orkney is a place to which people have travelled for at least five thousand years, but George Mackay Brown was a still centre, like island bedrock. He travelled almost nowhere at all, but wrote down the travellers and their stories. One of his novels, The Golden Bird (John Murray, 1986), is a reworking in an Orkney setting of an old and widespread folk tale about a baby snatched by an eagle from the edge of a harvest field. Despite the book’s title, the eagle that inspired the story was almost certainly a sea eagle, for historically Orkney was a sea eagle haunt and unlike the mountain-thirled golden eagle, the sea eagle was never afraid to mix it with humankind.

Then there is his poem, ‘Bird and Island’:

The other George is George Garson, the closest friend I ever had, and in whose travelling company I was introduced to his friend George Mackay Brown in Stromness. George Garson was an artist – mosaics and stained glass, in particular – and head of murals and stained glass at Glasgow School of Art until he was scunnered by “the suits who took over the art game”. He took early retirement in his mid-fifties, after which he wrote a bit, but drew and painted every day for twenty-five years until the last days before his death a few weeks before his eightieth birthday. He was Edinburgh-born but fiercely, even aggressively thirled to a long Orcadian lineage. Orkney was in his blood, he was accustomed to travelling to Orkney from earliest childhood and throughout his life (something of Orkney travelled everywhere in him), and Orkney stone in all its forms coursed through his art as island blood fed his veins and sustained his heart. When he discovered the possibilities of slate as a mosaic material, he wedded it to his intimate knowledge of Orkney geology and Orkney architecture from Maes Howe to St Magnus Cathedral, and fashioned art from it all, art rooted in Orkney stone. All of the above is caught in a mosaic of grey and black slate and stone called “Black Sun of Winter”, which is in the collection of the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Its standing stone motif is decorated by runes and dominated by a haloed sun, a black sun, the whole set in columns of tight-packed stones. The title of the piece is a line from a George Mackay Brown poem. I imagine that if you were to cut through the stone, it would say “Orkney” all the way through.

So these are the faces and voices I memorialised in my mind as I followed the flight of two whimbrels a mile out of John o’ Groats and I looked up and saw Orkney on a sea the blue of goddess eyes. This was a view of Orkney George Garson never saw, for he had only ever crossed from Scotland to Orkney by way of Scrabster to Stromness (and long ago by steamer from Leith), but this way lies Gills Bay and the newest ferry that crosses not to the Stromness of George Mackay Brown’s small flat with its rocking chair and its coal fire, but to St Margaret’s Hope on South Ronaldsay. There, on that blue day of May, the Tomb of the Eagles awaited me, five thousand years after it had been expertly fashioned from the raw stuff of the island by no one knows who.

“Here, hold them,” she said, and I felt the press of eagle talons in the palm of my hand. This is not the kind of thing that happens to me every day. The first time had been – what – thirty years ago? I held a golden eagle on my thickly gloved wrist. It was a falconer’s bird, and I knew the falconer a bit, not well, but well enough for him to show me the eagle (it had a name – Samson) and say, “Here, hold it.” The eagle saw what was going on, understood, and stepped from his hand to mine. I was unnerved, not by fear but by my awareness that the golden eagle is, by instinct and learning, a tribe that shuns man and all his works, yet this one was being commanded to make physical contact with me. I knew it had been bred in captivity, although I had no idea how, or how legally the egg or the chick had been obtained. An eagle does not stop being an eagle just because it is captive bred. Nothing about the moment was comfortable. I was unnerved on the eagle’s behalf.

I watched the feathered feet shuffle from the falconer onto my outstretched arm, watched the talons curve and bite for grip, the bird balanced perfectly on its new perch, looking round, a flash of yellow-gold eyes beneath a hooded brow that seemed to frown. I would frown too in those circumstances. I couldn’t feel the talons through the leather gauntlet. What I could feel was the power of a grasp that breaks bones for a living. That and the weight of the bird on the end of my arm. But I watched the talons, the dull black gleam of them curving out and down from the well-spaced, down-curves of yellow toes; I watched the grey gleam of the beak’s terminal hook and the yellow cere that curved out beneath the eyes; I watched the pale tawny-gold nape when the bird turned its head away, that mysterious shade of feathering that illuminates in strong sunlight in such a way that my species christened the bird “golden”.

