I stare into the fire. Yet this fire is like no ordinary fire. This fire has not been lit to warm or to cook, or to comfort. A brilliant, orange glow radiates from this fire. This is a fire that burns with a heat that will transform, that will melt all laid before it – for in truth, this is not a fire but a furnace. There is a steady intensity to the fire of the furnace that is fierce, frightening. From the mouth of the furnace, a sinuous absinthe-green swirl rises and rests above the flare. I bend low. At eye-level height I can better watch the small green cloud as it morphs and shifts through a subtle spectrum of colour changes: from emerald to jade; then on to a tinge of mossy, turf green; now to a vaporous verdigris. That miasmic, green swirl is strangely mesmerising as it dances in the air above the circle of fire. And then I see that sea-green, pea-green phantom for what it truly is: it is the genie of the furnace.
It is a chill, autumnal Sunday morning. We are gathered in glorious, deepest and darkest Suffolk. At an old smithy in a hidden glade are four fortunate souls who have spent the last few days as apprentices in alchemy. I have stepped into their world, into this outhouse, to witness the ancient ways that they are gradually learning. Each apprentice is keenly focused on their tasks – they hammer and drill with bodies still, with heads fixed on the objects of their attentions. The material burning in the furnace is malachite – a copper ore from which the metal can be leaked out in the heat. Then, when that copper is added to tin, the two combine in the fire to form bronze.
We are here to cast bronze. Yet for the moment, I am still held by the genie who plays above the furnace. In substance, this apparition is a heinous mix of arsenic and other evil elements that leave a cruel lick on the tip of your tongue and the back of your teeth. I am here at the invitation of Will Lord. He oversees all and guides me away from the fire, out into the fresh air beyond.
‘You’ll be able to taste it by the end of the day,’ he says. ‘A horrid metal tang on your tongue.’
I had rung Will the week before.
‘I’ve stepped back into the Stone Age,’ he had declared. ‘The Bronze Age was killing me.’
At first, I had thought that he was joking. He wasn’t. The arsenic released from the smelting of malachite to produce copper really does kill – it would have gradually poisoned Bronze Age metalworkers, too, as they proceeded in their alchemic ways. And so within minutes of talking to Will, I was already looking back on what I knew of Bronze Age Britain with new insight. I thought of Cladh Hallan and remembered the small round outhouse that sat just to the east of the middle roundhouse. And now I saw it for what it was – a sheltered workspace in which to forge bronze. Crucially, it was separate from the main roundhouse that held the family. The poisonous genie could be contained.
Outside the shed, Will leads me to another basket of fire in which lies a mould. When the time is right, he will lift the urn of molten copper and tin and pour the bronze alloy into that mould. We step back into the shed and stare down to the molten bronze in the furnace. The surface of the metal has now become clear.
‘The first mirror,’ Will says.
If I braved the heat I would be able to see my own face. But the heat is fierce even from standing height. I peer over into the glare and see the swirling vortex of the bronze, the slick sheen of the surface.
Simon is Will’s able assistant at bronze-casting. He tells me more of the science of the process. Tin makes up around ten per cent of the bronze and has a melting point of 232°C. Copper, on the other hand, which makes up the other ninety-odd per cent, has a melting point of 1084°C. When the two metals are mixed, the melting point drops to around 950°C.
‘But you want them to flow,’ says Simon.
He is missing a front tooth. He also has an infectious enthusiasm, a bright friendly face and an impish way. His long pointy beard is neatly matched by a pointy leather hat.
‘You see, you need to overheat to get a good flow rate,’ Simon explains. ‘So you heat to 1200°C or so.’
The gas-jet furnace is rather more modern than a Bronze Age metalworker would have had. They would have needed a couple of hours of using a bag bellows to reach such temperatures.
We both look down once more into the molten mire. It feels like staring into the heart of a volcano. In a way, it is. Simon ventures an iron rod into the furnace to draw off some slag from the surface. I look down again. The bronze mirror is perfectly clean.
It is time. One of the other apprentices steps forward. He is a local man called Peter who I had been chatting to earlier. From a coat pocket, he had produced a double-sided and socketed Late Bronze Age axe. He had placed it in my hand. His brother had found it in a field in Germany while out metal detecting. Now Peter is primed and ready to cast his own Bronze axe.
The noisy buzz of the electric tools is stilled. There is a wonderful silence to the moment as the molten bronze is lifted from the furnace and gently poured into the mould. As it flows from the beaker it really does look like liquid sunlight. Then the mould is taken outside and placed in the gentler heat of that secondary furnace, the basket of fire, where the bronze can gradually harden into the axe-shaped form of the cast.
There is the chance to step back a while. Will leads me to the quiet of a wooden shed he has transformed to a museum of flint. He is a kind man who has already generously given his time. Now he talks me through the ways of flint from the earliest tools of the earliest days of the Palaeolithic through to the most intricate and incredible flint blades of the late Bronze Age. The collection of flint implements are displayed on shelves around the hut. Some are finds. Many have been made by Will.
Will’s father is the famed John Lord who moved out to the lands of East Anglia in the 1960s to become the guardian of Grimes Graves – the most significant flint mine in ancient Britain. John Lord had then taught himself the ways of flint-knapping until he was a world expert in stone technology. He had virtually invented experimental archaeology before the term had ever been employed. John now understood more about prehistoric flint use in Britain than any one – except perhaps for his son Will. John and his wife Val had brought up Will in a way that was unique. Will had been raised in the grounds of Grimes Graves. As a child, Will had the run of the wide heath plains of Norfolk’s Brecklands and the forests of Thetford. He had the freedom of the flint mines as his playground. And he had learnt the ways of prehistoric peoples from a young age, as though they were part of the present.
