THE WOMAN IN THE FIELD
BECAUSE OF THE EARTHFAST NOTION that time is deep, that memories are buried, the Neolithic and Bronze Age artefacts occupy the windowless basement level of the National Museum. To visit the prehistoric, one must descend turnpike stairs, or travel down in a lift—either way, down—until the pressure of the building, of thousands of years of subsequent history, is piled on top.
Down there, a diorama shows how the land was then. Two stuffed wolves slink through a forest, pursuing a wild boar. A tape plays wolf-howls and the yaffle of a woodpecker. Opposite that, mounted in a glass box, is the massive bovine skull of the now extinct aurochs. It looks like something cast in a foundry, like it ought to belong upstairs, under ‘Industrial Revolution’. This skull was found, as it happens, in the small town where I now live, with its single main street and primary school, and where, last year, a log boat was carefully pulled out of the river mud, where it had lain since the Bronze Age.
I’d come to the museum to visit something in particular, but I’m distracted; first by the wolves and aurochs, and now by a gleaming bronze dagger with a pommel of whalebone, which the label says is a replica of one found in a bog. It shows how new and desirable such objects were, before they spent four thousand years corroding in the earth. But at last I find what I’m looking for.
It’s a clay bowl, that’s all; what the archaeologists, with imaginative flair, call a ‘food vessel’. It’s displayed in a tall glass case with a number of other bowls small and large, artfully arranged on glass shelves. A load of old pots, the epitome of museum dullness, unless you like that sort of thing.
The bowl I want to see has been placed together with another at the front of the case slightly apart from the rest, as though these two had things to discuss, which they well might. They are both reddish brown, and about seven inches tall, though one is fatter than the other. The fatter one is a bit lopsided, so it inclines toward its neighbour. Both are decorated all over with bands of grooves and half-moon-shaped jabs and it’s this—the near-matching decoration—which announces them as siblings. It’s remarkable, but though they’re nigh on 4000 years old and were discovered a century apart in different corners of the country, these two Bronze Age bowls were almost certainly made by the same potter. One was discovered on the south banks of the Forth, the other farther north in Perthshire, in a place close to the River Earn. Those places (‘findspots,’ the archaeologists say) are only twenty miles apart as the crow flies, but the vessels must have been transported to their destinations, possibly from the potter’s workshop in a third place, by a route much longer on the ground. They must have been taken by boat through a complex of rivers, or been carried on foot over hill-passes and through wooded valleys, where wolves may well have pursued the wild boar.
They had lain a long time in the earth, but both are clean now in their glass case, and contain nothing but shadows. If they were indeed the work of a craft potter, they might have been fired to order, perhaps at the behest of a messenger. So, despite difficulties, people and news and goods must have spread through the country more quickly than we might suppose.
I was a teenager when I first became aware of the past, manifest as relics in the land. A teenage antiquarian, thrilled by standing stones, tumuli, ley lines and all that; what their aficionados grandly called ‘earth mysteries’. Questing after a well or earthworks was what got me out of my parents’ overheated living room and off into the local byways and hills. I had a duffel coat, suede boots and flared jeans that soaked up the wet; hopeless attire, but near to our modern housing scheme on the outskirts of the city were the remnants of two, three, five thousand years of occupation. I cycled to visit a long-barrow, which is now a roundabout at a motorway intersection near the airport; I hiked up onto the Pentland hills to examine a few ditches and banks which the map announced as an ‘earthworks’, and one Boxing Day, just to get out of the house, I walked miles to visit a stone pocked with cup-marks. It stood where it had been raised thousands of years before but an estate of 1930s bungalows swirled around it now. It was snowing lightly. What I saw wasn’t a standing stone overwhelmed by bungalows but, rather, I fancied I could feel the pulse of ancient energy in the land, quietly persistent even in the slushy suburban sprawl.
Then, one day in May 1979, it may even have been my seventeenth birthday, I sat my last, lacklustre exam and left school without ceremony or much notion of a personal future. A day or two later, my mother drove me the thirty miles from our house into rural Perthshire. She had suggested librarianship, which was the stock idea for a kid who read books. I did read books: the paperback stuffed into my haversack on the back seat was by Tom Wolfe—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. She suggested secretarial college. When she said these things, tears of belligerent dismay pricked at my eyes. No one suggested university.