The falconer moved away north not long after that, and I heard with a sickening lurch of heart and mind that Samson had suffered a grotesque death such as only a captive bird can suffer. He was attached to a perch in the garden when a swarm of bees settled on him. He panicked, and he was stung to death.

The second time was – what – twenty years ago? I was driving over a quiet hill road when a car travelling in the other direction hit a barn owl in flight. The car drove on, the barn owl crumpled. I stopped, picked up the owl, thought it might not be quite dead, put it on a carefully folded fleece jacket on the back seat, and set off for the house of a friend about five miles away, a friend who had nursed countless injured birds and animals back to good health.

Halfway there, the owl revived, and confirmed its revival by appearing suddenly on the headrest of the front passenger seat. Instinctively I put out my left arm. Why, God knows. The owl stepped onto my wrist just as the golden eagle had done, but this time my wrist was bare, and the owl talons sank in as deep as talons can sink. The pain is barely describable.

I had been driving at about 40 mph, taking it easy. I now had to stop the car one-handed while my other hand felt as if (my frantic guess) I had plunged it into a bath of acid. The car stopped. The road was mercifully empty. I leaned the owl towards the passenger door and opened it. I tried to urge the owl out through the space. It dug in a little deeper. I changed tactics, opened the driver’s door and eased myself backwards out of the car and into the road. The owl came with me, still attached to my wrist. I walked to a roadside fence post. I held the owl next to the top of the post and at once it stepped up from my wrist onto the post. Oh joy, oh blessed relief, oh thank you God, or whoever. Little rivulets of blood dribbled from my owl-inflicted stigmata.

I retreated slowly, watched the owl from the car. I wanted to be sure it could fly. It flew. I drove home, mostly one-handed.

Twice in the last thirty years, then, I have had talons on my wrist. Now, in a visitor centre a mile away from the Tomb of the Eagles at Isbister on South Ronaldsay, a woman with a delicious Orkney voice put four sea eagle talons in my hand and said, “Here, hold them.” They were yellowed and blunt with age, and it is their age that is the point. They are, give or take a century, five thousand years old, and they were found carefully arranged alongside human bones in what the outside world now knows as the Tomb of the Eagles.

These talons flew. That is the first truth that stares up at me from where they huddle together in the cradling cup that forms spontaneously in the curved palm of my left hand, so like eggs in a nest. They also grabbed fish, duck, gannet, cormorant, swan, curlew, goose from the sea or the air and choked the life from them, lambs stillborn or weakly alive from the land; they left their imprint in snow and estuary mud. It is not possible to feel their strangeness as intimately as this and be indifferent to the individual bird that wore them, five thousand years ago. That the talons still exist at all in the twenty-first century AD is a consequence of the nature of the relationship on this island between eagles and its Stone Age people: it astounds us today, for we have no comparable relationship with eagles at all, but that particular tribe that lingered on South Ronaldsay for at least eight hundred years either side of 3000 BC knew that sea eagles could – and would – perform a sacred service for them. So one more truth about those talons that lie snugly in my hand is this: in their day they were also accustomed to anchor themselves deep into dead human flesh while the biggest hook beak in all nature ripped it open and tore it up into manageable, edible pieces. Today, we have a euphemism for the process – “sky burial”. It is still practised among some of the world’s more isolated tribes, in Tibet for example, where the dead are laid out on raised platforms on sacred mountains beyond the reach of earthly scavengers so that their mortal flesh will be cleansed from the bones by birds, especially eagles.