A few weeks earlier, I had walked those scarred plains of Grimes Graves with my daughters Eva and Molly on the last day of the half-term holiday. Even on a day of drizzle and grey cloud, they’d both wanted to run about the hillocks of the ancient mine-workings excited as young rabbits. We’d climbed down the ladder into the dark gloom of the underground and shared an intriguing delight in doing so, in staring into the tunnels dug from early Neolithic times to mine the flint seams in industrial quantities. We had happily crawled and scrambled about in the half-light below ground, getting dirtied with streaks of mud and chalk in an odd mimicry of those distant Stone Age miners. And then an hour or so later, after returning to the surface of the earth and October daylight and strolling over the in-filled shafts and pits of the five-thousand-year-old flint mines seeking flint while being steadily soaked by a Norfolk form of smirr, Molly and Eva had pleaded to be allowed to step back down the ladder into the darkness. I could hardly have refused.
That was the world Will had grown up in. And now he happily spent his time sharing the knowledge he had gained of life in ancient Britain. From his home here in the wilds of Suffolk, Will ran a variety of prehistoric courses: flint-knapping, tanning, longbow and arrow making workshops. He even offered a ‘family prehistoric survival day’ with a ‘prehistoric lunch included’. Yet it seemed I might well be at the final bronze-casting workshop.
We walked back over to the heat of the basket of fire. It was time to open the cast that hopefully held Peter’s bronze axe. Will was experimenting once more – this time with the material of the cast.
‘In the past, I’ve used clay,’ he said. ‘And really fine sand with a little bit of dung.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘And for this one I’ve used grog,’ Will said.
I had to ask.
‘What’s grog?’
‘It’s clay that’s been fired and then crushed quite fine.’
He pointed to the variety in the clay particles that made up the cast. The process of experimentation was essential to practical learning. I caught a glimpse of Will there beside me, bearded and long-haired, wearing his leather jerkin and standing before the charcoal fire. It suddenly wasn’t too hard to peer back in time to Bronze Age ways. Not when you had Will testing different materials for casting axeheads.
‘So what was the thinking behind using this crushed grog?’ I asked.
‘The trouble with the sand is that it starts to turn into glass,’ Will said. ‘And so instead of the moulds being stable, they start to turn to toffee.’
‘And this is the first time you’ve tried this way?
‘This is the first time with the grog,’ said Will. ‘And the outcome has been substantially more secure.’
‘Wow,’ I said. ‘So in a way you’re mimicking what they would have done. Trying different ways, as any practitioner would do.’
‘Yeah,’ agreed Will.
I looked back at Will and realised that here was someone who really did have an insight into the ways of prehistory. He really did. Not by digging about in the sites of the past but by being actively engaged with living by prehistoric ways. Will was also the only person in Britain who had a generation of prior prehistoric knowledge passed on to him by his father. Will was raised prehistoric. He was also very skilled at calmly analysing the process he was undertaking.
‘For a long time we’ve been smelting the malachite and getting a variety of outcomes. We’ve had ball bearings and these wiggly ingots which were really clear copper and then this weekend we’ve had these copper outcomes that look a bit like a biscuit.’
He retrieved a rusty piece of fragment from the worktop. It did indeed look rather like a biscuit. It wasn’t really the outcome you wanted from smelting malachite. But Will was already working on a new technique.
‘What you really need is carbon particles to bond to the malachite particles and separate the copper. So we’ve seen a system which is pretty much a lazy-day’s work: you dig a little hole in the ground. You put your malachite in, you put your charcoal in and then you cover it over to reduce the air getting in there. So it’s a bit like making charcoal. You give it a couple of hours, gently bellowing and take it out and you’ve got a decent ingot.’
Will looked at the copper biscuit in his hand.
‘Because to get that after a whole load of successes …’
He paused a moment.
‘But then you start to think about other questions. Like, what are those white bits?
I looked closer at the mesh.
‘Yeah, what are they?’
‘Dunno,’ said Will.
He thought a moment.
‘They could be bits of a leg bone actually. There was a bit of bone about when we restarted the fire from embers. So it could be bits of bone particles.’
Simon was in the process of lifting the lid on the outdoor furnace. Will stepped closer and with tongs extracted the cast. Peter closed in with a hammer in his hand. He steadily worked the grog casing off in fractures and fragments until the remainder was the rough outline of an axehead. There was a soft blue tinge to the object. Peter took it away to be worked on.
I asked Will if he ever got the chance to talk with other metalworkers.
‘Like blacksmiths?’ I suggested.
He had but only after having spent a long time working on his own, experimenting and revising practices and processes along the way.
There couldn’t have been that many people who he could talk to.
‘The problem is that the bronze-casters who have established a reputation, a name for themselves – not all of them but certainly some – they defend their knowledge very well. They like to be regarded as magicians.’
‘Like alchemists,’ I said.
‘They don’t like what I’m doing much because I’m letting the secrets out of the bag. A lot of what I do is a skilled-based scenario. So you can’t flint-knap just because you’ve been told how to. But with this, all I need to do is show you how to do it and you can go away and do it.’
‘So do you think that even in Bronze Age times, they would have kept their secrets? Perhaps passed them through their children?’ I asked.
Will thought a moment. He still held the copper fragment in his hand.
‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’
It was the only answer. How on earth were we to know what Bronze Age people did in terms of passing down their bronze-casting skills?
On a battered and ancient workmate bench, Peter was chiselling away at the molten grog still clinging to the copper.
‘You getting there?’ I asked.
He paused and looked up.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘I think so.’
