A new day dawned. The sun rose slowly through sea frets at Cladh Hallan. I walked north along the sands and then over the green highways of the golf course at Askernish, cutting inland, stepping out of the band of dune and machair which ran beside the sea and into the mile-wide stretch of streams and lochs which would have provided the fresh water for the good folk of Cladh Hallan. I had pencilled in another day of context, of seeking those who came before the Bronze Age mummifiers of Cladh Hallan. I headed for the moorlands, stepping back in time to try to know something of the last of the Stone Age.
Further inland, past the lochlands, I followed sheep and deer tracks through the heather and the marshes and played with the idea of walking back in time. I was heading for Barp Frobost a few miles north of Cladh Hallan on South Uist, and then to Reineabhal, a mile or so further north. I was venturing into the Neolithic – the New Stone Age – on the trail of two chambered burial cairns.
The official dates for the Neolithic ran from 4500 to 2500 BC. Or, to put it another way, I was looking to step back five, six thousand years or so. I was still playing with ways of trying to frame that distance in time. It was so hard to do. First, go back the four hundred years to Shakespeare’s time. Imagine yourself in a tavern on the South Bank of the Thames, enjoying an ale in a pewter tankard before you stagger over to The Globe for that new play everyone is talking about – something to do with fairies. Then go back ten times those four hundred years. Or, to try it another way, go back to the birth of Jesus. Imagine yourself in your toga pottering about the sandy streets of Bethlehem. Then go back another two thousand years; and then go back another two thousand years again. That was roughly what the task was. It wasn’t easy, this imaginary time travel.
I walked the tarmac of the main road with a smooth, hard stride that took me past a quarry gouging granite from the south face of the hill of Aisgerbheinn. I marched as the road rose, counted footsteps on fingertips until I reached a thousand and then counted a thousand more and reached the rise. I halted at the crossroads. The road to Frobost ran west towards the sea. I remembered my directions were to turn east at this point, to follow the fence line inland to the higher ground. The cairn of Barp Frobost lay on the far side of a stream.
The sun shone. The day grew warmer and the flies grew worse. I crept through a morass of boggy marsh and barbed wire and felt the freedom of stepping beyond as I edged towards the higher ground. I turned my mind to the matter of the Stone Age once more – not to those worlds of clubs and furs and stone axes of the Palaeolithic but to the later, more refined era of the Neolithic. It was certainly still a time of stone tools but significantly now one where cereal crops were grown and animals – cattle, sheep and pigs – were being domesticated for the first time. I walked and thought and sought to imagine, to step into, the South Uist moorland landscape of six thousand years ago.
For thousands upon thousands of years, since the first footsteps, life had been a series of sojourns to favoured camps dictated by seasonal pushes and pulls. In winter, that meant the protection of caves, chosen to be close to fresh water, to be near wood for sacred fire – places that enabled survival through the frozen, bitter months. Eventually, as spring brought increasing daylight, sunshine and warmth, so too it brought a stretching of cramped limbs and the start of tentative steps out and away into the awakening landscape. In summer, there would have been far grander ventures by land and by sea to the further reaches of the known world and sometimes beyond.
And then, sometime around 4500 BC, that shift in living took place.
Hunting and gathering still played a part in sustaining life but now a more stable, more settled sense began to pervade people’s relationship with place. The migratory, seasonal aspect to the year, which had so defined the pattern of life for the Mesolithic folk, gradually altered over the centuries as food became available by other means. Certain local patches, favoured lands close to those sites chosen for settlement, now were nurtured with increasing care and attention. Farming became the favoured way of being. Survival no longer meant being reliant on the seasonal resources of everything from flint to fruit to fur. A fundamental change in the relationship between humans, the land and the natural world was taking place.
I looked to the north-east where the grey-piled stone hill of the cairn was becoming clear against the backdrop of similarly grey rock outcrops. I slowed and tried to picture the scene here some six thousand years back – in the Neolithic. They were certainly working stone, and working with it in new and impressively elegant ways. I had seen a picture of an amazing carved, black, stone ball that had been found on Benbecula, a few miles north of Cladh Hallan which had been carved from granite with such patience, such skill. Since seeing that image, one of those Neolithic carved stone balls had become a kind of ultima Thule of possible beach findings.
Now I turned my thoughts instead to Neolithic chambered cairns and the emergence of these huge, new monuments from the land. There was an obvious, practical sense to gathering these stones when you considered that the task was undertaken by those prehistoric peoples commonly referred to as the first farmers. If you were going to farm this earth, to work this land, then first you had to clear it; and that was a task that was going to take time – it would take months, years, even generations of hard labour.
I halted as I finally reached the chambered cairn at Barp Frobost. Though much of the cairn seemed damaged there remained an awesome presence to this sacred site, place of burial, home of the Neolithic dead. I touched an upright kerb stone respectfully, fought to breathe more calmly. Here was the remaining evidence of monumental physical efforts executed in hazy distant realms of the past. I felt the touch of the gneiss, of the lichen; then scanned the horizons. Once, this land would have been covered with trees. Now, there was peat and moor and rock – those long-gone shades of green replaced by browns and greys. The woodland had been cleared since Mesolithic times by hunters using fire both to carve safe spaces for their settlements and to provide grazing for the red deer they loved to hunt. By the end of the Neolithic this landscape looked pretty much like now – minus the fence posts, the telephone wires and the odd abandoned house. Except there would have been those first Neolithic permanent settlements starting to dot the lands of Uist – formed of low stone walls and wooden fencing, enclosed safe spaces defined and delineated from the landscape beyond, where a collective of related souls could sleep in peace together in warmth. They could pen pigs and turn them from wild to domestic creatures, could build a home in a land that would gradually become tamed, too.
