It was earlier that same summer that I first learnt of remarkable findings concerning ancient Britain. Archaeological excavations on the island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides seemed to suggest a whole new way of looking at the practices of our distant ancestors. A window opened to journey to those faraway lands in August. I would head to the Outer Hebrides to delve once more into the prehistoric past. I would learn from my time on Tiree. Now, I would step back not to the Stone Age but to the Bronze Age.
It was dark and drizzling at Lochboisdale. I stood in a strangely emotional state as I watched these whale-like outlines of islands appearing on the western horizon, rising from the sea as the boat brought me ever closer to these lands. There really was something extraordinary about these islands. I stood on the boat in the damp and the cold of the evening and watched as the sea receded as the land closed in. The boat docked. I was back in the Outer Hebrides.
I drove north to Tobha Beag. A single-track road led through the night, rocky shadows on either side. I turned at the sign for Tobha Mor, passed the ancient chapel and continued along the rough track down to the Howmore River, over the bridge where fresh loch water meets the sea, and there I stopped for the night. A storm was due. It had already flooded southern England and was due to hit South Uist at two in the morning. I slept in the car.
The morning woke grey and overcast. A westerly wind blew gustily. I busied myself, made breakfast and watched the river rushing out to sea as the tea brewed. Two years before, on that very same patch of earth, I had eaten breakfast while watching seven hen harriers – two pale males and five dark females – as they sailed over the loch waters and the wavering heads of the corn in the fields. This morning I saw only one: a lone male. I followed him as he glided the pale sky above the stone bridge then wove out over the dunes to the sea where he vanished into the cloudline.
I passed the next hour on the beach seeking flints and finding none. Tiree still chimed in my mind: the Mesolithic Stone Age, those seasonal summer camps and the sound of flint clink clink clinking on sunny days. Yet that was last summer and eight thousand years ago. Here on South Uist, it wasn’t the Stone Age that I was seeking. I was stepping forward in time to the Bronze Age – two thousand years on from those flint-knappers on the beaches of Tiree. Unlike those Mesolithic peoples of last summer, the Bronze Age people I was seeking hadn’t travelled for flint, hadn’t come journeying, travelling in seasonal migrations, hunting for stone, for salmon, for the resources that would keep them alive in their Oban caves through the bitter winter months. These lands had been their homes. In enclosed, protective roundhouses built of stone and wood, tucked out of the wind and the driving rains, the storms and the cold, they had happily lived out their days here. They weren’t seeking stone like those before them. They had forged another way of living – embracing the ways of their Neolithic ancestors in farming the land and keeping animals for food but literally forging too, in a practice utterly unknown to their Stone Age forebears. They were turning stone into metal – to bronze. And they were also doing something here that had only just been realised by the archaeologists who had been digging into these sandy soils for years. They were preserving the bodies of their dead. Over three thousand years ago, the Bronze Age people of South Uist had learnt the ways of keeping their ancestors from rotting away. They had learnt to turn them to mummies.
I walked an untrodden beach and thought about time. It really was a very peculiar item and yet to get anywhere near an understanding of prehistory you had to get a grasp of it, of great handfuls of it really, of what generations of time add up to, what they mean. As I walked, I started to try to reason across the last 10,000 years from the Mesolithic Age to now.
I lifted my eyes from the strandline. Two seagulls passed overhead. The tide was low, leaving a bare stretch of perfectly smooth sand topped with a line of seaweed. The rain still fell softly on my hood.
I tried to think it through. Average each generation at twenty-five years – that makes forty generations in a thousand years; eighty every two thousand years. That’s from the birth of Jesus to now – eighty generations. Then go back from Jesus to the early Bronze Age folk of South Uist – eighty generations more. Then step from the Bronze Age folk to the Stone Age flint gatherers of Tiree – eighty more generations of souls who are born, live and die, and then another eighty. So soon, the numbers become mere numbers, not lives. It is so hard to see beyond two, three generations – what of the sight of eight souls, lined up like the descendants of Banquo before me? What then of eighty?
I shrugged the matter away and walked on over sea-sodden sands, out into the open wonder of the beach, peering west to where I had gazed two years ago at the blazing glory of the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean. Then I turned back to time.
What had changed in all those thousands of years? You walk the same beach through the same seas of stranded seaweed, the same grey swirls of gneiss across the storm beach: the same rocks, the same sea, sky, mountains. What had really changed in, say, four thousand years? The beach looked so clean, so free even from the detritus of our modern world with all its plastic colours. Our world of consumption, of digital entertainment seemed so very distant, so alien, that here on the empty beaches of the Western Isles you could so much more easily step back those thousands of years into the footsteps of ancestors one hundred and sixty generations before. I smelt that salty, so distinct air, of drying, rotting kelp upon the shore. The same sands sunk beneath my feet as had sunk beneath Bronze Age feet. The same sun still shone.