He wasn’t wrong. In his hand he now held what was distinctly and definitively a Bronze axehead, and not one tarnished with a familiar verdigris patina like the one he had shown me earlier that day. This one had a fresh brilliance. It glowed with the fiery light of the sun.
‘That’s amazing,’ I said.
It really was.
And he had smelted the copper and cast the bronze himself – with a little sprinkling of knowledge from Will Lord.
There was someone else I needed to meet. Like Will Lord, he was born and brought up in prehistoric worlds. I also knew that like Will Lord he would be able to guide me towards a greater understanding of what it really was like to be around in ancient Britain. So I headed west. I headed to a place I hadn’t been to for an age.
The fleeing darkness gradually revealed it was another dank and dismal day. A misty Wessex drizzle pervaded. Yet somehow it felt like the perfect weather for my visit. I walked south along a long, straight track. Sunrise was still some moments away. A nebulous greyness covered the land through which the white chalk of the track shone clean and clear. I walked on as far as the great cursus and then halted. This vast enclosure had been dug out of the landscape by red deer antler picks in the Early Neolithic sometime around 3500 BC. It ran for 1.7 miles on a roughly west-to-east axis. And I was stood at the midway point. Exactly what it was for, no one really knew any more. I gazed along its faint outline and then turned back to the south.
A familiar cluster of stone stood before me. From half a mile away, Stonehenge rose on the horizon. In the strange half-light of dawn, the stones merged with the morning mist that lifted from the fields. I stood and watched as the stones emerged from the shadows of the fleeing night. There was a sense that these stones were somehow both solid and ethereal, as though even their very presence on the landscape was ephemeral. I walked on, closer and closer, drawn to the stones across the unkempt fallow field as light seeped into the day through the cloud cover. The land dropped and then rose once more as I approached and the stones of Stonehenge seemed suddenly huge and impressive.
I went no further. A fence barred me from doing so. A security guard in a lime-green hi-vis jacket patrolled the stones. He glanced over towards me, the only other soul around. I looked back but said nothing. Instead, I picked flints from the fresh brown soil of molehills. I crouched low against the ground and saw a string of shrunken Bronze Age burial mounds and thought of those at Harpley Common in Norfolk that I had seen when resting prone on the Peddars Way. I wandered to the east, towards the solitary molar monument of the Heel Stone where the true entrance to Stonehenge lay. The ancient processional avenue ran down the slope of the field to the east and away, off to the south-east and the site of the henge at West Amesbury.
The darkness faded. I poured a cup of Thermos tea. Then I turned to the thin book I had tucked in my pocket. It was Aubrey Burl’s Prehistoric Stone Circles. For the best part of twenty years I had taken this book with me on various ventures around Britain. The sunlight-faded cover illustration was of Swinside Stone Circle in Cumbria. Swinside was one of the early stone circles dating from the Middle to Late Neolithic (c. 3370 to 2670 BC). It had been one of my first, too. Two years ago, on a journey around the Outer Hebrides, I had visited Callanish on the Isle of Lewis. It was one of the late stone circles from the Early to Middle Bronze Age (c. 1975 to 1200 BC). Callanish had been the last of the great stone circles of Britain for me to visit. In between there had been many days spent wandering moorlands and heaths seeking lesser-known circles of stone covered with bracken and bramble. I thought of the day I had finally seen the spectacle of the Stones of Stenness, all those hundreds of miles away north in the Orkney Islands, perched on a peninsula in a sea of lochs. It had been grey that day, too.
I turned to the pages on Stonehenge and reread Aubrey Burl’s words once again as rain started to fall.
Visual effect was everything. Despite the monument’s appearance of stability it was an architectural disaster. To ensure that they were of the desired height some stones had foundations that were dangerously insecure. The result was an impressive but ramshackle edifice.
Before their erection these monstrous sarcens were treated just as carpenters would have dealt with wood – smoothed, chamfered, rebated, mortise-and-tenon jointed – to imitate the ring-beams of the vanished mortuary house. It is this that sets Stonehenge apart. It was the accomplishment of woodworkers who chose to build in lasting stone. The result was the intriguing and awesome ring that looms in shattered magnificence today, a megalithic triumph.1
That it certainly was.
I drank my tea and then walked back north. All the way I felt the presence of Stonehenge behind me. I glanced back over my shoulders at intervals and saw snapshots of the monument as it fell away towards the horizon.
It was only later that I was able to refer to Aubrey Burl’s more magisterial tome The Stone Circles of the British Isles. It was a far weightier book – certainly not a field guide. I had left it in my room at Sarum College, where I had stayed the night before, overlooking Salisbury Cathedral. Burl referred to Britain’s most famous prehistoric site as a ‘ravaged colossus’. It was a monument that had been ‘wrecked in antiquity’ and that now ‘rests like a cage of sand-scoured ribs on the shores of eternity’.2 As I read those words after returning from the stones that morning, I wondered vaguely if Burl had actually arranged the book’s layout – his words on Stonehenge appeared on page 303, matching the number of the A-road which passed so close to the actual stones.
I was due at Salisbury Museum. The museum was housed in another old college on the cathedral square. Somewhere within was the man I had come to meet. As I stepped though the medieval entranceway, it was Louise Tunnard who first met me. Within what seemed seconds, Louise was talking about Thomas Hardy and Jude the Obscure. Her blue eyes really did sparkle as she told me how both of Hardy’s sisters had been here, in this very building, for their teacher training, as indeed Sue Bridehead had been, some years later.
‘Jude, of course, was working on the cathedral,’ she said.
Louise turned and led me away through another grand wooden door. It opened to reveal the outdoors where a dank drizzle was falling. I followed her out into the rain.