I checked the map and the skies, then started off again, heading directly north for the summit of Reineabhal. Over that grey ridge, down the gentle slope which fell towards the still, dark surface of Loch an Ath Ruaidh lay a second chambered cairn, larger and more intact than the one I stood beside. In the warming sunshine, I stepped away – picturing as best I could the process by which this land was first settled, first became a homeland. From those first, palisaded homesteads the Neolithic people of South Uist stepped out and began clearing the land – fathers, sons, mothers, daughters all working together, sweeping the land of grey stone: the largest boulders inched along by gangs of men; the smaller stones collected like eggs by children in reed baskets. Each stone was carried and placed in a defined space, the gathering pile steadily building until in time it would become a sacred place.
There was such a practical necessity to the process of gathering these stones from the land so that the first primitive hoes could drill these meagre soils; readying the land for seed, preparing the land in order to eke out a basic cereal crop each growing season from some ancient strain of spelt. This process was a collective practice. It was one that served also to fashion a sense of community, that united the people in a shared goal, firming up their feeling of belonging, both to this landscape, and to those kith and kin who toiled alongside to forge a fruitful way of living here. And, if you as a single individual worked hard enough and were good enough to your family, to your wider, collective kith and kin, then maybe you would be laid to rest in that vast stone chambered cairn, that burial mound that had been created by the communal efforts of centuries, constructed from the stones that were lifted from the earth by those very first farmers and their families.
I reached the summit of Reineabhal and stopped. The sun was now arching over a perfect summer’s day. I stripped down a layer and walked over a moon-rock plateau and down the slope into the heather and bog until the pale outline of the chambered cairn became clearly visible in the landscape against the peaty ground. I halted and stared at the site. When I got up close it was the scale of the cairn that silenced me. The stone monument rose five metres from the ground. I walked clockwise around the circular kerb of larger stone tablets that framed the main mound. It was twenty metres in diameter. It was the sheer bloody effort involved that struck home. And this wasn’t one of the largest chambered cairns on Uist. What was certain was that this wasn’t made overnight. None of these Neolithic burial mounds were. They weren’t even made in a generation. They were made over hundreds of years – added to year after year after year.
I sat down and poured a tea. It was so hard to conceive of the collective enterprise that had gone into the construction of the chambered cairn. Nothing in our modern times has such a timeline. Nothing. In the past few hundred years we had learnt to supersede the deeds of the past so swiftly. In Neolithic times, change happened so much more slowly. I tried to imagine those first figures stepping about these lands, straining to lift, to clear a rough field, and gather the stone on this spot. Here. For year after year. Then I tried to step into that world where the gathered stone became something more – became a place where the dead were buried.
Imagine being here in this land of stone as a young boy. Imagine watching as a beloved grandma is laid out in death and ritually placed in this sacred site. Imagine the silent reverence as those gathered remember, and as the winds tear through the heather, as the rain begins to fall, as the tears fall, as all remember the days of life of that woman whose comforting scent of wool and wood ash you still smell today. You stand as a mite, with five years of life lived, and your tears too are washed by the rain as her still body is carried from the light of day to the darkness of the underground chamber to be placed on the huge granite slab that lines the hallway of the tomb.
I sipped some more tea.
Then you return again, some years later. You have moved away. You are now a man, with a wife and children. You remember the days spent on these lands as a child, screaming at the winds, laughing as you walked the sodden soils picking stones; as a young man lifting ever larger lumps of rock from the land; and now as a man, as a father, here to bury your own father.
It was hard to step into those shoes so distant, yet somehow it felt possible sat on a stone which human hands had lifted and placed exactly here five, six thousand years ago. I leaned against the rock, closed my eyes to the sunlight.
You are tired – that deep-boned tiredness of limbs worn by the labours of life. Twenty-five years of hard living have passed since that day they buried your grandma. A generation ago and now you are here to bury your father whose still face stares up at you. You crouch and creep into the circle of night that is the entrance to the chamber. No tears today. There will be time for such moments later. For now, you must see him away.
And then you return there as an old man. You hope. If the years are good and nothing takes you before then. Time passes. You return to this place and now it is your turn to lie on that slab of stone that marks the halfway between day and night, the hallway beyond the light. The faces of your sons and daughters now stare down at yours.
I returned to the present and to the mewing of a buzzard high beyond. I wondered if everyone would have been buried here. Would it have been only the great and the good that got in, whose bodies found repose in this sacred space? Was it like Westminster Abbey where only the greatest were permitted to lie in the most favoured of locations for the long journey through death’s dominion? The mewing persisted. I twisted my head and saw the flecked frame of the bird soaring impossibly high. I pressed my hand to stone. And if this place was one whose gates were locked to all but a select few, then where did the bodies of those others lie? Where did everyone else go? I looked up again to the airs above. I knew the truth was that their bodies were simply laid out to the elements to be gradually devoured by the wild creatures who shared these lands, to be returned to nature.
It was getting intense, this stepping into ancient worlds, into ancient ways and minds. I spent the rest of the day strolling steadily back to the machair of Cladh Hallan, weaving my way west along the track from the chambered cairn at Reineabhal, over the main road and on towards the sea. It was a strange, rather dream-like stroll. I walked past a derelict mobile home which had once been someone’s pride and joy but now lay ruined, a side torn away by winter storms, the roof gone. I walked on and passed a grand, abandoned home whose walls and sills stood while the chimney tops leaned drunkenly and grasses grew from the guttering. A line of starlings sat strung along the apex of the roof. I slowed. And then, as I stopped and gazed at this forgotten frame of a home, a white horse walked into what would once have been the back garden, all the time staring fixedly at me. The horse stopped and stood stock still and it peered at me with such intensity of purpose that my skin grew cold under its stare and I turned and walked away down the sandy track to the sea. When I turned back again after some yards, that white horse remained standing quite motionless and still stared intently. And even when I glanced back some distance away, I saw that the horse continued to gaze after me.