What makes Isbister different is that the sundered and scattered human bones were gathered up and buried, and alongside them were the bones, skulls and talons of the sacred birds that performed the sacred service – mostly the white-tailed eagles. There was no intact skeleton, either human or eagle, among the remains. Rows of talons were arranged alongside human skulls and broken torsos. George Mackay Brown’s mysterious last line suddenly hit me: here was the “nest of broken numbers”.

So here then, is the beginning of my story. As things stand, the story of change that has begun to impose itself on the Scottish eagles of the twenty-first century goes no further back than this. The situation that I have begun to try and unravel has been evolving for five thousand years that I know of. It took the white-tailed eagle from sacred totem in 3000 BC to oblivion in the early twentieth century to reintroduction in the late twentieth century to role model of twenty-first century conservation and green tourism.

“Here, hold them,” she said, and she put the talons in my hand and my palm curved into a cup to protect their eminence, their sanctity, while I stared at their lifelessness and willed some unknown something to speak to me, or if not to speak, to reach out to me with some sense of their meaning. Whenever in my life I have been moved beyond mortal comprehension, the kind of unreasoning heightening of the senses that is achieved in some people by, say, a religious revelation, it has been because nature has touched me in a way that I was unprepared for, and in some great or small measure my life is changed from that moment. Here was one more such moment.

It may seem an extravagant claim. After all, I had done nothing more than accept an invitation to hold four very small pieces of a long dead bird. But here is why I think they startled me. I had not come to Isbister as a casual visitor. I was not on holiday. I was not a tourist on a whistle-stop tourist trail. I had driven more than 250 miles to catch a ferry to South Ronaldsay to find the Tomb of the Eagles. I did not know quite what to expect. I had read a little bit about it, and I cannot say that I have a great relish for tombs, or anything else that shuts out the overworld. I was propelled by a sense that the story of the book I wanted to write might prosper here. My friend George Garson had stepped this way one winter’s day twenty years ago as part of his research for a very personal wee book called Orkney All the Way Through (John Donald, 1992), which saw Orkney with the eye of an artist and the sensibility of a Garson (a name that in its Norse-Orcadian inheritance meant “the son of the dyke-end”, an inheritance he wore with some pride). It is fair to say that it was not the highlight of the book, for he was no one’s idea of a naturalist or a nature writer, but he caught something of the lie of the land back then, before the visitor centre was built. His guide was Morgan Simison, the wife of farmer Ronnie, who had discovered what was to become known as the Tomb of the Eagles and who had done much of the early archaeological excavation himself. It was not eagle talons George was handed (for he and Morgan had obviously exchanged brief autobiographies). It was a human skull. He would write it down thus:

That’s it. That’s all there is. Just a handful of whistle-stop lines. Whatever he encountered at the far end of that solitary midwinter mile between farm and tomb, it unnerved him, it was unnervingly more than he bargained for, and far more than he was willing to write down. Instead, he stashed it away within the chambered walls of a three-word phrase: he left “hugging the experience”. Nowhere else in his book, and never once in hundreds of subsequent conversations and dozens of letters in the thirty years I knew him, did he conceal. He was an artist, and even when he wrote he painted pictures. His instinct was to reveal. No man I ever met was genetically less qualified to “hug” an experience. Yet when I first read his guarded account of his visit to the Tomb of the Eagles twenty years ago, none of that registered. It was his first book (and his only one) and he was wildly enthused by the process – by his research trips to Orkney, by discovering a writing style, by the way his Orkney took shape before his eyes and insinuated itself into what he wrote down. Our conversations, usually in a favourite Edinburgh pub, were awash with Orkney for months – the places, the people, the sounds, the travels, the stirred memories. But now that I think about it, the Tomb of the Eagles did not surface once. It was only when I set out on my own book’s journey that I re-read his take on the tomb, and instead of some anticipated shred of enlightenment I found a shroud, and I wondered what manner of truth he unearthed that day that he would never talk about it and never write it down. And of course it is too late to ask him now. But there is also this: now that I have been to the Tomb of the Eagles myself, I think I know.