I stopped and scanned the lands for signs of change: a white chapel up on the hillside; a farmer’s tractor half-abandoned atop the dunes. Back in the Mesolithic some six, eight, even ten thousand years ago, these lands would have been wooded. Yet the steady work of their distant offspring through the Neolithic, burning and cutting the trees for fuel and shelter and in time clearing land for farming, had ensured that by the time the Bronze Age folk of Uist lived on these lands the woodland had largely gone. Their landscape, their world here on Uist, was beach and then dunes and then machair and then peat moorland up to the stone outcrops of the highest peaks – pretty much as it looked today.
Back at the car I made tea for the Thermos. I was perched behind the car, packing the stove away. When I rose, it was to the sudden sight of a shrunken old lady wrapped in a worn, red winter jacket, the hood pulled tight over her head. I visibly started. In this vast empty place, she had appeared without warning, from nowhere. She stared. She was covered in the same flies that I had been wafting at all morning. She flapped her hands beside her face.
‘These flies,’ she said.
‘They’re terrible,’ I agreed.
I was still trying to recover from the shock of seeing her.
‘Ai. There’s a dead gull back there,’ she said.
She nudged her head to back along the track.
‘Erm,’ I stuttered. ‘Have they been like this all summer?’
She didn’t seem to hear.
‘Eh?’ she said.
‘Have they been like this all year?’ I said.
‘Eh?’ She stared straight into me. ‘What’s that?’
I repeated myself, only louder.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s just today.’
She swept her eyes across the skies.
‘Something’s changed.’
She looked back to me and smiled.
‘Got to walk to get away from them,’ she said.
‘It’s better on the beach,’ I said.
‘Ai,’ she agreed.
She turned and went. I watched her walk away then went back to packing up the stove. When I looked again, she was gone. I followed her footsteps some moments later, heading back to the beach south of the river, but never caught another sight of that red jacket.
My feet led me to the open space of the sands. My mind felt as though stunned, struggling to adjust to being here – to the space, to being in these landscapes of endless horizons: sea and sand, sky and air. I gazed about at the grey cloud that was clearing above, and then walked the shore for another hour staring at the tideline for treasure, for ancient stones, signs and wonders. I was in something of a daze. I strolled merrily along, weaving pleasingly through the dunes and fields. Two cars passed. In time, I passed a man in a van speaking into a phone.
‘Seven six, seven six,’ was all I caught of his conversation as I walked by. And he in turn didn’t seem to see me, didn’t turn his head as I walked by, as though I really had started to slip, as I had intended, through the structures that hold us in this world. I turned down a sandy path through the machair. A lone male hen harrier flew above the field. I halted, watched that ashen cross glide over the golden heads of corn and shivered at the sight though the sun had started to shine. Then I returned to the car and drove south to Cladh Hallan.
It was twelve miles from Howmore to Cladh Hallan. I reached the dunes in the late afternoon and followed one of the tracks that led into the mile-wide maze of machair. On the western edge of the dunes, I stopped. The sun, though falling, was bright above a bank of cloud on the horizon. By the time I was sat in my chair sipping tea with my bed secure for the night, the sun had dipped below the cloud level for two final hours of splintered daylight before dusk. For the next nine days, I would make a home here. I would seek to step gently into this landscape. I pitched my tent a discreet, respectful distance from the Bronze Age roundhouses of ancient Cladh Hallan. Tucked down here, I would start to spend time forging my own understanding of this place, would start to step into this intense, incredible space with horizons that stretched for miles.
I stared west – out into the Atlantic Ocean where the grey swirls of cloud in the far distance were a squall some leagues out to sea that was steadily heading this way. It would soak in seconds, yet would take an hour to reach here even though blown in with huge, hurricane breaths from the Americas. I sat in silence and simply watched the world, glancing every few moments back to the ever-darkening west. To the east, there was a mile and more of soft machair and then a scattering of tiny squares that were the nearest houses. To the north-east, half a mile or so away, sat the stone walls of the cemetery with its smattering of standing headstones; and then, beyond, lay the dark shadowed outline of Beinn Mhor, the highest peak on South Uist. Behind me, to the south, the fertile plains of the machair ran for another mile then turned to marshland, which ran for four further miles to the rocky toes of the southern shore of the island. I drank tea and turned the binoculars back to the north and to the string of three sandy lozenges in the dunes that marked the site of the Bronze Age settlement I had travelled from the further reaches of Britain to visit.
I spent the rest of the daylight reading through my clutch of scientific papers on Cladh Hallan. I sat outside in my dune-top chair until the sun finally fell and dusk was more dark than light. Then I turned in, lying horizontal in my tomb-like tent, reading on by the light Katie had given me for just such moments.