The route we followed in the family VW Passat was almost the same, I now realise, to that which separates the sites where the two decorated food vessels were found. We, too, travelled by river valley and hill-pass. We followed the motorway upriver to Stirling, skirted the edge of the Ochil Hills, dipped into Strathallan and crossed the Allan Water, and continued through farmland and old villages. It was an alien land. We drove narrow roads shaded by huge trees, passing the driveways and gates to secluded private houses larger than either of us had ever entered. Blue election posters were still nailed to roadside trees, but they would soon be removed. They’d done their work—ten days before, Margaret Thatcher had been voted into office.
There must have been an exchange of letters and directions. I must have seen an advert recruiting volunteers, applied, and been told to turn up at this mid-May date. I remember nothing of that except that I had to bring a trowel, ‘cast not welded’. I had no idea what that meant, except that it seemed suggestive of the ancient magic of metalwork. It meant only that cast trowels were stronger, and there would be a lot of trowel work.
We crossed the Earn by a lovely old four-arched bridge, then took the right turn under a road lined with tall pines. On the right, the river; on the left, after half a mile, an unremarkable farm track began. We turned in, the track at once sloped uphill, and led quickly onto a level terrace of farmland. Suddenly, when we crested the rise, there appeared the long ridge of the Ochils, five miles away and blocking any view further south. This low but determined range of hills formed the entire horizon. To the north, more hills, higher and jagged, the beginning of the Highlands. All of this—the crossing of rivers, the terrace of land, the encircling raised horizon was relevant, but I didn’t know it then.
We’d arrived at something which seemed part wartime billet, part hippy commune, and no one was around. The track led to the back yard of a substantial old-fashioned farmhouse, derelict-looking but obviously in use. It was L-shaped, built of grey stone, with pitched roofs. At its eastern gable stood a few trees. At its west side, an arched barn. A couple of caravans were parked up nearby, and a lived-in ex-army ambulance painted yellow, with a stovepipe emerging from its roof. A field away, beyond a line of sycamores, were low heaps of freshly dug earth.
The farmhouse door was open, but a deep puddle had formed at the threshold, and hessian sandbags were piled up to keep the water out of the house. We negotiated the puddle and entered a dim kitchen with a long table flanked by benches and a sink in the window. A woman dressed in shorts and a T-shirt was stirring a pot. She turned and gave me and my mother a cursory look. To me she seemed old, and senior—twenty-eight or so. I explained myself, but didn’t understand at first when she spoke; many of the people here were itinerants with accents I’d simply never heard before, not for real: London or Devonian, or, like this woman, a clipped, old-fashioned English public school. My mother said, brightly, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not staying!’ She didn’t, either.
What was being excavated was a ‘henge’. Henge, hinge, to hang—the word first applied to Stonehenge, with its great stone lintels, had come to mean any Neolithic circular enclosure, which is to say a circle of standing stones or wooden posts, with a surrounding ditch and possibly a bank. Spanning the ditch, which can be deep, there may be one or two causeway entrances. Henges are not uncommon, but their purpose is still obscure, and might always be. They attract baggy words like ‘ritual’ or ‘ceremonial’. Some, like Stonehenge, are orientated toward solar or lunar events, but thirty years ago that was still a moot point.
This one, on a farm called North Mains, had been discovered—or rediscovered—from the air. Two years before, in 1977, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments had conducted an aerial survey of the whole country. When Antoine de St-Exupéry said, with typical hauteur, ‘the aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth’, he meant the vastnesses of the Sahara, the rippling oceans he saw beneath him, against which human habitation was a paltry thing. But it’s true of human traces, too—the small and lost and intimate are also revealed. Prehistoric sites, invisible to a walker on the ground, can show from high above.
‘Crop mark’ is the phrase. On the black-and-white photo this henge had shown up as thick dark circle, which the field wore like a tattoo. And, like living memories, crop marks are fickle: they respond to different weathers and seasons. One stalk of corn will grow taller than another a yard away, because of ancient disturbance to the ground in which it was sown. It knows a secret, which everyone else has forgotten, and which it discloses to the sky.
My own memory of that summer is patchy now, inevitably. Some images, a ‘taste’, some names, a feeling of being much out in the sun and wind, and of being caught up with new excitements and possibilities.
