Читать книгу Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain - James Canton, James Canton - Страница 8
Оглавлениеan illegible stone …
that is where we start.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’
Four Quartets
I had fallen under the spell of a stone. It was in May half-term that I found a window from teaching. To find that stone I would venture to the north-east of Scotland and so I headed north until I reached the town of Insch.
Yet I had no map. When I asked where I might find one, the two women in the chemist’s looked to each other. They could have been twins. Both had short grey hair and glasses. Their faces were round and friendly. Had I tried the DIY store? I had. What about the post office? I had tried that, too. They smiled.
‘Mmm,’ they both said.
Then one spoke.
‘What about the garden centre just down the road. They might have one.’
‘Ay, they might,’ echoed the other.
The day was grey. I walked to the edge of the town where a new housing estate was rising from the earth and then for two miles more along the B992, skipping from the tarmac of the road to the grassy bank each minute or so as a car whooshed past. A buzzard circled above. In a copse of spruce trees an incessant mewing told of young buzzard chicks. I continued to dodge the sporadic traffic and soon reached the A96 with the choice to walk north to Inverness or south, back to Aberdeen. Instead, I turned down the slip road to the Kellockbank Country Emporium. The ladies from the chemist were right. By the bars of chocolate and racks of magazines, lay just what I wanted: Ordnance Survey Explorer maps 420 and 421.
There I stood. I had travelled some five hundred miles to this windswept place in Northern Scotland, beside an A-road some twenty miles north-east of Aberdeen. I was there to see a stone – a standing stone; a stone that held a story. The only problem was that there was a locked gate between me and the stone and I didn’t have a key.
The tale of that stone had been lodged for years, tucked away. Every once in a while the knowledge would work its way to the surface of my thoughts. Then, I would find a way to tell the tale:
‘There is a stone in Scotland …’ the story would begin.
About a year ago, I had found myself in the Rare Books reading room of the British Library in London, sometime in the afternoon of a warm day in May, and rather drifting away from the research I was meant to be undertaking on an explorer of the Arabian desert. Thoughts of that stone had arrived unexpectedly in my mind. I had ordered up some books on what I remembered was called the Newton Stone.
The facts were simple: the Newton Stone was a block of granite, or rather blue gneiss, something over six feet from top to toe on which there are carved two inscriptions. One is in Ogham script – a Celtic writing system that appears as a series of scratch-like marks torn into the side of the stone. A second, more prominent, script is engraved into the face of the stone consisting of six roughly horizontal lines of writing. Each line consists of some form of exotic lettering from an ancient language: a series of swirls, curves and curlicues carved into the surface of this mass of granite. What those letters say remains a mystery. That text has yet to be deciphered.
It seemed unbelievable that there could be a piece of written script sat on British soil that no one in the world could understand. There, in that hub of all known knowledge – in London, in the British Library – I gazed incredulous that those simple lines of script before me held a message which all our centuries of collective study had been unable to fathom.
A week on, I sat at home in my study. The Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland website simply stated that:
The ogam-inscribed stone (The ‘Newton Stone’) is of blue gneiss, 2.03 m x 0.5 m, and bears at the top six horizontal lines of characters and an ogam-inscription down the left angle and lower front of the stone.
No indication of mystery there. A second monument that sits alongside the Newton Stone was described as a Pictish symbol stone. The stones were in the garden of Newton House, some twenty miles north-west of Aberdeen. I rang Historic Scotland.
‘We can’t give out owner details,’ said the woman from the scheduling department.
She suggested I try calling the post office in the nearest village. I rang Old Rayne Post Office and elderly lady with a soft Scottish accent answered.
‘I’m afraid we’re not a post office any more,’ she said.
She suggested I rang the Old School House. I did. Another softly spoken voice told me to try Old Rayne Community Association.
‘They’ll know.’
I found their number and left a message on their answer machine. It wasn’t going well.
Then I received an email from Sally Foster. She was an archaeologist at the University of Aberdeen who I had contacted asking for advice on the Newton Stone.
Dear James
I’m afraid that I don’t know how to contact the owners, other than to write to the occupiers of the house. Historic Scotland’s scheduling team will have full details because the monument is scheduled.
I’m dashing for a train now and will return to your question about best sources for latest thinking when I get back next week.
All the best for now.
Sally
She remained good to her word. A week later, a second email offered a list of reading and an intriguing lead:
My colleague Professor David Dumville has some new but unpublished ideas about one of the Newton stones, so I am copying him into this.