Cladh Hallan was the reason I had come here. It was a Bronze Age settlement, founded around 2000 BC and occupied sporadically until 500 BC. The excavated site consisted of three roundhouses: the north, south and middle houses, though the entire settlement was made up of seven roundhouses aligned in a terrace that ran on a north–south axis. In the Bronze Age, South Uist had been home to some two hundred settlements. Each one had been built of stone and wood. Each had been occasionally rebuilt and remodelled, the heavy stone walls lifted and replaced in a similar circular structure a few feet from the foundations of the previous. Each had housed generations of souls.
And those ancient ancestors who lived here at Cladh Hallan lived in a landscape pretty much like that of today: dunes of seashell-white sand and machair grasslands where those roundhouse homes were built; then the moorlands of peat spotted with grey outcrops of stone; and, beyond all else, the peaks of the hilltops that brushed the clouds.
Yet it was the ritual practices that had been taking place at Cladh Hallan which had brought me here. I reread the abstract from one of the scientific papers I had with me:
Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200–700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.1
The initial excavations at Cladh Hallan had begun in 1995. The article in my hand was published a decade later in 2005 by Mike Parker Pearson and a collective of archaeologists. The title declared: ‘Evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain’. It was one hell of a statement.
In the northernmost roundhouse, two adult bodies had been discovered. In the middle house, there was the body of a ten- to fourteen-year-old child, probably a girl. And in the southernmost house of the three excavated, there was the body of a three-year-old child. Each burial showed signs of ‘mummification and curation of the bodies’.2
And yet that was only part of the tale of Cladh Hallan. The whole story was quite mind-blowing. The findings on the skeletons recovered from Cladh Hallan really had transformed thinking on Bronze Age burial practices. Seven years of further laboratory investigations from 2005 had revealed the true nature of the two adult skeletons. Not only was there evidence of Bronze Age mummification, the adult skeletons at Cladh Hallan really were some kind of Frankenstein’s monsters. They had been constructed from the bones of separate individuals. The male adult skeleton, recovered from that northern roundhouse, was composed of the skull and bones of three separate, individual people. The body – the corpus, the torso – was from a man who had died around 1500 BC; the head was from a different man who had died a hundred years later; and the jaw was from yet another man who had also died a hundred years later. A century lay between the death of the head and the body of the skeleton. The composite skeleton – a recreated Superman or Frankenstein’s monster – had then been buried somewhere between 1440 and 1260 BC. It really was astonishing.
The female skeleton unearthed from that front roundhouse was also formed of three separate individuals. The body was from a female adult, but the skull was from a male. The right arm belonged to a third individual. It was hard not to label her as some ‘Bride of Frankenstein’s monster’, though perhaps she should rather be seen not as a monster but as a goddess of sorts, constructed from human forms. Her male skull was somewhere between seventy and a hundred years older than that of the female torso – fitted on to that female body and then buried sometime from 1310 to 1130 BC. But the really rather disturbing detail of that female mummy was this: the two upper lateral incisor teeth had been extracted from that male skull and then placed in the bony palm of each hand of the skeleton – the right tooth in the right hand, the left in the left hand.
I shook my head. Though my eyes were tired and my sight smearing, I leafed back through the scientific paper which had first revealed ‘Bronze Age mummy is a composite of different skeletons’ by ‘osteological and isotopic evidence’.3 I laid the wad of papers by my side and closed my eyes. It was too much to take in. Lying in my tent on the dunes, I pictured pale bones tossing and turning in the air, spinning in some danse macabre. I’d got the gist of the burials at Cladh Hallan from the accounts I’d read some weeks before. But actually being here a few hundred yards from the site of the burials – miles from any other living being – and having the time to carefully read through the archaeological papers detailing the nature of the skeletons and the specifics of the scientific investigation made real, made visceral, the complexity of the Bronze Age burial practices that had been taking place here three thousand years ago. That was the word: visceral. In all its gory, bloody truth, I could see, or at least I could start to imagine, that solemn ceremony as the cadaver is cut open and eviscerated: the heart, the liver, the vital organs, the viscera, extracted from the body of the dead. I opened my eyes. The head torch forged a patch of light. Outside, I could hear the sea.
My eyes closed again. Raindrops fell, drumming gently on the tent. I pictured the process. Once the viscera had been extracted, the skin and body of the remaining skeleton would have been wrapped, binding the bundle together. Then the skeletons had to be preserved. The outer millimetres of the bones showed evidence of ‘unusual thickening of bone mineral crystallites’ – a process not due to the alkaline machair sands, but by soaking of the corpses in the acidic peat bog.4 The skin and remaining flesh had then been tanned by the bog water. The bones still showed the rusty stains. The wrapped, hollow mummy bundles had been ritually placed in some sacred space, in the dark waters of the peat bog. For weeks, months, the acidic action tanned and preserved the skin and bones. Too long immersed and the bundle would be burnt away. Removed after the right interval of time, the skeleton and its bony parts would keep for centuries.
I opened my eyes again and managed to swat the last remaining fly in the tent with the Journal of Archaeological Science article, which left a smear of blood across the phrases ‘isotopic evidence’ and ‘ancient DNA’. Then I turned the torchlight out and the darkness flooded in.