‘And that’s the route which Sue took as she fled,’ said Louise. ‘Escaping over the backfields …’
She pointed across the green lawn of the stone-walled quadrant before us, towards the open iron gates on the far side. It was as though Sue had only left recently. We both gazed at the gateway. I took a photo that showed the rain in splats of grey splotches. I was ready to return inside to the dry. Louise smiled.
‘There would have been water meadows then,’ she said and swept an arm out, as though waving Sue Bridehead off.
‘We’re on the confluence of five rivers, you see,’ she looked at me and smiled again. ‘They’ve been drained now.’
We stepped back inside and talked a few moments more together on all manner of matters Wessex. It really was the most remarkable introduction. Louise’s passion for Hardy was impressive.
‘Hardy’s a pagan writer really,’ I heard myself saying. ‘Everything goes wrong in the town. “Stick to the fields, to the villages”, he seems to be saying.’
Then I saw the meteorite.
Thoughts of Hardy vanished. The meteorite sat on a plinth in a glass case. It was actually rather hard to miss, though somehow I had managed to as I had followed Louise on the footsteps of Sue out and away into the water meadows.
‘That’s incredible,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ agreed Louise.
It was dark brown in colour, roughly round in shape and close to two feet or so across though missing a sizeable section. Its surface was fractured by fissures that rather made it look like a great, dried ball of mud. Except it weighed in at ninety-two kilograms. I thought instantly of the Wold Newton meteorite sat in another glass case a long way away. The rock before me was called the Lake House meteorite and had landed in Britain some 30,000 years ago. It actually illustrated far better the ties between prehistory and shooting stars than the Wold Newton stone. The Lake House meteorite might even have been deliberately placed in a burial site by prehistoric hands in Stone Age or Bronze Age times. Edward Duke, a nineteenth-century antiquarian owner of Lake House, was credited with unearthing the meteorite from one of the burial mounds he had excavated nearby.
‘And this is called The Milky Way Corridor,’ Louise said, sweeping her hands along the gallery.
Yet I hadn’t come to Salisbury to see shooting stars. The man I had come to see was in the next room. Louise led me away. We passed a painting.
‘Is that a Turner?’ I asked.
It was.
‘We’ve got five Turners,’ she said with a smile.
For the moment there was no time even for Turners. We walked on into a wide gallery full of fresh bright, light, passing a variety of artefacts all dug from local soils.
‘Here he is,’ announced Louise. ‘The Amesbury Archer.’
And there he was indeed. Laid out in mock burial before me, a skeletal spray of bones surrounded by his collection of grave goods. He was magnificent, even four thousand years after death.
‘Wow,’ I said.
He had been found not far from Stonehenge in May 2002, buried in a wooden chamber beneath a low mound sometime around 2300 BC. He had died aged somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five years old. And there was just so much about him that was significant – both his life and death.
For a start there was that list of grave goods: five Beaker pots, eighteen arrowheads, two bracers (archers’ wristguards), four boar’s tusks, 122 flint tools, three copper knives, a pair of gold hair ornaments and a cushion stone used as an anvil for working copper or gold.
The gold and copper objects were the oldest known in Britain. Yet the facts about him as a living person were also fascinating. For a start there was that isotopic analysis of his teeth, which suggested he was born in the Alps. He also had a left kneecap missing, which meant he would have walked with a pronounced limp.
‘And look at that hole in his mandible,’ said Louise.
We leant over the glass, peering down over him at the pronounced puncture visible in his jawbone.
‘They think it was from an abscess,’ she added.
‘Ow!’ I said.
We were joined by Owain Hughes, Salisbury museum’s Learning Officer, who pointed me in the direction of a small screen showing video footage of the Amesbury Archer’s excavation. An archaeologist stood neck-high in the dig hole surrounded at ground level by a series of what looked like ice-cream containers filled with earth. It took a moment to recognise that the dig was taking place at night. The light was being provided by a car’s headlights.
‘A Peugeot 205,’ Owain said.
There was a delightfully amateur feel to the dig – a sense of night-hawking to the scene.
The Amesbury Archer really was an amazing figure. His was not only one of the earliest Beaker burial graves in Britain; he perfectly represented those strong links to continental Europe that existed in the first era of metalworking. He was one of the Beaker people of Britain – named after their pottery but known for their cultural sophistication across Europe. These Beaker People had been forging new ways of working with gold and copper but also sharing common practices with funereal rites. Their pan-European scale and apparent ability to travel long distances in a lifetime made you re-imagine ways of living in that pre-Bronze Age world. Small groups of these Beaker people, like the Amesbury Archer, were responsible for bringing metallurgy into Britain and Ireland. The copper in his grave goods had been analysed some years back and shown to have come from continental Europe rather than the far closer source mined on Ross Island in Ireland. Of course, he might well have simply traded for the copper but the finding at least showed the extent of European links in that early metalworking period.3
I knelt down and looked in at the spread of the grave goods gathered around the skeleton before me. There was that incredible, inch-long gold hair tress. Beside it was a beautifully fine barbed-and-tanged arrowhead. It wasn’t alone. There were seventeen others buried alongside. He was an archer, after all. Though he had died in an era defined by the first use of copper and gold, the quantities of flint surrounding his skeleton served as an important reminder of the significance of stone throughout prehistory. Even as copper (and later bronze, and even iron) were discovered and worked, flint remained a crucial material. I thought of Will Lord’s comments about stepping back into the Stone Age. Even as those fancy new metalworking skills had emerged in Britain somewhere around 2500 BC, even as they had spread and developed and been refined over the following centuries, there had always been a place for skilled flint-knapping.