It was neither winter nor was it a day of storms when I followed in his footsteps those twenty years later, and two years after his death. Instead, it was May and sunlit and anthemed by skylarks and adagio curlews, and every footfall was dusted by ground-hugging, wind-cheating flowers – eyebright, primrose, spring squill, marsh orchid, grass of Parnassus. It is a mile to the tomb from the new visitor centre by the farm, with its sea eagle weathervane. I could see the tomb’s inconspicuous shape in the distance but I knew it for what it was only because it was pointed out to me by a member of staff. In truth, it looked like nothing at all. Orkney on such a day is a many-layered wonder for a nature writer, and my mind was anywhere but inside a tomb. I walked from one oystercatcher territory to another, so the decibel levels of strident variations on a theme of “piss off” rose and fell about my ears with the rhythm of waves on shingle. Lapwings lined up strafing runs out of the sun and aimed them a few feet above my head. They also fell out with the nearest oystercatchers. Once, an Arctic skua, a darkly, beautifully lethal missile of a bird, sped above the fields trailing a raucous wake of six lapwings. Three oystercatchers joined in, united for the moment in common cause against the greater enemy. The sea shone, gannets fell and rose and dazzled, seals mourned. Above it all, skylark after skylark after skylark sang and sang and sang. By the time I got there I was drunk on a cocktail of island seductions and warm honeyed winds, and I was in no mood for tombs. Perhaps George was right: perhaps the trick is to go on a head-down day of midwinter storms. I looked at the black oblong of the knee-high entrance and inwardly I shuddered. What was it you wrote, George: “…and gulping fetid air, crawl into the past, time present snapping at the soles of your feet…”

You can crawl, or there is a weird, flat, wheeled trolley with a rope arrangement to ease your passage along the entrance tunnel. The tunnel is three metres long by eighty-five centimetres high by seventy centimetres wide. It is not a place to linger. I went in by trolley, head-first on my belly, which seemed the speedier option. The trolley deposits its cargo in the main chamber. I was at once grateful for two late-twentieth century skylights that were let into the late-twentieth century protective roof, but the place is still gloomily convincing enough for a tomb. Sunlight, sea and skylarks are elsewhere, in the overworld, lost beyond recall. You are supposed to be dead and in pieces to get in here. I stood up, dusted myself down, and looked round.

I don’t like being underground. I don’t like dark, enclosed spaces. I go out of my way to avoid them. Yet I had travelled more than 250 miles to reach this eerie here-and-now, and abandoned the skylark-scrolled, sun-smitten, ocean-scented island for a glimpse of the Stone Age from the inside of its corpse. All was grey stone, expertly stacked and fashioned into walls, alcoves, stalls, shelves; a mysteriously ordered silence wonderfully wrought in grey stone. And everything about it was at once utterly familiar. Every facet of the techniques at work, every trait and nuance, were as familiar to me as the walls of my own living room, because in fact they adorn the walls of my own living room in the form of two small slate mosaics by George Garson. And on the walls of George’s house and in various exhibitions of his work down the years I have seen and studied their like again and again. In the Tomb of the Eagles I was astounded into something like a state of trance. I walked round the walls stopping after every yard, fingering worked stone from flat pebble-sized pieces to lintels a yard wide and slabs deployed as structural posts the size of tall men. When Ronnie Simison first forced a way in here, it was a mass grave of men, women, children and eagles. When I wheeled my way in it was tidied, bone-free, roofed, lit, and presentable to a tourist audience. But when George Garson “crawled into the past”, he came face to face with something like his own ancestral ghost. When he stood up, dusted himself down and looked round, he would have seen himself, for the walls of the Tomb of the Eagles resemble nothing so much as a huge, walk-in George Garson mosaic. When he fingered these meticulously ordered stones, he was shaking hands not just with his ancestors but with the very origins of his own art, and his art was his life. That glimpse of his own mortality was why he had left hugging the experience, “secure in the knowledge that sea eagles are breeding – albeit tenuously – along Scotland’s western seaboard”.