In the morning, I rolled out of the tent to glorious sunshine. I washed, brewed tea and wandered the beach north, already wide awake in this wild new world. I beachcombed the strandline, then walked down the beach to a spread of rounded splinterings of gneiss and turned to treasure hunting, seeking gold coins, Spanish doubloons in the sand. I found none so turned to the stony hard ground of an exposed, ancient beach and sought Stone Age cast-offs. Flint was what I still had in mind – a legacy of Tiree still lingering from last summer; some nice round nodules among all this gneiss beach spree. I found none.
I stopped and stared about me. The simple, sublime nature of all was stunning: the landscape, the seascape, the skyscape. Especially now the morning sunshine had brought out the colour. I passed the incongruous presence of a lime-green oil drum on the tideline, and headed in towards the dunes and the machair and the Bronze Age settlement of Cladh Hallan.
That was when I found the axe. It was the regular pattern of the stone that drew my eyes. I lifted it from the sand and held it in my hand, feeling it fit snugly between my fingers and my thumb. I felt the touch of prehistory. I brushed some stubborn grains of sand from the stone and examined it. It looked like the fossilised bone of some long dead leviathan, the scapula of some strange creature of the sea that had been found one distant day far back in time and then carefully fashioned, chipped at to sharpen that cutting edge. The smoothing action of the sea, the sand and of time had rounded any splintered edges. One of the corners of the blade had come away. Perhaps that was the moment when the stone had last touched human skin – four, five thousand years ago, maybe far more – the moment when the stone was cast off, discarded on the beach.
I held the axe in my hand, motioning a chopping action through the morning air with the six-inch stretch of the blade. I felt the stone against my skin, felt its weight. It had to be a fossilised shoulder blade of some kind. I turned the stone in my hands. One face was a sea of greys; the flip side a spray of rusty oranges. And it was treasure all right – Stone Age treasure. I knew that much.
Yet I also knew that the bedrock of South Uist, as with the rest of the Western Isles, was Lewisian Gneiss, the oldest rock of Britain – from a Pre-Cambrian seam that ran the length of the islands. And Lewisian Gneiss was metamorphic. It was formed under unimaginable temperatures and pressures, deep in the earth and only brought to the surface as molten magma that cooled to leave those black-and-white marbled outcrops which broke the coastline into bays and were so beautiful when washed with seawater. My geology days were distant but I was pretty sure that fossils only really came from sedimentary rocks. I stroked the rusty surface of the stone. Could it be limestone? And if it was, how the hell did it get here?
I needed to move on – to venture forward some five-thousand-odd years from the Palaeolithic into Bronze Age Cladh Hallan. I tucked the stone axe into a pocket in my rucksack. I walked and thought, threading a path through the machair and the dunes towards the three roundhouses, stepping away from the storm stones and thoughts of flints and gneiss to wondering on bones and Bronze Age burials and to notions of mummification.
I stepped up the slope of the southern dune beneath which the rest of the Bronze Age settlement of Cladh Hallan lay – the four unexcavated roundhouses – then stepped down into the hollow and the three rings of the excavated homes, roughly reconstructed. I sat and stared. Those two adult composite bodies were discovered in the northern roundhouse that apparently acted as some sort of sacred mortuary – a House of the Dead; a Mummy House. Alongside the two bodies there were also the cremated ashes typical of Early Bronze Age burials. A small cremation pyre built of stones lay just outside the walls of that roundhouse. At some moment in time, burial practice at Cladh Hallan had shifted: cremation had been replaced with that intricate, precise procedure of mummification by evisceration and peat preservation. It was a process then followed – anything up to centuries later – by the creation of a constructed skeleton, a united whole of various individuals, to be buried in a ceremony we can only ever imagine.
I shook my head, poured a tea and looked down on the three circles. I thought of the other burials, the other bodies found during the dig. They were of two children – a ten- to fourteen-year-old who was probably a girl, discovered in the middle roundhouse; and a three-year-old bairn buried some time after death under the southernmost of the three excavated buildings whose body also showed ‘post-mortem modification’. I sipped the steaming tea. Were they the children of the families that lived in these houses? Though dearly loved, they had been lost and so were buried within the protective embrace of the stone wall of the family home. Their bones had not been used to form one of those superhuman skeletons. They were children; little voices that had grown silent.
I shook my head. The flies had found me. They grew worse, then unbearable. I rose and walked back to the clearer skies of the beach. On the top of the dunes, I found a bright-red drinking bottle with ‘USS Gunstone Hall LSD 44 Defending the Constitution’ printed around a heraldic shield. I stared out to the Atlantic, half expecting to see a warship patrolling the seas. On the beach, the flies were still bad. I flicked at them with the cord of my binoculars then swallowed one, which had me coughing and spluttering, spitting and swearing. There were no spiders to hand so I downed a cup of tea. I sat on the smooth, flat sand by the sea and when I blinked there were more flies – black spectres swarming my vision: Muscae volitantes. I blinked again. A strange abstraction seemed to have caught hold of me sat there on that empty expanse of sand. In a while a man walked by, strolling the water’s edge a hundred yards from me with a whippet trotting beside him. Something in his mien, his mannerisms, reminded me of my Dad – the hands clasped together behind his back, the head dipped watching the ground as he walked; his worn trousers, shirt and jumper. I watched him as he went by and in time he shrank to the northern horizon and I was alone again on that vast stretch of sands.