‘What of his companion?’ I asked.
There was the matter of his so-called ‘companion’ who had been unearthed a few metres away, later that same year. No one seemed sure. He was certainly not on show, but then his grave goods had been rather less spectacular. Yet the companion was intriguing in that he was biologically related to the Amesbury Archer. He had died aged between twenty and twenty-five years old and was a generation or two younger than the Amesbury Archer but whether son or grandson or nephew hadn’t been determined.4
‘Think he’s in storage,’ said Owain.
I’d been fixed on the notion of generations ever since using them on South Uist to count back through prehistoric time. Seeing things in generations made sense. There was also the notion of knowledge being passed down the generations, a process surely only more pronounced in the ancient world. You could imagine the Amesbury Archer or any other of those early metalworkers passing on their newly emergent skills. It was exactly as with those alchemic secrets that Will Lord had talked about a few weeks back. The magical elements of the forger would only have been told to a chosen few – told to the next in the family line.
It was a model of Stonehenge that finally drew me away from the Amesbury Archer. The henge was two foot across. The stones were all upright and in place, positioned as had been intended in the final arrangement of the monument around 2200 BC. The central setting of four trilithons that made up the Sarcen Horseshoe sat surrounded by the circle of outer stones. It looked as I had seen it earlier that morning at dawn, only somewhat tidied up. There was an accompanying exhibition concerning the archaeological dig begun in 1919 at the instigation of the Ministry of Works and led by Colonel William Hawley. One of Hawley’s notebooks was on display, opened to a page titled ‘Aubrey Hole No. 29’ and dated to 14 September 1921. I leant in to read the copperplate handwriting of Hawley’s meticulous records.
We had been joined by another figure in the gallery, who I later learnt was called Anthony. He was smartly dressed in a suit and was a volunteer guide to the Wessex Gallery. A small screen was showing a black-and-white film. It was of Colonel Hawley’s dig at Stonehenge in 1920. Together, we stood and watched the remarkable footage.
‘That’s amazing,’ I said.
Men in a variety of hats and suits clambered about the monument. One smoked a pipe. Another, dressed in plus fours and tweeds, was measuring one of the fallen stones.
‘That’s my grandfather,’ said Anthony.
I looked from him back to the grainy, black-and-white film.
‘The one with the moustache,’ he said smiling.
‘What?’ I said.
It was news to Louise as well. She’d never realised that Anthony was Anthony Hawley, grandson to Colonel Hawley who now stepped about the stones of Stonehenge with his handlebar moustache, just as he had done a hundred years before.
I turned back to Anthony and shook his hand. Here was that generational footprint once more.
It was nearly time to leave but there was just time enough to spend a moment with one of those Turners. On the wall beside me was a watercolour dated 1827 and simply titled Stonehenge. The painting was one later published as part of Turner’s Picturesque Views in England and Wales. Stonehenge was lit up in a dramatic thunderstorm. In the foreground a dog howls. A shepherd lies beside him, apparently struck down by a lightning bolt. It had all been rather calmer that morning.
I left the museum in a flurry of goodbyes. Louise kindly showed me back to the grand wooden entrance door, leading me back along The Milky Way Corridor where Sue Bridehead had fled for the fields. Yet it was only as I stepped out into the sunlight and the sight of Salisbury cathedral gloriously pale before me against a blue sky that I saw there really was something of Sue in Louise. They shared that same indomitable vivacity of spirit.
It was much later when I finally reached home that I was forced to return to the matter of Turner and Stonehenge. I had searched my bookcases for my copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles in order to reread that end scene where Tess wanders into the stone circle of Stonehenge and when I did finally find the book I was struck by the extraordinary cover image on my old Penguin edition, which had clearly been painted by Turner. The scene showed Stonehenge as the sun was setting. The foreground was of the fields and footpaths in a dusky light, above which was a sky of spreading clouds lit with the colours of sunset: in between, stood the stones. Yet Turner had painted the stones as though they were not solid but see-through. And by making those huge stone statues translucent such that the hills on the horizon beyond could be made out through their insubstantial shapes, Turner had painted them with that same strangely ephemeral feel which I had seen with my own eyes that very morning. It was a stunning effect. Turner had given the huge stones of the monument a delicate, diaphanous nature. I stared closer and could make out a solitary figure in the foreground who was framed against one of the pathways and I realised too that the aspect, the view or perspective, of Stonehenge sketched by Turner was the very same one that I had seen as I had walked east across that dewy, fallow field in the dawn light.
The preface to the book stated that the cover showed a detail from Stonehenge by J. M. W. Turner and that the painting was in a private collection. The information did little to solve the mystery. It was clearly a different Stonehenge from the one I had seen in Salisbury museum. I emailed Louise to thank her for her guidance and asked if she knew anything of the second Turner. Then I turned to the final pages of the book.
Tess and Angel Clare were on the run through the wilds of Wessex. They had stepped through Melchester (Salisbury) at midnight then ‘followed the turnpike-road’ for some miles before it ‘plunged across an open plain’. The last fragment of moonlight had been soon lost behind cloud. They had ventured on though ‘all around was open loneliness and black solitude’ then stepped into what Hardy called a ‘pavilion of the night’.
‘It is Stonehenge!’ said Clare
‘The heathen temple, you mean?’
‘Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the d’Urbervilles!’
…
Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered from the wind by a pillar. Owing to the action of the sun during the preceding day the stone was warm and dry, in comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass around which had damped her skirts and shoes.
…
‘One of my mother’s people was a shepherd hereabouts, now I think of it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was a heathen. So now I am at home.’5
I left Tess to sleep on the stone of Stonehenge. It was time for me to head to bed, too.