The site was already well under way. It was an orderly place of scraped earth and excavated holes and spoil heaps. It lay beyond the sycamores, five hundred yards away from the farmhouse, on the same flat terrace, near the lip of a defile that fell away sharply down to a meandering tree-lined burn. There was the River Earn on one side of this raised terrace, and a burn, the Machany Water, winding along on the other, and, farther in the distance, that wall of hills. Due east lay the farmlands and wooded slopes of Strathearn, the long fertile river valley that became, eventually, the Firth of Tay, and the North Sea.
We worked by day, but the long midsummer evenings were our own; we were free to linger outdoors in the cool gloamings, at leisure until work began again in the morning. About twenty of us dossed down in the farmhouse at night, and every morning we filed out onto site. I loved it.
The exams I’d just taken were already far from my mind. The Stone Age was closer to me than secretarial college ever would be.
May was cold and blustery and often we were rained off, and obliged to sit in the wooden site huts—a couple of big garden sheds—drinking tea, smoking roll-ups, watching the rain slant across the door. At day’s end, dusty and weary, we trooped back to the farmhouse. Every day, on a rota, two people quit work mid-afternoon and retired to the farmhouse kitchen to assist on a marathon of cooking. What did we eat? Who did the shopping? I couldn’t say.
The farmhouse was due to be demolished. That’s what we heard. It had obviously been empty a while, but there were many derelict farm buildings then. People were still leaving the land; there was as yet no appetite for renovating old mills and steadings and the like. In short, there was no great need to take care of the house; this youthful invasion was its last hurrah. If there were what estate agents call ‘original features’—fireplaces, shutters, panelled doors, I was oblivious to them. There was a lot of brown varnish and the floors were bare, good for sleeping and dancing. In every room—five, I think—were rough furnishings: old mattresses, rucksacks and sleeping bags. Of the two large public rooms downstairs, one had been commandeered by more longstanding volunteers, the weather-beaten old hippy element. They had installed a couple of old car seats.
One of the inhabitants was a long-haired man we called Pete the Lech. He did to me as he did to all the girls: sidled up while my back was turned, slunk his arms around me and asked, huskily, if I’d sleep with him. I remember the texture of his hair on my face and the smell of patchouli as, laughing, I said, ‘No’. ‘Fair enough,’ he said and wandered off. By then I’d read enough of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to recognise the quotation painted gleefully on his door. It was Ken Kesey’s great scrambled pun, ‘No left turn unstoned.’
There must have been a bathroom, some means of washing, an outside toilet even, for the twenty-odd ‘diggers’ billeted in the house, but that’s another nicety I can’t recall. The tribal elders, our bosses, were in their late twenties. Everyone was young. It’s a wonder to me now how people so young could carry all this. As in wartime. As in the Neolithic.
No stone was left unturned. That was the day job. There was a Neolithic monument, it had lain in the earth for four thousand years, and our task was its swift and meticulous destruction. The site, the henge, was subdivided into four areas, each area the responsibility of one archaeologist, all of whom reported to the overall director, Gordon Barclay. These real archaeologists were remote figures who lived aside in caravans, who told us what to do, and who hauled us back to work when the rain showers passed.
Mostly I worked within the inner sanctum, an area about twenty-five metres in diameter, and was engaged in ‘stripping down’—that is, carefully and, with the trowel, scraping away just a centimetre’s depth of the hard-packed subsoil which formed the interior of the enclosure. Several of us did this job. Hair in my face, knees on the ground, I held my new cast trowel and scraped at the earth. Had they still existed, we’d have been within a circle of twenty-four wooden posts, possibly with a wattle fence strung between them. Immediately outside the ring of posts, there would have been a ditch almost three metres deep, like a dry moat, and then encircling that, a raised bank, six foot high in its day. Such had been the original, Neolithic construction. Every day some diggers were seconded into the outer ditch, to empty it of long centuries of infill. I didn’t envy them, stuck down a hole all day. All the post-holes and the ends of the ditch were emptied, and the fill carried away in wheelbarrows to the spoil heaps. I still loathe wheelbarrows.