In truth I was finding it all rather intense. I spent the night star gazing – praying for an appearance from aurora borealis but instead watching Arcturus sparkling yellow to the west and Capella piercing in the north. As I had risen to turn in, two bright orange-amber eyes had gazed at me from beneath the lip of the dunes five yards away. It was a creature of some kind, though what I could not tell. It held its gaze. Two eyes glowed with fierce intensity like Castor and Pollox. I froze. It froze. For a few seconds, probably just a fraction of one, all else was gone. A midnight stare. Then it was gone. The eyes ducked below, into the darkness. I breathed again, unfroze and headed for the tent.
The next morning, I decided to step away for a moment from those bodies of Cladh Hallan; from the bones, the mummies, the children buried in the floors of their roundhouse homes. I would venture into an earlier period of the Bronze Age. I would return to Eriskay, a small island to the south, connected to South Uist by a causeway. Two years before, I had seen one of the wild Eriskay ponies silhouetted on a hillside as I had driven through, rushing for the ferry that would carry me to Barra. Today, would be a gentler return; a day of contextualisation. I would look at the burial practices of those who lived on these wild islands before the mummifiers of Cladh Hallan. I had a guidebook called Ancient Uists which directed me to the cairns of Am Baile, ‘probably of Early Bronze Age date’, which lay on the north-west slopes of Beinn Sciathan. These were the directions:
The cairns are grouped closely together but are ephemeral, and somewhat difficult to find. Take the road from the causeway towards the Barra ferry. Pass the school on the left hand side, and as the road bends towards the right, walk up the hill, between two streams. The cairns are located on a small level area on the bluff.5
It seemed straightforward enough.
For the next few hours, I pottered about the boggy moorland and the grey rocky outcrops, occasionally spitting flies from my mouth. The sun rose into a gloriously blue sky. I stripped off layers and stumbled on through heather and marshes, weaving every which way between babbling brooks of fresh water until I stopped at last beside a small burial mound of some sort, a smattering of stones that seemed aligned north to south. I sat panting. In truth I felt utterly befuddled. Munching a late lunch, I read carefully through the directions once more while occasionally wafting at flies one-handed. I sat and tried to steady my sense of prehistory, my appreciation of past times. I wondered if it had been the mundanity of my morning that had made me misplace those ephemeral cairns. I had stepped back into the present, had driven in to Lochboisdale to replenish empty water bottles and wash up the pile of dirty pots and pans; then I had gone to the Co-op to load up with supplies – all the time marvelling at the brilliant convenience of modern living. Now, I was perpetually bothered by flies that seemed more annoying than ever. My map flapped awkwardly in the wind. Nothing seemed to flow. I rose, vowed to give up the hunt for Early Bronze Age burial cairns, and instead spent a few moments following the tea-stained waters of the stream nearby, probing the smaller stones with a pencil for Beaker potsherds and seeing pieces of that fine-patterned pottery style in the broken fragments of gneiss littering the water.
I spat another fly from my mouth and admitted defeat. I shook my head and sat down on a stone. What did it matter? The sun shone. The sky was blue. Beside me I noticed the pink, round flower tuber of a marsh orchid, a twin to the one tucked in the lee of a dune beside the roundhouses at Cladh Hallan.
I drove the grey avenue of the stone causeway back to South Uist, then headed west for the standing stone of Poll a’ Charra on the southern tip of the island. I parked up and made tea and thought on the tanning process, on preservation by immersion in peat, as I poured the boiling water on to a tea bag in a pan and watched the waters turn to the same reddish-brown as bog water. Just as you leave the tea leaves to do their work, so those ancient Bronze Age bodies were left for that peat water to do its work. It was merely a matter of timing: a few moments for a perfect pot of tea. Too long and the tea is stewed. Leave the bones in the peat water for a few months, and you have a perfectly preserved and tanned mummy. Too long and the acid in the peat starts to eat at the bone tissue.
I walked down to the rocks at the water’s edge to drink my tea. It was early evening, the sun dropping, the tide nearly high. I lay with my back against a lichen-encrusted grey stone and watched the sea. Time passed. There was a flick of black, of something in the edge of my vision where those motion-sensitive rods are packed tightest. It was like a fly – either one of those pesky creatures that had been floating about my head all day, or one of those more ethereal Muscae volitantes floating across the aqueous humour of my eye.