Things seemed to be coming together. I knew that my time was nearly up. The thing with obsessing about anything is that deep down in some distant fragment of your mind you know when that world has reached its apogee. It may be that the knowledge surfaces only in a retrospective sense yet once that moment is passed there follows a natural process of procession where the object of that obsession can gradually fade and some form of normality may steadily return. It is as with the cycle of the sun or the moon or the turning of the stars. We stand spellbound before the spectacle of the setting sun on the shortest day of the year. Then we can turn back to our daily lives knowing that each day will hold a touch more sunlight than the one before.
There were two more people that I wanted to talk to about ancient Britain. Both were based in London. The first was Mike Parker Pearson, the archaeologist who had led the work at Cladh Hallan for years. Mike was based in the archaeology unit of University College London in the glorious setting of Gordon Square. His office was suitably book-lined. He sat behind a desk covered in more books and scattered with papers. We shook hands. I said that Chris Standish, the Cornish gold analyst, sent his best.
‘Chris told me you’ve been busy with the bluestones of Stonehenge,’ I said.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mike with a smile. ‘Many projects.’
He was back in the confines of his office for the day yet you could tell he was happiest outside, digging about and musing on the ways of ancient worlds. I could have gladly sat and heard of Mike’s latest work on Stonehenge, but I was really there to ask about the mummies of Cladh Hallan.
‘So,’ I said with some sense of drama. ‘I guess there’s really just one question: have you found evidence of mummification across Bronze Age Britain?’
Mike laughed; stretched back in his chair.
‘Yes, we have,’ he stated firmly.
So it was true. Mummification wasn’t merely a ritual confined to a small settlement on the South Uist coast. Our Bronze Age ancestors across Britain had been routinely preserving and mummifying their dead. It was genuinely thrilling to hear.
Mike gave a little more detail. One of his colleagues, Tom Booth, had gone back and looked at all kinds of skeletons, from all kinds of periods.
‘He found out it’s just the Bronze Age ones that show this lack of post-mortem deterioration and decay.’
Mike seemed quite calm about the matter but then he had known about it for a while now. It was news to me.
‘That’s a pretty dramatic finding, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ agreed Mike. ‘Absolutely.’
‘I mean the South Uist mummies were pretty exciting…’
‘They were indeed pretty exciting. We just had the perfect context for finding it there. Beautiful machair sand made of shell so bone is immaculately preserved.’
I asked the obvious question.
‘So where does Bronze Age archaeology go now?’
‘Well, every now and then I give a talk to a conference in Europe and of course the key thing is a question of getting them to do this for the whole of Europe.’
Mike sipped his coffee.
‘The thing we know about the British Bronze Age is that it’s very much plugged in to what’s happening on the other side of the channel. In the Neolithic it’s a different question – they’re much more isolationist. But in the Bronze Age, everyone is part of this massive metal trade – there’s all this gold coming out of Cornwall but it’s not just gold, it’s the copper and especially the tin. I don’t know if Chris told you about the isotopic analysis of tin…’
He hadn’t. I’d been too fixated with gold.
‘We’re seeing Cornish tin going right round Europe.’
My sense of Bronze Age Britain was shifting fast. Seeing the Amesbury Archer and now talking to Mike made me see that period of prehistoric time for what it was: a well-connected and thriving European world with Britain and British metal reserves playing a fundamental role. Then there was Ireland. I said how I’d stood on the North Cornish coast the week before with John Fanshawe and stared out across the waters to where Ireland lay; how we had traced a rough route for the Bronze Age seafarers. Mike nodded.
‘Well, we know about their boats as well, thanks to the Dover boat and others,’ he agreed. ‘It’s a properly maritime society. So, of course, they’re going to be in contact with Ireland and Europe.’
It was exciting. It really was. I clasped the coffee cup in my hands to get a better grip on all this. The reality of the Bronze Age was expanding before me. There was a growing truth to the notion of pairs and small groups of Beaker people travelling the pathways of land and sea, not just through Britain and Ireland, but across continental Europe. That scenario of me and Paul walking some ancient pathway across southern Britain as two Bronze Age beaker folk had some justification. They brought the emergent gold and copper metalworking skills that would lead to the Bronze Age but where had the rituals of mummification come from?
While I had the chance I wanted to ask more about those Cladh Hallan composite bodies. They still seemed utterly extraordinary to our modern eyes.
We started to talk mummies and specifically of that ‘female’ composite mummy with the torso of a woman, a male head and those incisors placed in each hand. Mike explained the scientific probability model: how there was a two-thirds likelihood the skull was at least seventy years older than the body. I started to think in generations again.
‘So are they saying “This is grandfather’s head”?’ I asked.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Mike. ‘It could be. To misquote Lady Bracknell “One would be carelessness; two looks like it’s deliberate”.’
I laughed.
‘It certainly seems to be deliberate. It’s not a matter of sending the stupid boy to the mummy shed and he comes back with the wrong bit…’
We both laughed.
‘Because there was that kneecap that was found outside the roundhouses at Cladh Hallan,’ I said. ‘Red herring, you think?’
‘No, not at all,’ said Mike. ‘What’s important about it is that it shows there is breaking up of the bodies before they are actually posited in the ground. Why they take that kneecap and put it in that pit, I just don’t know.’
‘It’s not practical?’ I suggested.
‘No. There’s no practical sense in doing that,’ said Mike. ‘But for us it was a hugely important lead because it showed us they were breaking up these bodies long after death and yet they were still in articulation. It was a contradiction. It’s the nature of the bone break. If you break old bone that’s lost its collagen, it’s like breaking a biscuit. But new bone you get a green fracture.’