He would, perhaps, have been impressed at the nature of the bond between his ancestors and the ancestors of those tenuous eagles, for he loved simple, powerful symbolism. But it never drew him deeper into the eagle’s world, and whatever insight he learned about Neolithic tribesmen and himself he kept it between himself and those who had gone before. I thought about him cradling that skull in the crook of his arm. Then his head-down, solitary tramp out to the headland where he crawled into the tomb and was tapped on the shoulder by five thousand years of his own lineage. Then I wondered what I was doing here. Then I stopped thinking for a while and just stood uneasily breathing the place in.

The next conscious thought I had was that I could still feel the talons nestled in my curved palm. They were not there, of course, for I had handed them back after a minute or so, then talked to several other people, then stepped from the visitor centre out into the sunlight, then walked a mile by field and clifftop, squill and skylark. But standing in that place of death, the life that these talons had led was a sudden, electrifying summons: the relationship between man and eagle is reborn, you too are part of this.

And just as suddenly the tomb’s aura was too intense, too overloaded with too much past, and too enriched by my inadvertent collision with George’s moment of revelation, and suddenly all that began to unnerve me, and I felt overwhelmed. I lay flat out on the trolley and sped head-first for the bright end of the tunnel like a breaching whale. Sunlight rushed in to meet me like helping hands.

I stood, dusted myself down, and without looking back, walked down to the shore, where the rocks are piles of flat tiers, and tilted like a half-open fan, and that still felt a little too much like the walls of the tomb (you can see how Orcadian geology informed the architects) so I climbed down to the ocean edge and watched a sea the blue of goddess eyes, where gannets and Arctic terns dive-bombed the shoals, and skuas cruised the wavetops, handsome thugs looking for unwary birds to mug.

It was half an hour before I turned to look inland again to where the tomb lay, just a low, green swelling on the surface of the island, apparently demure and sun-drowsed, and placid as a tidal pool at slack water. There must have been many eagles when the tomb-builders of the Eagle Tribe made landfall here, bearing their newly dead and their eagle-empathy. A good eagle population must have been their first consideration. I wonder if they came on a midwinter day of storms like my friend, or on a May day like this one of goddess eyes and skylarks. I walked back up to the tomb, admired how the restorers and nature had conspired to heal the walls and clothe the new roof in the green of the island, so that the tiered walls only showed here and there in patches. I was standing about a dozen yards from the entrance when a skylark rose from the very crown of the tomb’s curved roof. Skylarks are my good omen birds. Where there are skylarks, there is hope. As long as there are skylarks, I can handle most things. And now a skylark sang at the Tomb of the Eagles.

I walked back the spring-laden, cliff-girt mile to the visitor centre, walked through larksong after larksong after larksong, the song passed from singer to singer to singer. At the visitor centre shop I bought archaeologist John W Hedges’s book Tomb of the Eagles – A Window on Stone Age Tribal Britain, (John Murray, 1987), in which he argues that a phenomenal amount of effort would have been required to build the structure, which consumed almost a thousand cubic metres of flagstone and other material. “It must have been a magnificent sight”, he observes, and “it takes little imagination to appreciate the significance that it must have had for the generations that laboured over its erection, let alone those that followed. To know of one such monument belonging to so remote a period of antiquity is remarkable enough, but the fact is that no less than seventy-six are known in Orkney as a whole – of which Isbister must be accounted among the most splendid.”