So this was what we did: kneel over a portion of earth, a metre square or so, and scrape with the trowel’s edge, trying to apply the weight evenly, so as not to score or scratch, or make one side tilt lower than the other. Some diggers were better at this than others. Although the word ‘diggers’ still carried a whiff of the radical English movement, the seventeenth-century communitarians, and they were often ragged and long-haired, there was, even amongst them, a hierarchy. A sign of experience was a trowel worn away to a thin dagger-like blade. With this one tool, it was possible to spend half the year in a journeyman or gypsy way, hitch-hiking from site to site, working a few weeks here and there. In the right hands it was a sensitive tool—you learned to feel, or hear, the grind of an earth-hidden stone or pottery shard before you saw it. Sometimes a little pebble tumbled away as the trowel edge passed over it, but a larger stone, as yet hidden, just beginning to emerge, sent a tiny seismic thrill along your arm. This was what you wanted, the excitement of a ‘feature’.
We can talk a great deal about post-holes and ditches, but what actually happened at that place so long ago, at what time of year, and who travelled how far to attend, and what they called the place, and whether they came by boat or on foot, and if there was a distinction between those deemed fit to enter the inner enclosure where we worked, and those who, like a crowd outside a cathedral, were obliged to stand at a remove, we have little way of knowing, though some bold theories are emerging. You can’t help but suspect social distinctions have been with us for a very a long time.
Over the last week of May the ditches were excavated, the post-holes within the ditch all emptied out, measured, photographed and the enclosed area carefully scraped down. You could tell where a hole had been dug 4000 years ago, and a wooden post put in, by a change in colour and texture of the soil. You could tell that the posts had, over the course of the years, simply rotted away. They had not been set ablaze in a great spectacle, as had apparently happened at other henges. People bent over their patch of soil, squinted through theodolites, drew on paper pinned to boards, and for this were paid a few pounds a week pocket money, fed, given a space on a floor. For a while it felt like a life. It was rough and ready, but with more purpose than a commune and too short-lived for much tension to build.
Mostly, we were just clearing, but the work had its own satisfactions. It was hand work, nitty-gritty. I liked the bite on the point of the trowel as it scraped back a layer of soil, the feel of earth. For long moments, though, I thought of nothing but tea break, and discomfort, the nuisance of having my hair blow over my face. But at other times you could lose yourself in that minuscule landscape, a tiny Sahara seen from miles high. It often surprised me, when I leaned up to rest my back, that I was in a field in Perthshire. I liked to see the unchanging, stalwart ridge of hills, to be reminded of the wider landscape, of which we, bent over our trowels, seemed to be the centre—possibly with reason. I mean, there was a reason these ‘ceremonial enclosures’ were constructed where they were. Prehistoric people may not have had aeroplanes to reveal the face of the earth to them, but they could certainly read a landscape.
A few photos: one shows a dozen diggers sitting on the ground, legs outstretched, backs against the wooden wall of a site hut. A sunny, blustery day, but cool, judging by the jackets and windblown hair and the squinting into the sun. Everyone is under thirty, and everyone has a mug; we are engaged in the ritual/ceremonial of the tea break. Five more minutes and we’d be summoned back to work.
Another shows a young man standing down in a ditch, for scale. He is friendly-looking, thin and red-haired. I forget his name. The end wall of the ditch is a third taller than he is, maybe nine foot.
In that ditch it was possible to tell where, one day four thousand years ago, one labourer had finished his shift and another had taken over. Plus ça change. When he’d climbed out, he’d have seen the same ridge of hills as we did, the same long river valley, with woods and clearings. He’d have gone off, maybe down to the burn to wash away the grime, to take a drink, maybe to lie looking up at the clouds before he had his meal.
The director in his report calculated that a hundred people would have been required to build the henge, probably organised in gangs. A similar team, organised in gangs over two seasons, dismantled it again.
A third photo shows four diggers in the golden evening light, outside the farmhouse. They are dancing. Their shadows are long, and reach right across the yard.
It was because of the Avro Lancaster that the henge had to be excavated. That was what we heard. The site was being dug because the landowner, Sir William Roberts, intended to extend a runway over the top of it, because of his Lancaster.