I had learnt to hide. I had successfully tucked myself down behind that green curtain of the machair, sliding away from the few figures that walked the tracks nearby with their dogs, slipping down the dunes to the beach and away or merely sinking into the sharp protective embrace of the marram grasses. The sliver of tent lay in a sandy hollow, so low and green as to hardly be seen even by the sharpest of eyes. My beloved car was not so well camouflaged. Its blue hull, seen from Cladh Hallan five hundred yards away, appeared more than once to my glance as an abandoned boat, tossed into the dunes by the storm waves. Yet its presence out there on the edge of the earth, perched on the final scraps of British land before the endless expanses of the Atlantic, seemed to grow ever more natural as the days ticked by. I began to imagine the years passing and the car gently melting into the machair; the blue paint peeling away in time, the tyres collapsing slowly as the rubber lost all solidity, and the rust from that salt air started to take a hold, turning wheel hubs gradually to dust, striping the body of the car to a tarnished skeleton as the corrosive power of this land – this so beautiful, so brutal land – took hold.
The next morning, two cyclists appeared on the track only a few yards away without my spotting them. My retreat from the present and from other people into the ancient world of Uist was rather shattered by the sight of two figures suddenly heading towards me.
‘Hello,’ a friendly voice called.
I could hardly shun such an affable tone.
‘Morning,’ I called back.
Andy was a gentle giant of a man. He was perhaps six foot three in height, with a good crop of white hair, and a matching white, stubbly beard. He was wearing a powder-blue T-shirt that flapped about in the gusts of wind.
‘I wanted to speak to you …’ he started, then paused as his grandson Louis, as I was soon to learn, crashed his bike into a clump of grass.
Andy turned back to me.
‘I wanted to ask you about getting my car out here,’ he continued.
‘Oh, right,’ I said.
‘You see my daughter is disabled. She has a wheelchair. I wanted to drive her out here …’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘There’s no one out here so she’ll be able to get down to the beach by herself. Independent girl, you see. But obviously doesn’t want a crowd about.’
‘Of course.’
Louis had abandoned his bike for the moment and now stood beside his grandad. His black hair ruffled in the wind. He stared and blinked. His T-shirt simply said the word ‘Zoom’. Louis told me he was seven and three-quarters. As his grandad and I started to chat about the wonders of this world about us, Louis disappeared into the land.
They were from rural Lincolnshire, outside Grantham. Andy had an immediately likeable nature. He had been a secondary teacher for years. We chatted about teaching, children, schools and the beauty of this place. I glanced to the south. The building storm cloud still looked far enough away. For a good few minutes more, we stood and chatted together in that glorious sunlight. I was enjoying his friendly company after days alone. Our shared experience of years of teaching forged an immediate bond. His wife, too, was a teacher, a geography teacher. She had served forty years in the classroom. They were both retired now, were here on holiday with their daughter, Louis’s Mum, and the vanished Louis.
‘I tried driving over there,’ he said, pointing back towards the site at Cladh Hallan, ‘But there was such a ridge of dunes to cross.’
Andy curved the palm of his left hand to illustrate. He was right. That was the way I had driven over, lurching with surprising momentum over that same dune-bank before crashing back to earth.
‘I know,’ I said, grimacing as I recalled the noise as my car’s underbelly had struck the sandy soils. With a series of finger pointing and squinting in the morning sun, I directed Andy to the more manageable farmer’s track, which wove its way here from the southern end of the road to Dalabrog.
‘Brilliant,’ Andy said.
I glanced back to the south. The storm was due soon. Gale Force 8, the radio had announced of the winds the night before. I had shifted the tent back from the exposed dune edge. It was rather more sheltered now, tucked into a hollow, the roof now only the height of the marram grasses.
Andy had turned to the matter of Louis. We’d been chatting for a while now.
‘He loves it here,’ laughed Andy as he started to search for his grandson.
I headed over the dunes to the beach. Louis sat in the sand a few yards away with a collection of stones.
‘You’re Louis, aren’t you?’ I called through the wind.
He nodded.
I walked over.
‘What stones have you got?’ I asked.
Louis looked to his blocks of gneiss. Andy appeared over a dune behind us.
‘There you are,’ he said.
The rain began to fall about twenty minutes later. It was thick, wet rain that soaked in seconds. I had just reached the three roundhouses, dressed in waterproofs that were starting to lose their ability to keep rain out. I pulled a plastic bag from my rucksack and sat down in the lee of the dune, beside the purple glory of that single Hebridean orchid. I was thinking about teeth. I had found a tooth yesterday morning, sitting in the sand kicked up by rabbits in the unexcavated southern section of the roundhouse community. I had turned it in my fingers, holding it by the root as I examined the broken enamel. It didn’t look human. I had pronounced it as sheep and popped it in my pocket. Now, I found it there again and extracted it from my damp jacket. I turned it once more in my hand and thought of the ‘female’ skeleton, found in the front roundhouse. In the left hand of the woman had been placed a left incisor and in the right hand, the right incisor – of a man who had died many years before and whose head in death had been placed on her shoulders.