I emailed Professor Dumville immediately. Then I turned back to Newton House. Surely it was possible to find a phone number. I rang directory enquiries. A young Indian voice answered.
‘What is the name you are seeking, please?’
‘Newton House, please.’
‘Business or residential?’
‘Erm … residential.’
‘And the name?’
I hesitated; confessed I knew no more.
‘I need information to find the number,’ she stated.
She was fast, efficient: New World. I pictured her in a call centre in Bangalore. I was slow, blithering: Old World. I thanked her and hung up.
Two weeks on, there was still no reply from Professor Dumville. I emailed him again and then rang the archaeology department at Aberdeen.
‘He’ll be back next week,’ a voice informed me.
The following week I tried again. No answer. I tried a second email address. An online search had come up with a phone number for what seemed a fishery based at Newton House. The phone rang for an age. Finally, a woman answered. I said I was trying to visit the Newton Stone and wanted to speak to the owners of Newton House.
‘The big house,’ she said. ‘I don’t know the name of the people.’
She sounded nervous.
‘They’re not local,’ she added.
I asked how I might get to see the stone.
‘The house is just off the A96,’ she said. ‘Ask at the security gate for them to let you in.’
Now, I stood at the gate. Here was the moment of truth. I rang the buzzer and listened intently beneath the swoosh of cars on the main road a few feet away. There was no answer. I pressed another button on the keypad and there was a faint ringing tone like a distant telephone. It stopped.
There was a pause. A silence that lasted too long. Then nothing.
‘Hello?’ I asked.
I pressed the button again. The ringing tone started up again.
‘Hello,’ a voice said cheerfully.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said. ‘I spoke to a lady a while ago about coming to see the Newton Stone.’
There was another silence.
‘Hello?’ I said again.
A long tone rang out through the speaker. The gate shifted, squeaked rustily.
‘Come in,’ said the woman’s voice.
Magically, the gate began to slowly open before me. I stepped forward.
The gate opened on to a path, which wound down a soft incline into another world that seemed as though a kind of paradise. Birdsong rang out. A flycatcher flitted about in the still bare outer branches of a beech tree. The path led to the edge of a stream. On the far bank the skeletal remains of last year’s giant hogweed stood tall among this year’s wide young fronds – their broken frames fragile, delicate and leaning rather a-kilter. A beech hedge ran to my right. A line of broad-leafed limes ran beside the riverbank. I crossed a bridge over the river, pausing inevitably over the water before proceeding. An avenue opened before me, formed from the leaves, the branches of beech trees, which produced a distant focal point to which I slowly headed.
Newton House stood beautifully positioned before me. It was Georgian square, stately and solid beside a pea-shingle driveway. A small, rectangular sign stated ‘Newton Stones’ and pointed past the house to a smaller pathway of pale gravel, edged with sections of beech hedge that wove into woodland. Deep green rhododendron bushes bunched out into the spaces left by Douglas fir that reached high above – their bare lower trunks wonderfully sinewed. Over the ground lay a copper brush of last year’s beech leaves that soon transformed to a carpet of pink campion. The path ended.
There were two standing stones. Each stood two metres tall; each was topped with a wig of soft, green moss. Posies of yellow primrose had been planted about the stones. To the side, there was a white, metal-framed bench and a table in the form of a slab of slate resting on foot-high sections of beech trunk. For a moment I did not know quite what to do. Here before me was the Newton Stone. Here was the strange script.
I stepped closer, reached out a hand and touched the granite with my forefinger, stroked the edge of the stone as though it were some wild animal that needed greeting, gentle reassurance I was friend not foe. There was nothing of the coldness to the touch that I had anticipated.
I stepped away. The stone was the colour of cloud. In places, the surface of the stone was patched of whiter, paler shades formed by some long Latin-named lichen. The Ogham script was easily made out: a series of engraved lines, each two, three inches long; each close to horizontal and running parallel down the edge of the stone. The script appeared as a line of scars, a tribal marking that ran the length of one side of the stone. To the trained eye, these lines in the stone were far less controversial. They now made sense; they could be read. On the front of the stone was the undeciphered writing. I stared. There seemed a sinuous sense to much of the script. The letters looked as though they flowed together naturally enough and yet here before me were words that the greatest minds could not fathom, that not the wisest archaeologists or philologists, the most esteemed professors of linguistics, could make head nor tail of. There was the fylfot, the mark in the centre of the engraving: a swastika by any other name. Yet that symbol meant something so much more sinister to our modern eyes. To pre-twentieth-century eyes, the pattern was one formed by four Greek symbols: four capital Gamma signs placed together – a gammadion.