Westward of our site, still on the same level of land, were couple of large hangars, a grass landing strip and a windsock. They constituted the Strathallan Aircraft Museum, a private collection of mostly WW2 aircraft. It was open to the public and, in the hangars, amongst other things, were two Spitfires, a De Havilland Mosquito, a Lysander and a Hawker Hurricane. The Hurricane still flew, and often passed above our heads as we worked. It came low over the henge, over the perimeter fence, to land and taxi to a standstill down at the hangars. We grew accustomed to the sweet snarl of its engine. It was a wartime sound, as evocative as the wail of an air-raid siren. But now—this is what we understood—Sir William had acquired a Lancaster.
What can we say of the Lancaster? Some reckon it a most beautiful aircraft. The most beautiful-sounding. The little Battle of Britain Hurricane had but one Rolls-Royce Merlin V2 engine. Lancasters had four, wing-mounted, 1400 horse-power. At about 40,000 lbs unladen, throttled up and ready to go, they made the earth shake—way too heavy for the present landing strip. The plane was bought, however, and would be flown over from Canada when the runway was extended to receive it. But the survey had shown this henge, this long-kept secret of the field. Sir William had provided the disused farmhouse, and now we were engaged in a ‘rescue dig—meant to salvage something of the deep past before it was destroyed.
Few if any of us kneeling over our Neolithic and Bronze Age site with our little cast trowels had been alive during the war; that was our parents’ and grandparents’ day. We were more concerned with time out of mind. We pored over the earth, seeking tiny clues about the prehistoric past. When we were done, the heavy bomber would be brought thundering in.
Little wonder, then, if we felt dislocated sometimes. Not dislocated, the place remained the same, the topography altered little. The range of hills, the plateau where we worked, the twin flowing rivers, the pines and cawing rooks—these were constant. But it was easy to feel unhooked from time, to be uncertain which era one was alive in. Under our knees, in the earth, a Neolithic henge, which was now beginning to yield Bronze Age artefacts too. In the air, the sound of the ‘finest hour’, the Hurricane lifting off from its grass strip. There was a lingering 1960s feel around the community of diggers—and, as I say, something of the seventeenth-century English radicals of that name, who were concerned to ‘level all estates’. And now Margaret Thatcher, antithesis of all that, was chasing her new broom round Downing Street.
In his Battle of Britain speech, Churchill said this: ‘If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.’ There was no quarrel, because the past, the various pasts, were all present. It was what I’d felt in my fanciful visits to standing stones, that to level all estates, to abolish all layers of time, took only a little imagination.
On one of our long leisured evenings, a boyfriend and I slipped away from the farmhouse, away from the site altogether. We made our way down the steep defile to the meadow beside the Machany Water which was, and still is, just a tiny tree-lined burn. The burn was easy to cross, but the meadow on the far side felt like a faraway secluded place. There we discovered, parked in the buttercups and apparently forgotten, the fuselage of an aeroplane belonging to the aircraft museum. He said it was a DC10. I had never then been in an aeroplane, so, as no one was around, we scrambled up, slid into the cockpit and pretended to fly.
‘Features’ were the great excitement. Features happen when, under your trowel, a something, you know not what, a true earth mystery, begins to loom up. It might be just the surface of a stone, or a change in the colour of the earth: a hearth where a fire once burned stays black for ever. It’s dusted with the hand, appraised. The archaeologist’s skill is in telling a something from a nothing, human intentionality from nature or chance. They learn to read stones, but sometimes stones stay shtum. But it’s a ruthless business: even as the mystery is revealed, it’s dismantled and destroyed.
Each of the four assistant archaeologists wrote a daily logbook, in which they kept track of the progress of their portion of the site, and of ‘features’ as they emerged. The logbooks still exist: they are fawn-coloured A4 school jotters. ‘Supplied for the Public Service’, they say, which makes them historical artefacts in themselves. If something was unearthed that looked like it might develop into a feature, it was allocated a number. One can follow its progress day to day by checking that number in the logbooks. Many features come up, burst, vanish like bubbles in champagne.
Depending on which of the assistants is writing, the small regiment of volunteers, of whom I was one, is referred to variously as ‘diggers’, ‘rabble’ or even, sardonically, ‘work units’. Which ‘work unit’ first happened upon Feature 455 I don’t recall, and the logbook doesn’t say. Lowly diggers were not entrusted with ‘features’. If something exciting looked like it was emerging, backwards, like a dog out of hedge, a more experienced worker would be sent to take over. Of course, everyone knew when a feature was slowly being revealed. They were the subjects of our conversations, central to the life of the site.