I shook my head, spinning showers of rainwater from my hood. It was so extraordinary, not just the practices of those ritual burials but the way in which advances in scientific analysis had evolved over the past few years to reveal the details of the mummification at Cladh Hallan. Ten years ago, that same Bronze Age body was viewed as a single female who had been placed in the typical foetal position that so mirrored in burial the earliest womb-warm comfort. Now that gentle image had been replaced with one so much harder to fathom and one that felt in some ways so much darker, too.
Then I retired to the tent, dried off as best as possible, and lay down for a while.
When I awoke, the rain was still drumming on the roof. I stuck to the plan for the rest of the day, which was to head north digging deeper into the prehistoric past of these islands, to drive up to the lochlands of North Uist to another Neolithic chambered cairn – only this one was special. Barpa Langais not only still had its original roofed chamber and inner passage intact, but was described by my Ancient Uists guidebook as ‘the best preserved chambered cairn in the Outer Hebrides’. The book also noted ‘it is possible to enter the chamber (bring a torch), but this is done at your own risk and care must be taken.’ I had missed out on a visit two years back on a sunny afternoon passed at the nearby stone circle of Pobull Fhinn. I would certainly take that risk. Now was time to make amends and to further try to fathom that shift in practice, in ways of burying the dead, which occurred from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age.
I drove steadily along the wet road. As I crossed into Benbecula I thought of that black granite ball once more, carved with such dedication by some Neolithic hand. On better days, I would have been eagle-eyed for otters, which occasionally darted across the roads among the maze of lochs and outcrops that make up these southern sections of North Uist. Instead, a murky smirr lingered beyond the windscreen. I concentrated on the road, peering for the turning that would take me away to the north-east.
The rain that had fallen for six hours stopped just as I pulled off the Lochmaddy road. I found myself in a square of tarmacked land which served as a car park for visitors to Barpa Langais. The only other vehicle was large motor home with Dutch number plates parked up in one corner. I stared out through condensation to the misty world beyond. I could just make out the smooth curve of the cairn lying above the land as a false horizon on a rise a few hundred yards to the east. I stepped outside. The wind still blew damp but the rain really had halted, leaving the land looking washed and shiny.
An interpretation board by the track to the cairn was titled ‘Early Prehistoric Uist’ and illustrated with a colourful vision of brown-clothed Neolithic folk milling about beside the fresh grey walls of the cairn. Three figures were stepping along a raised entrance passage into a stone-roofed chamber. A ceremonial fire was burning. Pale smoke rose past pale stone to a pale sky. I paused a moment, staring at the scene, then stepped beyond the kissing gate and walked the path that rose up the slope east until the cairn became a vast mound of stone before me that shone rain-wet and stretched twenty-five yards and more across. A wooden board planted before the monument read:
NOTICE
Please be advised there has been a recent collapse in the passage leading to the central chamber and the entrance to the chambered tomb has been temporarily blocked in the interests of safety.
North Uist Estate, and a local community group, Access Archaeology, are exploring an appropriate scheme of repairs, which they hope to implement in the near future.
I frowned. The notice ended: ‘George H. Macdonald. Factor – North Uist Estate.’ Factor: I had come across the word only the day before. It was the name for someone who manages and runs an estate for a landowner. I walked clockwise round the cairn to the entranceway in the east. It was here a hundred years ago that the Victorian archaeologist Erskine Beveridge had dug up burnt bone and potsherds and some flint tools. A wooden frame overlaid with sheep wire was wedged in the opening to the tomb. I stepped closer, feeling the slippery surface of each stone under foot. The wooden frame lifted easily away leaving a black hole against the white lichens and the grey shades of the cairn’s stones. The wind blew frantically from the distant sea beyond. I stepped back to that black hole and tucked down into a silent, still world under the protective umbrella of the six-thousand-year-old heap of stone. I looked east along the alignment of the entrance passageway to the chambered cairn, up to the empty horizon of Beinn Langais. Then I turned and crept into the darkness.
The fractured sunlight from the entranceway framed the broken passageway of stone. Torchlight drew shadows from deeper within. A green tint of algae decorated those stones over which the rainwater had leaked and, indeed, over which a dark drizzle now leaked. I crawled steadily forward for some yards through that shadowland, through shades of light and dark until I found myself in the heart of the cairn. A central chamber, roughly pentagonal in form, opened before me. I clambered clumsily into a seated position, my boots bouncing on the stone, my back pack lurching heavily, then leant against one of the five huge door stones that would once have defined this room and, finding a comfortable enough seat, started to stare about me. Each vast slab of stone was a sealed doorway. Behind each was an open passageway into which the Neolithic dead had been placed. My headtorch beam played on the stone. Biotite-rich seams flickered in the artificial light. No sunlight had fallen on these stones for thousands of years. I pictured Erskine Beveridge edging in here a century before and imagined the light of those oil lamps he would have carried into this darkness.