And then in the globular world of my binoculars, the black flick becomes a black fin, becomes black fins. Seconds hold like breath. A black body rises. And another. And another. And another: four black figures that move together in smooth, silent motion; slipping slowly through mediums; from water to air, to patches of sunlight and then back to water.
‘Wow,’ I say and I watch breathless as they rise again together.
For endless moments, I follow them as they cross my horizon, swimming up through the Sound of Barra, feeding on the fish brought in on the rising tide. They are heading north, like me. My camera zoom strains on maximum. I click away until I have a sea of photos of empty sea, and one of the sleek black body of a Minke whale.
The next morning, I crawled out of the tent expecting more glorious morning sunlight and found the machair shrouded in a briny sea mist that closed the horizon to a hundred yards. By the time I was ready to walk north, back to Cladh Hallan, the haze had started to lift in ethereal sheets and as I crossed the dunes towards the roundhouses a cloud of curlew rose too, calling their names as they did so. A chattering of starlings soon followed from a hidden hollow.
At the doorway to the middle roundhouse, I halted respectfully. The entrance faced east and the sun was already high above the sandbanks, the remaining stubborn veils of mists steadily evaporating as the sunlight found the damp, still-sleeping faces of the dunes. The night before, I’d read again the current thinking on the layout of the roundhouse – ‘the sun-wise order of roundhouse life’. The living quarters would have been based in the southern section of the roundhouse. Now I stood at the doorway to that Late Bronze Age world, striving to find a way into that world of 1100 BC – into the ways and beliefs of those people who lived here three thousand years back and who practised that elaborate process of evisceration, mummification and peat preservation on their dead. It wouldn’t be easy.
I ventured across the portal of the outer doorway, perfectly aligned to the east, stepped into the grassy stone-lined circle where a furnace would have burnt hot enough to cast bronze. It was two strides west, across to the inner doorway, to the roundhouse proper. A hollowed bowl had been carved in a stone that seemed perfect for washing dirty hands and feet before entering the central round of the home. Two huge stones marked the entry point. I stepped inside. Then I halted. I walked to the central point of the roundhouse where the hearth fire would have burned day and night.
I turned east. I tried to picture the rising sun appearing through the entranceway, as new-born sunlight touched the dying embers on the hearth. The fire was relit. The day could begin again. The ‘Sun-Wise Model’ saw everyday life in Bronze Age Cladh Hallan naturally fitting with the movement of the sun about the earth. An information board explained:
The movement of the sun around the house gave meaning to the sequence of daily activities and mirrored the life cycle from birth to death, for example, entrances faced the rising sun while burials were in the north-east quadrant. The daily routine moved clockwise with the sun – from cooking to working to sleeping – and is shown by the spread of artefacts found.
I stood in the centre of that Bronze Age room. I turned to ten o’clock, then edged round clockwise to twelve, to midnight, lifting my right arm as I did, as though it was an hour hand. There, the family would sleep together huddled in furs through those long, cold winter nights on a raised ‘sleeping platform’ of turf banks. I turned through the hours of the night. One o’clock. All lay in deep sleep. One thirty. Two o’clock. The north-east corner, the darkest space in the home, was where the deepest sleep – the sleep of death – took place. It was here the skeleton of that ten- to fourteen-year-old child had been excavated from the foundations of the home; a girl, a daughter. I had read somewhere that she could have been a human sacrifice. I frowned. I thought of my own daughters. How could you sacrifice your own daughter? Or was that the point: an ultimate sacrifice. Or perhaps she had died in childbirth; or just died of natural causes.
I turned clockwise. Three o’clock. Three-thirty. Dawn. Daybreak: the glory of the rising of the sun. The beginning of life again. I faced the entrance in the east. An ethereal spray from the last of the morning’s stubborn sea mists swirled about the doorway. I turned in the fresh sunlight of that new-born day to four o’clock. You could almost see those ancient souls awakening to another day and busying with domestic chores: first, stoking the fire and fixing breakfast in the kitchen area; then tidying and brushing the floor. I turned to six o’clock – due south – and on to seven o’clock where the ‘working area’ lay; to eight o’clock where antler picks and pottery had been unearthed; and then on, round to the west where I gazed up to the now perfectly empty, blue sky.
Back to basics: what do you need to have a stable society that survives; and more, one that flourishes for a thousand years? Or, to be more basic: what do you need to live here on South Uist? First, you need water. Fresh water. Loch water that drains through brooks, streams, rivers into the sea. Like at Howmore just up the coast. That’s simple enough. Settle close to a source of clean, fresh, peat-filtered water. And where was the water source at Cladh Hallan? I looked across the three hundred yards of dune to what were called the ‘outhouses’ – two smaller round houses to the north that were dated to a later era around 500 BC. I’d walked over there yesterday and seen the change in the flora as you stepped into the green horseshoe of what had recently been a sand quarry – those ammophilic, sand-loving grasses like the spiky marrams suddenly vanished and were replaced underfoot with young shoots of ferns and far lusher meadow grass, sure signs of the existence of fresh water coursing close beneath the surface. Three thousand years back a stream had to run close by Cladh Hallan and the string of seven roundhouses. Water. You needed it every day. There had to be a source readily accessible and right to hand.