Feature 455 became the responsibility of a pleasant man called John. There were several Johns, all with by-names. There was a John the Veg, who ate no meat, and raffish John the Pilot, to whom a certain glamour accrued because he did indeed hold a pilot’s licence. This site, with its regular fly-pasts of WW2 planes, must have been a joy to him. But it was John the Tent who worked on 455. ‘John’s got himself a feature at last!’ says the logbook. And later, ‘John’s feature worth all the fuss!’
The rest of us got on with our scraping and stripping down, but you could always find an excuse—dawdling back from emptying a wheelbarrow, for example—to wander over and see how other folk were doing. You could appraise someone else’s little square of desert, or cast a glance into a post-hole. Everyone knew, therefore, that within the Neolithic enclosure other things were emerging, still prehistoric, but of much more recent date. It meant that many centuries after the original celebrants were dead and gone, their enclosure was still potent, was still being used. In fact, it was used on and off for 2500 years. Whatever the henge had been, it lingered a long, long time in custom and memory.
Feature 455 began as the scratch of a stone under the edge of a trowel. A flattish stone, then next to it another, then a third and so on until an oval area, a sort of crazy paving, had emerged about five feet long and four wide. It was in an important place: well within the ancient enclosure but not at the exact centre.
Now there followed a process. Each newly revealed layer was cleaned of earth, drawn on paper plans, photographed and, in due course, removed, so the next layer down could be exposed, similarly mapped and then in turn removed and the next course of stones revealed. To add to the odd sensation of inhabiting several different times, there was also this process of dismantling; of running the narrative of construction backwards.
Thus, the arena of flattish stones was mapped, and removed. Under them were some more stabilising earth and stones, but the next layer down consisted in just one single, huge grey boulder. It was so big and heavy it must have taken several strong men to manoeuvre it into place. It had presence, and everyone now knew it was a capstone for a cist.
The Latinate ‘inhumation’ was a word I learned on that site; ‘inhumation’ being distinct from ‘cremation’ as a way of disposing of the dead, but the old word ‘cist’ I already knew. As ‘kist’ it lingers in Scots as the word for a chest or box; a corn chest or blanket chest is a kist. We quickly understood that John had unearthed a Bronze Age cist burial. Now the little covering pavement had been taken away, it was the huge rounded cover stone, or capstone, which had sealed the coffin for thousands of years, which was coming to light.
The weather remained unseasonably cold and windy. Being outdoors all day, we were attuned to that. When the long ridge of the Ochils was capped by grey clouds, the whole landscape became sullen and powerful. Between showers we worked on. Post-holes and ditches were fine, but now the site had focus. Here were ‘earth mysteries’ indeed; soon something would be uncovered which had lain in privacy and darkness for 3500 years.
For several days John worked to clean the capstone itself, and he was always ready to lean up from his task and give cheery progress reports. The archaeologists were excited by its state of preservation, no damage or collapse. John cleared an area around the capstone, so it lay exposed like a huge egg a step down from the surrounding ground. Then it was declared ready to be lifted; tomorrow would be the day.
I was darkly excited by the prospect. Many of us were—how could we fail to be? We were young and this cist burial was very, very old. Even the experienced hands were keen, and they were full of stories both ghoulish and tender. Had we heard about the labourer on a site in York who’d accidentally put his pickaxe through a sewage pipe? Not a sewage pipe: turned out to be a medieval lead coffin. But what’s that green sludge? he’d asked. ‘That’s the body.’ He’d fainted! Had we heard about the Bronze Age woman and her baby, buried together, laid on a swan’s wing?
It was the last day of May. The fretful weather of the past week had steadied into a sullen gloom. In twos and threes we wandered out onto site at nine o’clock as usual, through the wooden gate and over the field toward the line of sycamores and thence to the henge, scraped and bare. Within the ditch, within the sanctuary of the ring of post-holes, in its hollow was the waiting capstone. We set to our various tasks with trowels and drawing boards and measuring sticks. Low blue-dark cloud covered the whole sky, the hills were obscured.
Though I remember that morning well, I’ve often wondered if I’ve elaborated it, and introduced a touch of Gothic fantasy, but recently a friend from those days, the boyfriend of the DC10, corroborated it. It was a very odd day.