I looked about. Above my head was a six-foot square slab of granite that acted as a central capstone to the corbelled ceiling, a roof piece which dripped dirty rainwater down through a crack that ran much of the length of the flat rock. I peered at that fissure and thought how if that ceiling collapsed now I would be squashed so very flat. Opposite me stood another six-foot square of stone – a door to the passageway that ran away and beyond. By torchlight I traced the five doorways, the five chambers that ran from this central space. Their geometric beauty was remarkable and so impressive considering the sheer scale, the size, the weight of these stone slabs. The creative design so old in conception was still so clear. Barpa Langais had been carefully constructed to a prepared plan. I killed the torchlight and sat in the deep still that flooded the space. Tucked there in the darkness, leaning on that stone doorway, I listened to the sacred silence of that place. The seconds eked away. Once more I tried to think of those ancient people of the past whose heels and footfalls I tracked and followed. Once more I knew that they had not been huddling cold and lonely in this landscape as our age so commonly saw them. They had been flourishing in their prehistoric worlds. I felt the damp seeping through my no-longer-waterproof waterproof jacket, and through the seat of my no-longer-waterproof waterproof trousers. Then I saw those whose elders had laid the foundation stones to this cairn, saw them sat in their water-proof skins, their leather garments gradually steaming dry before peat flames. I saw them fireside in their homes talking in hushed tones of the ceremony they had witnessed – here, at Barpa Langais on the edges of the high land of North Uist.
And then I rose. I had spent time enough in this place of the dead. As my torchlight tore through the darkness once more, I saw the seams of grey ash seeping down through the gaps in the stone, an ancient amalgam of burnt human bone and rainwater working its way through the layers of stone down to earth under the gentle gradient of gravity. To the north-east of the central chamber where I sat, the torchlight lit a broken column of collapsed stone, behind which faint sunlight fell, a pool of half-light exposed where the stone roof of the cairn had recently fallen in. I felt once more the scale and weight of the collective stone about me and started to creep back along the passage which led to the open entranceway away from this other world.
I crawled out into fresh air and billowing winds, then unfurled from all-fours on to two feet and reached up, peering out across the rooftop of the cairn to the west, to where the sun had appeared between layers of cloud, opening pale patches of powder-blue in the sky and lighting darker patches of blue sea in the distance. The wind still blew a gale. I stepped away, along the entranceway towards the east, then ducked back down beneath the protective arc of the cairn and felt the wind fade away. I peered into the damp cracks between the surface stones, seeking shards of pottery, splinters of flint. When none appeared, I sat down against the damp stone and poured a tea, suddenly grateful for the air, the sky and the sun, for the space and light of this world.
For a few moments, I simply took in the scene. I was facing east. On the lip of the horizon, two men appeared striding over the summit of Beinn Langais on the path leading straight for the cairn where I sat. In truth, I was neither prepared for, nor delighted with the thought of returning to the present. But then the notion of that warning notice and my removal of that protective wooden frame returned me to matters immediate. The two men were heading down the hill with evident intent. I glanced to where the frame rested against one of the warning signs, then back to the figures marching my way and wondered if one was none other than George H. Macdonald, Factor for the North Uist Estate. If I moved now to replace the wooden gate to the entranceway, my guilt was beyond doubt. I glanced back. Their pace was impressive. As they closed in, I could see that both wore tweed jackets and sported flat cloth caps. Both were six foot tall if not more. My heart sank. It was George H. Macdonald all right, along with one of his henchmen. I rose from my seat on the passageway to the cairn and prepared to mutter some ill-prepared apology.
‘Is it open?’ the taller figure called out.
The voice that I caught through the buffeting wind rather threw me.
‘Erm, yes,’ I said with a certain hesitation.
‘Excellent,’ the voice replied. ‘Excellent.’
My eyebrows furrowed. I was standing now, stepping unsteadily on the wet stones away from the open entrance. The two men continued towards the entrance. As our paths crossed, I glanced at their attire of worn tweed and realised they were no Factor and henchman. They had reached the entrance which held an ominous darkness. I saw it at last for what it really was: an ancient black tunnel into a world beyond this, to a sacred land of the dead. The two men had fallen to all fours before it.
‘Have you been in?’ one asked.
The accent had a certain clipped quality – the bold, brash confidence told of the English Upper Classes.
‘Erm, yeah,’ I replied.
I started to tell how the wooden protective frame had merely come away from the entrance hole. My stuttering schoolboy explanation was not needed.
‘Do you have a torch?’ one asked.
‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘Do you want to borrow it?’
‘That would be very kind.’
I stepped back towards the cairn and handed over the flashlight.
‘Wonderful.’
They emerged a few moments later. I could hear their voices echoing in the entrance chamber of the cairn well before they reappeared.
‘How would they have shifted all these huge stones?’ the second figure was asking me even before he had reached the light of day once more.
‘Er, I don’t know really,’ I mumbled before I realised it wasn’t really a question directed at me. ‘I, erm …’
‘Rivers and rafts. And using water …’ he replied to his own question. ‘It’s amazing how many ancient sites are near water. Water’s key for moving stone. All the sites on the Nile are on the floodline.’
They walked the pathway east, away from the underworld, as the living had done for eight millennia and more. I placed the wired wooden frame back over the entrance hole before the real Factor arrived. We started to walk back down towards the car park together. The two Englishmen introduced themselves as Barnaby and Bruce. We talked of the ancient sites of the Hebrides. I told them of Cladh Hallan and the mummies.
‘On the Syrian coast there’s an incredibly ancient site where the bodies were placed under the floor of the living,’ said Bruce.
‘Ugarit?’ I asked.
‘Yes, that’s right. Ugarit,’ said Bruce. ‘They had the bodies under the main living space.’
It was close to twenty years since I had been at Ugarit yet now the thought of that site instantly brought back a remembrance of a six-foot long grey snake that had lifted from the grey stones before me. I felt the shadow of a cold shiver.
Bruce was a little taller than Barnaby, a little more dapper too with a neat neckerchief and a rather less torn tweed jacket. His knowledge of ancient sites of the world was soon evident. Barnaby knew the Outer Hebrides sites with an affection built over many years.
‘There’s a sense in which the stones feel like ancestors,’ he said at one point in our conversation.