Water was also central to cultural practice at Cladh Hallan. These people were preserving their ancient ancestors hundreds of years back – generations back. That link to the past, to the ancestors, to the people of the past, was something obviously fundamental to those human souls who lived here three-thousand-odd years ago. And, after the evisceration, after the binding of the skin and bones of the dead, it was immersion in the sacred water that allowed the preservation of those beloved loved ones that came before. It was peat water that allowed their presence to remain in the present. It was the same water that you needed to live.
Bog water. That was where you placed the bodies of the dead once they had been carefully prepared: sacred bog water. In the very same brown, bog water of the peat that babbled and bubbled and gargled its way down from the hallowed high ground in gentle streams; the very same water that found its way down to the low ground where the living lived; and, by some miracle of life, it was the very same water that the living drank and washed and bathed in each day. Up there on the hillsides and the hilltops, rain fell and the water gathered in deep, dark pools and lochs. And from there it streamed down until it ran beside the roundhouse homes at Cladh Hallan where it was fresh and cool and sweet. The very same water: water that kept the living alive and that kept the dead, if not from dying, then at least from disappearing.
I sat down. It was rather too much to take in standing up. I poured another tea. The past suddenly seemed so close; the ways of those Bronze Age people suddenly felt so touchingly human. I looked to the north-east, that alignment to the lands of the dead, to that undiscovered country. I looked to the cloud-shrouded peaks of Airneabhal and Beinn Mhor beyond. Those were surely the places of the dead. The living lived on the low lands; the dead lived on high.
But where did they lay the prepared bodies of the dead? It had to be a sacred place, a place chosen as carrying specific importance on the landscape and a place where a bound body could be carefully left to the preservative powers of the bog water. Not here, not on the coast, on the machair, but on moorland, on higher land where the peat waters were. They had spent ages in an elaborate, precise practice – removing the guts, the vital organs, and then carefully preparing the body for the process of preservation. They were hardly going to then simply toss it into the nearest bit of peat bog and leave it for a few months. The placement of the body into water for preservation would surely have been undertaken with precise care and attention. It would have been a ritual, ceremonial event, one that you could picture as something like that of a present-day funeral – a silent huddle of friends and relatives gathered together as some kind of priest, some shaman, someone chosen by the community who took charge of the ceremony, who directed as the body was prepared and placed into that watery grave not for ever but for a calculated period of time. I started to see the preservation process as a form of extended baptism for the dead, a religious ceremony that culminated with the body being lifted after some weeks or months back to the light of day, to the fresh airs of Uist from the dark wet world of the bog.
And what of those carefully extracted vital organs removed from the unmoving body? I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the scene, tried to peer in, to see those silent figures dressed in sacred robes as someone undertook the first incision. Were they putting them into canopic jars like the ancient Egyptians? I tried to look as the heart was removed and held in living hands. Where would it be placed? Would it be burned, cremated ceremonially? Would the organs be cremated? You can’t just have what is, after all, essentially offal hanging around. Do you feed it to the dogs? Do you eat it? Do you eat the organs? Would that heart of the loved lost one be ritually consumed – the remaining blood, the remaining presence of the dead taken into the bodies of those still left living, to continue them in you and therefore to keep them alive? What of the liver? The kidneys? In the same way that you preserve the bones by that careful bog practice, why not consume them, or what you can of them, as Catholics consume the body of Christ each week. Is it so very different?
Then there was that other essential: fire. By the late Bronze Age most of the trees had been cut down from the islands. But by that time there was now peat: for fires for the living; and – pulling things together in a tight circle of meaning to life – peat water for the dead. I imagined the smell, that wonderful sweet smell of peat, which would have scented the roundhouses, the smoke seeping from under the eaves; the tremendous aroma of peat that carries so far on the wind and that would have accompanied the daily ways of those people of Cladh Hallan each living moment of the day. I remembered a walk on the west coast of Lewis two years before, heading back to Gearrannan and smelling the smoke from a peat fire burning in one of the blackhouses from a mile away even though the rain fell and the wind howled.
Fire was essential for the hearth. Fire was essential to storytelling, to drawing families together in the darkness. When the day is done and night falls, the bodies can gather and talk, tell stories of the mundane, the everyday and then also of those who came before, keeping them alive not only in the mummification process that kept them physically on earth but in the tales of their deeds, of their time on this earth – all in the warm, peat-scented embrace of the roundhouse. In the same way that I told tales to Eva and Molly of my father, of their grandfather who had died, the grandfather they had never known, I saw the folk of Cladh Hallan also telling the deeds and ways of ancestors who had died to those who had never met them. Those Bronze Age souls here three thousand years back sat by the fireside and told tales so that the dead remained alive for the living. So, too, I told tales of Dad so that in some way my daughters could get to know him, even beyond death; and so that in a way, in a strange, subtle sense, they could also slowly get to know the parts of themselves that were like him. I, who did know him in life, can see him still in the ways of them. I see him in the gait of Eva as she walks, that long-bodied lean stride with head-bowed over; I see him in Molly’s eyes – the same clear-blue, shining light smiling back at me across the generations.