There was more preparatory work to be done round the capstone, and that took an hour, until at mid-morning the call came to down tools and clear the site. By then the sky was even darker, more like November than May, but close and windless. A small yellow mobile crane, hired from a local firm, trundled onto site.
We ‘diggers’ herded ourselves onto the far side of the site and watched as the crane driver, called to an unusual task, conferred with the anxious archaeologists. Together they peered at the stone, crouched over it, stood in a huddle, discussed. There was a problem—a supporting stone beneath the capstone had shifted, allowing a spill of earth into the cist, threatening to destabilise the structure and spoil the contents, so, although the weather wasn’t ideal, the task had become urgent. Against the spoil heaps and the black hills behind, the yellow, mechanical crane was a strange trump of modernity.
At last all was set—and this is the bit I recall. There was some final manoeuvring, and then the crane took possession of the capstone and began to lift it. At that moment, however, the instant we began to violate the grave, a tremendous clap of thunder rolled down from the hills. Even as the crane swung the capstone aside and laid it on the spoil heap, the hills announced their disapproval and, as we moved forward to see what the cist contained, more thunder came, and huge drops of rain began to fall, so immediately a tarpaulin was dragged over the grave, concealing it again from sight.
I fled the threat of the office job, the secretarial college, and spent the following winter in a cold dark cottage on the Orkney Islands, where I wrote a small poem, and called it ‘Inhumation’:
No-one noticed if he opened his eyes,
acknowledged the dark,
felt around, found and drank
the mead provided,
supposing himself dead.
The opening of the cist had lingered in my mind. The whole summer had lingered in my mind, full of possibility. Of course it had—I was seventeen, just out of my big comprehensive school and my parents’ semi. It was a turning place, a henge, a hinge indeed. The exams had been no triumph; if I’d thought about trying for university, which was not an easy process anyway, without a knowledgeable family or supportive teachers the idea was dashed anyway.
But you could sign on the dole. You could hide among the swelling numbers of genuinely unemployed, and claim a little money every week. That’s what people did: artists, diggers, mountaineers, would-be poets and musicians, anarchists and feminists. Anyone for whom the threat of a job, of conformity, felt like death.
The opening of the cist under that thunderclap was thrilling, transgressive. So, in its quiet way, was writing poems. The weight and heft of a word, the play of sounds, the sense of carefully revealing something authentic, an artefact which didn’t always display ‘meaning’, but which was a true expression of—what?—a self, a consciousness. This was thrilling too.
In the cist it wasn’t a man, but a woman. Had I written ‘she’, ‘supposing herself dead’, my poem would have read like a metaphor, as a poem about myself. It wasn’t about me. It was about the body in the cist.
She had been placed, as was the custom, on her right side, crouched with her legs drawn up, her head hard against the top wall of the cist. We looked down onto the skull and long leg bones, which were intact, and gleamed up from the bottom of the stone box, eerie and tender at once. But there was something uncomfortable about the turn and grin of the skull. The angle was wrong. Once the body was in place in the cist, someone had reached in and turned the dead girl’s face to look upward, and toward the east. Then, beside her, they had placed that bowl with its grooved and jabbed decoration. It had been filled with mead flavoured with meadowsweet. Then they had laid the capstone over her.
It had done well, that food vessel. It had kept its long vigil. Because of the way it had toppled, perhaps the very moment the heavy capstone had been shifted into place, the skull and the bowl seemed to be gazing into each other, mouth to mouth, as though engaged in a long dialogue.
Rather than cooling the weather, the thunder seemed instead to herald the arrival of summer. June opened with clear blue skies and increasingly warm days. Work on site continued quickly—time was limited. Plan, draw, photograph, take it down. It was perfect flying weather; the vintage planes took off and landed. Dig and dismantle—there would be nothing left. Evidence suggests that many Neolithic sites and chambered cairns were not merely forgotten, but ritually closed. Rings of posts were burned in situ by those masters of fire, or stones heaped over the entrances to burial mounds. This work seemed an equivalent. A ritualised undoing.
Being no longer required, most of the ‘diggers’ left in the middle of June. There was a final party, of course, and because it was midsummer, it didn’t really get dark. We stayed up all night and at dawn a few of us wandered down to the bigger river, the Earn, and sat under the arch of the old bridge. The water passing under the bridge in the dawn light was satiny, palest grey. Some bats flitted through the arches. I remember an earnest conversation, but what it was about I can’t recall.