I asked if he lived here. He didn’t but had been coming to the islands every year since his first visit when a student at St Andrews.
‘Gets into your blood, doesn’t it?’ Barnaby said. ‘Really bites in.’
He told how each year he rented the same house for a fortnight, inviting different friends over to share time and adventures together.
‘Friends have nearly drowned … boats overturned,’ he said, clearly only half in jest.
‘It is such an amazing place here, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Every day is just so intense.’
We reached the car park. I asked if they had seen the slightest sliver of the new moon the night before, as it had risen through a miasma of mauves and maroons at sunset. They hadn’t.
‘I’m afraid the whisky sours had rather taken over by then,’ said Barnaby in comic confession.
We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. I watched the outlines of Bruce and Barnaby strolling off down the road in the dusk, then climbed into the car, slipping out of the wind to a sudden silence as the door closed. I needed a moment. I simply sat for a while watching the open plains of the coast beyond the windscreen then stepped back out into the embrace of the wind, turning back to the pale arc of Barpa Langais on the hillside.
From there, five hundred yards and more away, the cairn lay symmetrical on the landscape. It was hardly believable that it had been built by human hands. I stood and stared then turned back to the present. Before me, on the edge of the car park, was a dark, raised mound of peat turfs, a stack of drying sods, or, in Gaelic, a cruach mhònach, as I later learnt. The symmetry with the stone stack of the cairn on the hillside behind was hard to ignore. A wooden paling stuck out from the turf stack. I leant forward to read what was written in black felt-tip:
H P
A E
R R
R K
Y I
N
S
1
H
7 hours
→
I looked about as the light thickened, wondering. I smelt the smoke of that Donegal peat my old friend John Burke had presented me with a year back – handing over two black blocks of turf from the stash in the boot of his car. The peat before me was still fresh. It would need time drying. I pondered the morality of English appropriation of Scottish peat. A bagful. Ten turfs. Would Harry Perkins mind? I wondered. I thought of Seamus Heaney’s grandfather ‘nicking and slicing neatly’, as the turf was cut from the earth.1 I saw the spade as it struck down into those sacred soils. In the end, I took a golden coin from my pocket, which gleamed in the evening light, and placed it carefully on a turf. Then I covered it with another. And then I took ten turfs, lifting them with due ceremony, tucking them into a bag, then into the boot of the car before muttering words of thanks to Harry Perkins.
Then I drove south along the empty road to my dune home.
Another morning broke. Light flared across the dunes. Wind tore through the grasses. Tomorrow I would be waking for the last time on these sandy soils. Tomorrow a boat was due to arrive soon after dawn which would take me back across the Hebridean Sea from South Uist to the mainland isle of our archipelago. I had one final day at Cladh Hallan.
The night before I had once more read through the pile of archaeological papers on Cladh Hallan and had turned my thoughts back to Bronze Age life here around 1100 BC. I had lain in my tent as the wind and the rain played about outside and heard in horror at midnight the news from the BBC World Service of the beheading of the eighty-one-year-old archaeologist Khalid al Assad at Palmyra, Syria. I had shuddered, actually shuddered, at the news, my body quivering for a second, and sparking the remembrance of a morning many years before when I had risen from my hotel bed well before dawn and stepped outside into the dusty streets of that same antique city of Palmyra and had walked about, past the stone remnants of a shattered civilisation, the colossal wrecks of temples which had once been proudly raised from desert sands and that lined the modern streets. Last night, I had seen again the same snapshot I had witnessed in the dusky pre-dawn light of that distant morning – a simple, horse-drawn, wooden cart that rattled along the street beside me; and I had seen again that glimpse, that glance, as the jalabiya-clad Bedouin driver had flicked his reins and turned his shrouded head to me, as he had looked at me in that half-light of dawn, the only other soul about that morning. Something in that man’s way, something in his mannerisms and his actions, as he had turned, had made me think of my father who had died not a year before. At the time, I had felt an odd sense of helplessness, of utter incomprehension, as I had been drawn by some unfathomable thread to the remembrance of my father by that lone figure on a deserted street in Palmyra. It had seemed in some strange way, as I stood in the stone remnants of that ancient civilisation, as though we two were the last human beings in this world. There, in the street before dawn, I had stopped and had watched the horse-drawn cart and its driver as they had trotted off down the road and had heard the waning echoes of the horse’s hooves as they had faded into the distance, until he was gone and I alone remained in that antique land. And then I too had turned and had walked away, silently stepping from the road to the sand beneath the fallen pillars, the skeletal remains of a temple in whose empty embrace I had cried, shedding tears that fell like raindrops into the dry desert.
I shook the night thoughts from my head and turned to the day. I was due to meet Kate MacDonald, a South Uist-based archaeologist, at the roundhouses at eleven. Over breakfast I reviewed the building list of questions I had for Kate, then spent the morning scanning the wrackline, dreaming now of finding one of those carved, Neolithic stone balls of which some 425 had been found to date; largely across the length of the Scottish mainland and islands with a few examples in Northern England and Ireland. These petrospheres, as they were properly called, dated from the late Neolithic to early Bronze Age. But the fact that really intrigued was that the vast majority were almost exactly the same size – around seventy millimetres in diameter; roughly the size of an orange. Each ball was carved by Stone Age hands from a dark igneous rock at least three thousand years ago and decorated with a variety of ornamentations.