‘So you can tell from that.’
‘Yes. You can tell from that. For it to be in articulation, as we found it, the skeleton had to have been held together by soft tissue and yet the bone was telling us it was very old.’
Even though it had been told many times before, as Mike retold the unveiling of the truth about those Cladh Hallan mummies, there was a tangible tension to the tale.
‘That must have quite been a moment,’ I said.
‘Of course, we didn’t realise until we were back in the lab.’
You could picture the scene: a gathering of the archaeologists in their lab coats and a dawning realisation enveloping them as to the dramatic truth they were uncovering. Yet those bodies hadn’t given up all their secrets. Though Mike and his team had managed to collect enough DNA to tell that the head was from a separate individual from the body, and from that of the right leg, that ancient DNA sample wasn’t sufficient to say whether those three individuals were related. But the science of DNA was improving.
‘One day we will do that,’ said Mike. ‘It’s on the back burner.’
One day. That was how our knowledge of prehistory evolved. One day someone discovered something else utterly remarkable that shifted accepted scientific thinking and then gradually that knowledge found its way out to the wider world. Chris Standish’s analysis of prehistoric gold had been one such day. That moment in Mike’s lab was another.
The revelation of the composite nature of that skeleton had caused a seismic, a paradigmatic, shift in the study of Bronze Age Britain. One day in the future, when there was funding and time, the individual bodies that made up those mummies of Cladh Hallan might be proved to be kith or kin. Perhaps some Bronze Age composite skeletons would be shown to be a kin construct – made from a family united across generations. And perhaps other skeletal figures will be shown to be built from the great and the good of the community – a society united in death.
As I walked out of the Institute of Archaeology and across Gordon Square, I was suddenly struck with a thought. It was to do with kneecaps. Mike had said how he was at a loss to explain the kneecap being taken from the female skeleton on South Uist and buried in a separate pit. And then I remembered that the Amesbury Archer was also missing a kneecap. Part of me wanted to head back to Mike’s office. But he was busy enough without me bothering him. And anyway, I was due at the British Museum. I would just have to let the matter of the kneecaps go for the moment. They would have to sit with the teeth. I’d asked Mike about those incisors placed in each hand of the composite female skeleton – the left in the left hand, the right in the right. He confessed he had never seen it anywhere else.
There were still so many unknown pieces to the puzzle.
As I headed into the British Museum, I was still thinking of mummies. I stepped across the threshold and into the imperial grandeur of the entranceway. The wide, sweeping stone staircase on my left would lead me up to the rooms of ancient Egypt. I now knew that those mummies of Egypt laid out in the galleries above me had British counterparts. Britain, too, now officially had its own era of mummification.
Yet I hadn’t come to see mummies. I had come to see Neil Wilkin, who was curator of the European Bronze Age collection. He met me in the wide-open space of the Great Hall. I could still remember when this universe had been the British Library and I had stepped about the desks beneath that beautiful, blue-globed roof seeking the seats where Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx had once sat. I had spent a good deal of my twenties in the various rooms of the British Museum. Based on his job title I had rather expected Neil to be some aged and estranged figure, lost to the ways of the past. He wasn’t. He was young and engaging and he immediately elicited my utter delight by leading me through a labyrinth of hidden alleyways prohibited to the public. I was suddenly backstage in the British Museum.
We popped out of the maze at the staff canteen.
‘Coffee or tea?’ Neil asked.
I reckoned I’d need a coffee. I did. We sat and talked of ancient wonders. Neil handed me a colour image of the Ringlemere and the Rillaton Cup in all their golden glory. Side by side you could see their similarities. They really were twins.
‘The Queen’s got it,’ I said pointing to the Rillaton Cup.
‘Yes. It’s in the Royal Collection,’ said Neil. ‘And we’ve got the Ringlemere Cup upstairs that was found by a metal detectorist.’
I had seen the cup when it had first arrived at the British Museum some years back. Neil pointed out the same pressed gold patterning in both – the same patterning used on the Mold Cape.
‘So there’s this tradition of embossing gold in this way,’ explained Neil.
‘And they all date from the same period?’ I said.
‘From around 2200 BC,’ said Neil. ‘Right through to about 1700 BC. The cape is at the end of that spectrum. And what we tend to think of is that these come earlier…’
Then he produced a photo of the museum’s four sun discs. It was a lovely theatrical moment.
‘So these and the lunulae found are very similar in that they’re about cutting sheets of gold and then decorating them.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And they’re worn as some sort of solar symbolism?’
‘Could well be,’ agreed Neil.
He talked of the work of Mary Cahill whose ideas on sun discs and their mimicry of the various patterns of the sun on water I had so marvelled at.
‘She’s made a pretty convincing case over the years.’
He turned back to the picture of the sun discs.
‘And what I particularly like is the way it’s decorated with all the Beaker motifs.’
I had never really noticed that – a commonality in the patterning.
‘So what you’ve got is Beaker pots and people coming from the continent at a time of enormous changes. Like metal. These people were discovering it. The Amesbury Archer captures it beautifully. So all these technologies are sweeping into Britain but they’re not going into Ireland. So in Ireland, they don’t practise the standard type of Beaker burial with the pots. They do their own thing. And one of the things they do, is to make these objects in gold …’
Neil pointed back to the sun discs.
‘But look,’ he said and pointed to the cross-hatched pattern on one of the discs. ‘A nod to the Beaker culture, to those ideas.’
He clearly loved the sun discs, too.
We talked over our coffees of that ratio of Irish to British sun discs and how more sun discs were now being found in Britain thanks to metal detecting, how the Irish finds that had largely come from cutting peat seemed to be drying up.