That feeling in my left palm would recur unpredictably for months, and each time I would hurtle back to Isbister in my head, to the bright headland and to the cool, grey, flat-stone innards of the tomb for which the word “splendid” was not an option that came readily to mind. But the word that did come increasingly to my mind was “Alaska”. Why Alaska? Because it was there in 1998 that I tried to interview a native Tlingit called John for a BBC Radio 4 programme I was making on the subject of the relationship between people and nature. He was a reluctant interviewee, which was understandable. After all, I had just stepped off a transatlantic plane, put a microphone in front of him and more or less asked him to bare his tribal soul. After a very protracted silence and several attempts to re-frame my first question, he finally spoke these words:

“It was not God who made the world, but Raven. Raven’s first job was to make Nature in perfect balance so he made the Bald Eagle, with a white head, a black body, and a white tail to symbolise Nature in perfect balance…”

So to this day, the Tlingit and other native tribes of south-east Alaska all derive from one of two Clans – Raven and Eagle. Many aspects of ancient belief still colour their lives in the twenty-first century, alongside hefty pick-up trucks, laptops and mobile phones. They marry outwith their own Clan. Each new child takes their mother’s ancestry. When an Eagle dies, a Raven watches over the body, and vice versa. But not everyone agrees with John’s ordering of events. There is a certain amount of rivalry about which dynasty came first – Raven or Eagle. In the summer of 2012 that rivalry took a particularly contemporary twist at the biennial Celebration gathering of the tribes of south-east Alaska in Juneau, the state capital. Everyone attending the gathering was invited to participate in a DNA study to reveal something of the history of migration of people into Alaska. One consequence might actually determine whether or not Raven really did make the world and arrange for Nature’s symbol of perfect balance, or whether the Eagle was already perfectly balanced when Raven got here. But the symbolism affected me deeply. Yet when I went to Alaska I knew almost nothing about the Tomb of the Eagles in Orkney beyond the fact of its existence and George Garson’s perfunctory account, and nothing at all about the sacred relationship between man and eagle that it embodies. Now I can embrace both lands. Now I can begin to understand the poleaxing effect of four sea eagle talons in the palm of my hand.

George had been given a skull because he had told Morgan Simison about his grandfather and the nature of his visit. Another couple who were in the visitor centre museum at the same as I was, and who were simply on holiday and enjoying Orkney’s historical sites were also given a skull to hold. I, who had said nothing to anyone about what I was doing there, might just as easily have been given a skull. Instead, I was given four sea eagle talons to hold. A life like mine turns on such moments.

The following month – June, 2012 – two emails arrived within a day of each other. One, from my friend and Alaskan nature writer of distinction, Nancy Lord, had attached to it an article from the Anchorage Daily News about the DNA of Ravens and Eagles. The other was an extract from a journal called Bird Study about the relative populations of golden eagles and sea eagles in Great Britain and Ireland. The thrust of the study was that persecution had been going on since around 500 AD, but what intrigued me more was that it included figures from 3000 BC, which is when the Isbister tomb was in operation and eagles were abundant enough to make possible the relationship between tomb builder and eagles. The numbers in the table here indicate breeding pairs.

DATE GOLDEN EAGLE SEA EAGLE
     
300 BC 650 2550
     
500AD 1000-1500 800-1400
     
1800AD 300-500 150
     
1920 100-200 Nil
     
1950 280 Nil
     
1971 400 Nil
     
2003 440 31

Reintroduction of the sea eagle began on Rum in 1975. The final reintroduction programme began on the Tay estuary in 2007 and finished in 2012. The golden eagle population is more or less unchanged since 2003 and the sea eagle population has more or less doubled. It is, then, a matter of time before the sea eagle begins to outnumber the golden eagle again. We are never going to reclaim the kind of relationship that underpinned the Eagle Tribe of Isbister, but sooner rather than later we must come to terms once again with the idea of living with eagles in our midst.

Most of us have never seen a golden eagle. Those of us who know the bird know it for a haunter of the high and lonely places. The sea eagle can do that too, but it has no hang-up at all about perching on your roof. The golden eagle will have to learn to live with it too, but unlike ourselves, the golden eagle will not have forgotten how. The change has begun and its effects will become more and more clear from now on. The process is happening as I write. The situation will be different from what it is now by the time I finish writing this book.