So I scanned the smatterings of rock litter as I sauntered north along the beach towards the golf course at Askernish, stepping once more up through marram grasses and away from the sand to the dune tops and the smooth green slope of a fairway. I was on the tenth tee. I lay back on the soft green grass and stared to the grey skies, listening to oystercatchers calling from below. Some days back when walking this way I had plucked a golf ball from the machair rough. A few of those Neolithic carved stone balls had been found with exactly that same dimpled, golf-ball style of ornamentation. On the beach that day I had then found three small buoys, each a few inches in diameter and each, too, with that distinctive dimpled pattern. Though I wondered as I lay on the tee, the wind whistling above me, if perhaps these round findings – the golf ball, the collective flotsam of buoys – were some form of a sign, I searched the shoreline in vain for a prehistoric stone ball.
Back at the roundhouses, I waited for Kate MacDonald until she appeared around the dunes – a diminutive woman with distinctive, dreadlocked hair and a nose ring. Kate was followed by a black Labrador who lumbered up to me in introduction. Her dog’s name was Holly. Kate had kindly agreed to pop over from Lochboisdale on a lunch break from her consultancy work with Uist Archaeology.
We stood by the circle of the northernmost roundhouse. I offered Kate some coffee. We talked dogs at first. Kate joked how she and Holly were often poking their heads in rabbit holes: Kate for signs of ancient bones and potsherds; Holly for signs of rabbits. I said how dog-walkers were the only people I’d really seen out here.
‘It made me realise they would have had dogs,’ I said. ‘You get warmth from dogs; you get protection, you get friendship. Just as we do now.’
‘There were two buried in one of the houses,’ said Kate.
‘Of course,’ I said turning to the site before us. ‘They were sacrificed, weren’t they?
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘The fact they were sacrificed suggests they were really important rather than the other way round.’
‘Wasn’t there a thought that the ten- to fourteen-year-old girl might also have been sacrificed?’ I said remembering last night’s rereading.
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘It’s possible. It’s hard to tell. The only ones that are definite sacrifices are the dogs. But of course, it’s quite easy to kill someone without leaving a trace on the bones.’
‘Of course,’ I said.
‘They do some things that seem very bizarre like that. It seems odd to us because we’re looking back into a society that’s very different, that’s happy to have bodies buried in the floor. There are things that we do now that will seem really odd in the future. Someone was talking to me about brochs the other day, saying how they were pretty useless. But think of football stadiums. They’re not there for any practical purpose but we still build them.’
‘And football stadiums won’t be around in four thousand years,’ I said. ‘But brochs still are.’
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘And there are loads of little cultural things that we do – like laying out cutlery in a certain way. Little rituals. In a way, they define our society.’
The coffee had already gone cold. We wandered to the middle roundhouse where that ten- to fourteen-year-old had been buried, along with those two sacrificed dogs. I wanted to hear Kate’s thoughts on life out here three thousand years back.
‘I was thinking about how they were flourishing, weren’t they,’ I said a little over enthusiastically.
It was a word I had started to use rather often to describe Bronze Age life on South Uist.
‘The thing here is that you have a really good buffer against starvation,’ said Kate. ‘If your crops fail or if your animals all die, you can get down on the shore and pick winkles and cockles.’
‘Though only ten per cent of their diet was sea food,’ I added.
‘Yeah, but it’s that security,’ said Kate. ‘And that applied here until quite recently, to be honest. Many people here still don’t understand why you’d pay good money for shellfish. It’s seen as poverty food.’
The wind had picked up. Kate’s lunch break was being stretched. But I wanted to check with her one other point that seemed to be coming clearer to me.
‘Is it right that there were some two hundred settlements along the South Uist machair in the Bronze Age?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘It would have been busy around here.’
‘I mean I’ve been trying to do the stats,’ I said. ‘I reckon that means some two thousand people living here: men, women and children. That’s about what there are here now, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ Kate agreed. ‘I reckon so.’
We were right. I checked later and the latest census showed a figure of 1,754 for the population of South Uist, which had actually fallen by sixty-four in the decade since the last survey. Roughly that same number of souls had been living here three thousand years back.
A horrible crunching sound was coming from a few yards away on the sandy path. Kate and I looked over. It was Holly. She was munching the bones of a dead rabbit that I had seen earlier in the day. It had been eviscerated: probably by a Golden Eagle.
‘Holly,’ Kate called through the wind.
She headed over to pull Holly away.
Our time was up. Kate had a heap of paperwork to wade through back in Lochboisdale. We said our goodbyes and I went and sat beside that lone purple orchid. When I rose a few moments later the figures of Kate and Holly were still walking the dune path away to the north. I stood a while and watched them until they stepped over the hillside and were gone.
That final night a gale blew. At dusk, I stood in the howling wind on the exposed hilltop of Beinn a’ Charra. Beside me stood a five-metre-high standing stone.
When I got back to my home in the dunes and sat by the edge of the world a while, the sea spat salty drizzle into my face, driven by the storm winds. The essential point that I had realised in my short time here was that those Bronze Age communities of South Uist before could comfortably deal with this landscape, even with these extremes of weather. They were indeed flourishing here. The word kept ringing in my mind. Those folk of the Bronze Age had forged homes and settlements and lifestyles that had really worked; that had enabled them to keep warm, well fed, and comfortable. They had forged ways of living that allowed them to cope and survive and yet so much more – to live lives well lived. The Bronze Age people of South Uist had developed delicate ways of being, touches of culture that we could only faintly understand today, which indeed the finest minds of our modern archaeologists, scientists and thinkers were only vaguely starting to get an inkling of. They had lived close to the landscape that surrounded them, close to the natural world which they relied on and yet had built into their cultural existence ways of memorialising their loved ones that made our funereal and burial practices seem almost crass and uncaring in comparison.