‘But even though the numbers of sun discs in Britain might be going up,’ said Neil. ‘It’s still the case that the best examples are from Ireland.’
Neil talked of how there was good evidence of copper travelling from its source at Ross Island in Ireland up into Scotland. Then we talked of gold – how the era known as the Copper Period or ‘Chalcolithic’ could just as easily be seen as the gold period, and how, so soon afterwards, there followed the beginnings of the Bronze Age.
‘The Amesbury Archer has those very fine copper daggers and those gold ornaments,’ said Neil. ‘But no Bronze.’
I was juggling various dates in my head.
Neil put me straight. The Amesbury Archer was around 2300 BC. The Bronze Age was normally seen to start around 2200 BC.
‘So one hundred years or so later you start to see tin and bronze…’
‘Which is only four generations,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s nothing,’
Neil told of the dagger grave finds from Rameldry in Fife and the work of Neil Burridge from Cornwall who replicated those Early Bronze Age weapons. I mentioned Will Lord.
‘Son of John Lord,’ Neil said with due reverence.
He told of watching John Lord flint-knapping as a young student of archaeology some years back. Then he showed a jet necklace from the Rameldry site with clear similarities to the patterning on the sun discs. Then he told of a body of a man discovered there who dated from 2200 to 2000 BC.
‘He was found with jet buttons from Whitby and one of them was inlaid with tin …’
‘Tin? I said. ‘From Fife?’
‘Inlaid with tin and found in Fife. And he has another button which was made of lizardite. They think the source of that is probably Cornwall.’
My head was spinning again. It wasn’t merely the coffee. Neil’s words had had their own effect. I was gazing back into a slim window of prehistoric time when the Beaker people were bringing new ways and technologies into Britain. There was the wonder of those golden sun discs and lunulae. Gold and copper working was soon to be followed by the forging of another metal form: Bronze. And after that, nothing would be the same again.
It had been another mesmerising day. I was ready to head home. And then Neil told me of something else from prehistory that was even more wondrous.
‘It’s called the Nebra Sky Disc,’ he said.
He showed me a picture.
‘It’s a copper-alloy bronze disc with gold inlays. The gold is from Cornwall, though the disc was deposited near Halle in central Germany.’
We were huddled conspiratorially in a corner of the canteen. It felt I was being told a long-lost secret. Around us people chatted and drank their drinks. Cutlery clattered in the kitchen nearby.
I leaned closer to examine the colour photocopy. The disc was utterly stunning. It was composed of a blue, copper alloy face that had been inlayed with gold to represent the stars and the moon in various phases. I went silent.
‘What it shows is the night sky and the sun and the crescent moon,’ said Neil.
His excitement was evident. I was simply stunned.
‘But it’s been modified. It’s had multiple lives. The theory is that it allows you to balance the solar and lunar calendars so you can know when to insert leap years in order to keep your calendars in sync.’
I was still gazing at the photocopy.
‘Seven stars,’ I said finally.
On the disc was a depiction of the seven stars of the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters.
The Nebra Sky Disc was far larger than any of the gold sun discs.
‘It’s dinner-plate size,’ said Neil.
It also dated from later than the sun discs – probably around 1600 BC. And it was far more complex.
‘It’s an ancient astronomical instrument,’ said Neil. ‘If you buy into it …’
Some moments later, I stumbled out of the British Museum rather dazed and confused. I had managed a few words of thanks and farewell to Neil Wilkin but now wandered on to the streets of Bloomsbury with my mind befuddled, full with musings on another ancient wondering.
My journeys into prehistory so far had taken me the length and breadth of Britain. I had dug ever deeper into the minds and beliefs of those souls who lived upon these lands thousands of years before us and it had become ever more evident that to understand ancient British ways and practices, you had to see these lands in relation to Europe. Eight thousand years ago, Doggerland had physically linked Britain to the continent. Then Britain had become separated. In the Neolithic Age, while there had certainly been a sense of cultural practices being shared across these islands, as the spread of stone circles and the development of agriculture illustrated, Britain had been more isolated then, more inward looking. By the Bronze Age, travel had extended beyond voyages around the islands of the British and Irish archipelago. People were now voyaging back and forth to continental Europe.
I thought of the Amesbury Archer, with his gold hair tresses and exquisite Beaker pottery, and his knowledge of the alchemic arts of metalworking, who had found his way from the heights of the Alps to his final resting place in the soils of Wiltshire. Metal trading had wrought such a significant shift to ancient ways of being. I heard Will Lord’s line on how the Bronze Age was killing him as it echoed in my head. Then I heard Mike Parker Pearson’s words from earlier that day: Bronze Age mummification like that discovered at Cladh Hallan was likely to be found across Europe. Bronze Age burial rites were apparently Pan-European. And then I thought again of the Nebra Sky Disc that had been unearthed in central Germany, but whose gold had come from Cornwall. I saw a map of prehistoric Britain and Europe before me with a series of black lines criss-crossing and steadily enmeshing the land, which signified the journeys made in distant times, the movements of highly skilled people, of gold and of tin, of the finest flint arrowheads, of Bronze axes and swords, of jet and of jewellery … and of astronomical instruments.
I shook my head. I stopped. I stood while London whirled about me. Once more, I pictured the Nebra Sky Disc with its face of copper and gold, the pattern of the moon, the sun, the Pleiades. I had to see it in the flesh. I would follow the trail of that ancient Cornish gold to Halle in central Germany. I would venture over the seas, beyond the prehistoric worlds of Britain to those of mainland Europe. I glanced back to the stone façade of the British Museum, then turned and walked away.