I shook the thought free and stood up. I stretched in the fresh breeze, glanced back to the three circles of stone, then walked away, stepping south over the grassy dune beneath which the remaining, unexcavated, four homes of Cladh Hallan lay. I flicked at the sands of the rabbit burrows with a pencil trying to remember the term archaeologists used for the process whereby ancient findings were brought to light by the actions of creatures like rabbits. I kicked at the odd, pale seashell, then glanced back across the machair, to where my home, my tent, lay hidden half a mile away in the marram grasses. I was getting hungry.
On the walk back I wondered what the past peoples of Cladh Hallan would have done for food. Mainly hunt it seemed. There were no rabbits on Uist in 1000 BC but there were hares and there were lots of deer. I had read that only ten per cent of the Bronze Age diet on South Uist had come from the sea. It seemed odd as they had lived their lives so close to the ocean. But they had turned inland for food instead. They were eating animals. They must have been eating wild, and cultivated, plants, too. I was walking a desire line back to the tent, cutting through the machair, stepping carefully about the yellow heads of buttercups and kidney vetch and rattle; and purple knapweed, white wigged wild carrot and hogweed. Venison and carrot stew threw itself upon my thoughts – bubbling gently away half the day in a pot over the peat fire in the hearth.
When I reached the tent, I dropped down to the sand of the beach and ate some nuts to stave off a growing hunger and then walked south, wandering now, sauntering; worn by the morning, the effort of thinking of the past, my mental weariness gradually eased by the simple act of walking. I stopped after some minutes and took off my boots, then my socks, felt the cool touch of the wet sand on the bare soles of my feet and delighted in the delicate shock. The winds had eased. The sea was calm now. I shaded my eyes and stared to the south-west, out to that ocean of water where the weather came from, out into the vastness of the space above the blue, to the furthest extent of the visible firmament, staring to the infinite distance of the horizon and to the vanishing point where sea becomes sky.
It had been four days and it felt like I was starting to get somewhere. The garments of the twenty-first century had begun to fall away. Not that I was intending to end in deer skins, nor indeed that I felt some deep psychic connection with the Bronze Age humans whose lands these had been three, four, five thousand years back. But rather I was slipping from the ways of now, from the demands of the present, from the mundane and the everyday and somehow getting closer to an understanding of what it was to live here in 1000 BC. And I had already realised that the image of these grim people living out grim lives in their roundhouse hovels which pervaded our collective imaginative vision of Bronze Age Britain was utterly and completely unfair; and indeed quite wrong. That time around three thousand years back was not an era marked by precarious survival. Not at all. Those people were flourishing here in 1000 BC. So often we looked back into the past and saw plague and pestilence and pain. And of course it was a hard life, a really tough existence. The truth was that they lived far shorter lives than ours. But they also lived out their days in a world of peat fires and venison stew. And certainly they lived their lives far more closely connected to the natural world, as one of the creatures of the world that shared this amazing space, this incredible landscape.
I stepped away from the present as I hid out in the furthest reaches of the Outer Hebrides, on the outer limits of land in the British Isles. I learnt to avoid the living. The few lone human figures who I saw out there in those dunes and wildflower meadows were mainly dog-walkers. I learnt to watch them from afar through binoculars as they wound their way along one of the sandy paths through the machair and to step away if their pathway seemed to be veering too close to mine. I tucked down. It had always been my thinking that if I was get anywhere close to any understanding of Bronze Age existence here then it would only come if I extracted myself from the ways of the present – excepting a few essentials like the Thermos, the tent, the car, the radio at night, books, walking boots etc. etc. I wasn’t trying to suddenly live a Bronze Age lifestyle overnight. I wasn’t looking to build a roundhouse of my own; to hunt for food and to dress in furs cut from the carcasses of my own kills. But I did believe that I would hardly get anywhere if I was chatting away half the day on my mobile phone to Katie, to Mum, or to friends; or passing the time of day with fellow travellers to these antique lands. That was surely no way to step into the Bronze Age. That was no way to prise open an ancient doorway into the past.
I strolled back to Cladh Hallan, tucking into the hollow of that southern dune that hid the secrets of the remaining four roundhouses of the settlement and disturbing a chattering cloud of starlings that rose and fell again as one, as huge black droplets. And, as I dropped to the dune floor, they were accompanied on their flank by a shade of something, a dark scimitar which rose and cut through the splattering of birds before falling back down to earth. It was a merlin. For an age, I watched as it sat on a fence post, until it flew and was gone for ever.