Of course it had been hard. They were living in a hard world. As Kate MacDonald had said earlier today with perfect understatement, the winters here were tough. They always had been. They still were. The dark and the cold and the driving storm systems that whirled and whipped across the Atlantic and struck these low-lying Hebridean Islands with such brutal natural violence did so in prehistoric times too. And South Uist took the brunt of it all. Yet what the first findings of the work here at Cladh Hallan had undoubtedly started to show was that there existed another side to life here three thousand years back, and especially in the ways in which the lost loved ones were treated by the community, both in their death and burial and in the manner in which they were preserved in the hearts and memories of those who lived on after.
To live on the land.
That was the great division between those Stone Age flint seekers of the Mesolithic who I had been chasing last summer on Tiree and their offspring who would become the Neolithic. It was the Neolithic who had really been the first ones to turn places like this from landscapes to be seasonally enjoyed, to be travelled to in order to gather the foods and materials that would allow survival through those ridiculously tough winters. The Neolithic had forged homes here. Rather than fleeing as the seasons turned – as the sun fell and the days turned darker – the Neolithic had stayed out here on these exposed islands. They had remained. They had forged settlements. They had lifted those first stones to form the first rough fields to drill and sow with wild seed. They had started to turn sites of wilderness into homelands. They had captured and tamed wild animals to form livestock. Those Neolithic folk had become the first farmers in Britain. They had driven stakes into the land and settled and made homes. That was the vital change. That was what had shifted everything, for in doing so they had effectively turned and seen the darkening skies, and had known the severity of the test of winter which they had to survive and had trusted in their ability to do so.
Before those first Neolithic proto-farmers and settlers, life had been seasonal and migratory. I had seen fragments of evidence of that nomadic lifestyle on Tiree – that tanged-point flint arrowhead; the scattering of microliths I had lifted from the beach; the stone detritus of the summer camps cast aside eight, nine, ten thousand years before in solidly Stone Age times. Those lives had been itinerant – travelling the seasons, setting up camp rather than settling the land. There was such a clear contrast to those first farmers of the Neolithic or the metalworkers of the Bronze Age. Those Stone Age people were living lives of movement dictated by the seasons. They would stir and rise and migrate once more as the darkness of the winter months died and the days lightened. They would return in kin groups to travel the lands to favoured sites: where the salmon ran, where the flints lay plentiful on the fresh storm-lines of stone dredged from the ocean floor on to the beaches of distant islands far across the seas.
You would travel first as a child and be taught to read the landscapes, the routes to the summer camps. You would travel in extended family bands, and meet other kin – on the flint beaches, round firesides, while gathering, while hunting. And all the time you would learn the ways to survive. But first you would have to find your way both to the migratory landscapes and then once there, to the places of plenty. There would be mental maps of migratory pathways passed down through the ages. Those early peoples of the Stone Age had to leave signs and markers to mark the seasonal pathways through the landscape. They had to make secure the knowledge of those vital migratory routes both through the maze of seaways and islands, and on land through the labyrinths of dunes and moors and hills and mountaintops. They would have used the natural landscape to find their way but they also raised vast stones as markers to help to guide the way, and in so doing were securing signs for all future generations of kin who would later seek those seasonal pathways. And as they raised those stone markers so too they must have felt a feeling of security, of embedding themselves into the very landscape itself. Surely that was the truth of standing stones. I thought of Pol a’ Charra on the southern tip of South Uist where I had sat and watched those minke whales some days before. Then I thought of the towering monument of Beinn a Charra I had just returned from, not an hour before, whose presence was visible for miles – even in the gloaming light of dusk.
Standing stones were raised as significant sightlines, as markers for Stone Age travellers on the land and seas. Those future Neolithic generations who followed would do more to manipulate the landscape than raise huge stones to mark the ways. They would lift the stones from the land to form the first fields. And with those stones and rocks they would form burial sites which would eventually become the grand, chambered cairns like those at Barpa Langais. And once such palaces of the dead were formed, where lost loved ones were kept to be remembered and memorialised, the hold to that place, to that landscape, would soon become forged not across lifetimes but across generations.
Once you as a people have moved beyond a mode of survival to a way of living that allows you to complete the tasks that you need to complete to survive then the basic essence of life has been successfully secured and something more than mere existence can emerge. If you as an extended family can complete that process of living year in and year out without injury, infection and illness, without being exhausted or going mad or being killed by someone else; without freezing, without starving … then you can start to create ways of thinking about the world. More time can be turned to thoughts on the world, to thoughts on the meaning of life, the meaning of death.
‘Where has our mother, our father, our grandfather, our grandmother, even – God forbid – our child, gone? Where have they gone? And what do we now do with the body that lies still here?’
Those questions need answers. How they are answered forms part of the survival package. As a collective of people you need to get some form of ritualised way of dealing with death or else you don’t survive. That aspect of living – of dealing with the death of loved ones – is one each society must deal with or it will not endure. And here at Cladh Hallan three thousand years ago, the ways in which they were fulfilling that task – with mummification, with preservation by a ritual intricacy way beyond that of our own society – surely tells us something of the complexity of their world and something too of the incredible manner in which they were flourishing on these edges of the British Isles.
I turned my head south to the steering point of the incoming squall. Seawater sprayed my face. I licked my lips and smiled at the taste of salt. I was snug and warm in my layers of clothing. My waterproofs were worn but would at least keep me dry against this smirr. It was August after all. I would turn in soon. For the moment, I was savouring these last few hours of my final night on Uist. There was still some lukewarm tea to be had. I poured a cup and stared out into the darkening storm.