Some folks were going south, down to Stonehenge to mark the summer solstice, to see the sun rise over the Heel Stone and get into the mystic. There was always ribaldry about this, between the ley-line faction and those who scoffed. But the diggers, outdoors all day, with Neolithic dust under their fingernails, were closer to the spirit of the thing than any ridiculous berobed ‘druids’.
I didn’t go to Stonehenge, but instead left North Mains in the company of a long-haired lad called Pete the Joint and we hitched to the coast, all of thirty miles away, and slept on a headland. How vast the sea, after all that concentrating on a tiny patch of earth.
Others were moving on to different archaeological sites. It was a bit of a golden age; life as an itinerant ‘digger’ was not impossible, and not intolerable for a while, especially for the young, and we were all young. Every site was an information exchange. In that, the henge probably functioned as it had 4000 years ago. Whatever it was for, it was also a place for romances, graft, parties, huge pots of food and good-natured resentment of the bosses who seemed to know what they were doing. Our off-duty lives probably got us closer to the Neolithic or Bronze Age than any analysis of post-holes and bones.
It would be simple to read much into the business of the Lancaster bomber rolling over the Neolithic henge, the Bronze Age cemetery, but I think it would be trite. It was nothing more than a bizarrerie. Besides, the ‘readings’ wouldn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. We know we are a species obsessed with itself and its own past and origins. We know we are capable of removing from the sanctuary of the earth shards and fragments, and gently placing them in museums. Great museums in great cities—the hallmarks of civilisation.
We are also capable of fire-bombing those cities, and melting their citizens to what Kurt Vonnegut called a ‘foul stew’. Vonnegut was a POW in Dresden, detailed to remove the bodies after the US bombers and Lancasters had done their worst. Flight had certainly revealed something of the face of the earth, and also the face of our own capacities. We can reach into a cist-grave and turn the face of the dead girl toward the light, and place a bowl of sweet food in with her, to tide her over into the beyond. At Dresden, the people had crammed themselves into cellars, into cists, hoping to be safe. It was impossible to remove the bodies for burial. They sent in a man with a flame-thrower.
I didn’t know it thirty years ago, but Neolithic sites were often built at the confluence of two rivers, so when I crossed the bridge on the way back to North Mains it was with a different awareness. Prehistoric people would have made the crossing by coracle, or something, and the crossing would have been of ritual significance, an arrival at the centre of the world, a plateau site held in place by the surrounding hills.
It was May again, the track was the same, rooks cawed, and the farmhouse, far from being demolished, had new windows and a well-to-do lived-in look. When a light aircraft took off and began circling round overhead, I nearly laughed. What’s thirty years in the scheme of things? It wasn’t a Hurricane, though, but a bright blue Cessna. A field away beyond the farmhouse stood the same row of sycamores, with fresh leaves. Beyond the sycamores, where the henge had been, there was no sign of a runway at all.
No one answered the doorbell, so I made my way to the sycamores, then stood beneath them, trying to recall where exactly in the expanse of fallow field the henge had been.
The henge was gone, of course, we saw to that. But the runway had never been built. Or, if it had, it had been grubbed up again pretty soon. The Lancaster had arrived alright, but a few short years after the excavation the aircraft museum closed, and the entire collection was sold off. The Lancaster was flown south, but a hangar roof collapsed on it, and what was left was broken up for spares.
The henge is gone, the director’s report is available to read, the photos are filed away, the Bronze Age woman’s bones—well, they’re in a cardboard box in a city store. The food vessel is reunited with its sister, and displayed in the National Museum, and has nothing to do with this place, this here.
This here. This same topography. I walked out into the middle of the fallow field on its plateau. With the enclosing hills and twin, east-flowing rivers, it is still the landscape the Neolithic people had understood so acutely, the same earth into which the Bronze Age woman had been lowered. Eastward, vanishing into haze, lay the river valley I’d driven that morning, where once the wild aurochs roamed.
You are placed in landscape, you are placed in time. But, within that, there’s a bit of room for manoeuvre. To some extent, you can be author of your own fate. At least, that’s what I’d been lucky enough to learn.