I peered at the first line of script. The initial letter looked like a lopsided C. Then an I. Then two Fs? I stopped. I had done all this before to photographs of the script. I leaned my head to the side a little. Did the script run from left to right or from right to left? I reached forward, traced each letter with my finger, then leaned my head closer, starring into the fissures of the carving.
Between the two stones, secured into the ground was a metal plaque. I brushed the bosky detritus of beech leaves and twigs away to reveal the following words:
The enigmatic carved stones are not in their original position. The symbol stone bearing a double-disc and a serpent and Z-rod is Pictish. The other stone bears Oghams – a Celtic alphabet along its side and an inscription in a different alphabet on its face. Readings of these two inscriptions are a subject of controversy.
This monument is protected as a monument of national importance under the AM Acts of 1913–53.
– Secretary of State for Scotland
On the second stone, far easier to make out, were two distinctive symbol markings: the snaking pattern of a serpent-figure, and above the double circles of a second, stranger sign.
I walked away and sat on the metal bench.
It was a beautiful setting. Mixed woodland. Beech, Douglas fir. Bluebells. Birdsong. Whitethroat and chaffinch calling. I sat and ate my lunch. There was something gloriously reassuring in that quotidian task of eating, of stepping away from the solemn presence of that standing stone a few feet before me and those illegible six lines carved across its chest. I listened to the birdsong, glanced about me at this picnic spot and then remembered: it was a folly; nothing more than an imagined site, a constructed landscape: a glade in the wood – the ancient stones framed by a beech hedge; the primula; the bench and the slate table. I laughed out loud at the ease with which a few accoutrements can create a sense of solemnity. I was sitting in a Victorian grotto.
For this was not the original site of the Newton Stone. The stone had been discovered by shepherds back in 1803 half a mile or so south on the side of a hill overlooking Shevock Burn. The stone had been brought here in 1837 and placed in the present position in 1873 as the perfect Victorian garden ornament – an ancient monument with unexplained inscriptions. Not that there weren’t learned antiquarian gentlemen already offering their theories. I had trawled the British Library. Only sixty years after the Newton Stone was unearthed there was already excited speculation. Writing in the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Alexander Thomson of Banchory noted with a certain evident pride how:
It is provoking to have an inscription in our own country of unquestionable genuineness and antiquity, which up to this time, seems to have baffled all attempts to decipher it.
That was in 1863. Conjecture flourished. The eminent ‘Dr Mill of Cambridge, one of the most profound oriental scholars of the day’ saw the inscription as ‘in the old Phoenician character and language’.
I took a bite of my sandwich and looked back to those six lines of inscription then rose and returned to the stone, touched again the rough edges of that first letter, the lopsided C. The same questions swirled. Who had made these words? What did they say? Who were they carved for? Who was meant to read them?
Even to my ill-tutored eye there seemed something distinctly Oriental in the swirls and whirls of the lettering. The Phoenician theory was one that had held for a good while. L. A. Waddell was a Victorian antiquarian and linguist whose elaborately entitled work The Phoenician origin of Britons, Scots and Anglo-Saxons: Discovered by Phoenician and Sumerian Inscriptions in Britain, by pre-Roman Briton Coins and a mass of new History had first been published in 1924. Waddell claimed not only to have deciphered and translated the Newton Stone script – which he dated to 400 BC – but saw the monument as evidence of Phoenician colonists who were the ancestors of the ancient Britons.
I rather liked the notion of Phoenicians reaching the north of Scotland on one of their expeditionary trading missions and their decision to stay, to settle here. It was a fanciful one, of course. I mused a moment on Waddell’s theory, sat there beside the stone, and imagined a young Phoenician traveller who falls in love with a local lass. He will stay, he declares. He cannot leave. Time passes. He prospers, grows old. He has spent a lifetime here. He prepares for his final journey, the one to the undiscovered country. He commands a stonemason to carve a message into one of the vast standing stones. He remembers pieces, fragments of his native language.
It was time I moved on. I packed up the picnic and placed my hand on the stone. It was an odd gesture, I thought later, and yet I did so automatically all the same, as though touching the shoulder of a friend in farewell. The pale gravel pathway continued on through gladed woodland. The map had shown a track running down from the grounds of Newton House, from what were referred to as ‘Sculptured Stones’, away south through open fields to further woodland, running directly to the original site of the stone. Strangely, the map also indicated the track would pass a mausoleum within the grounds.
It was while on the trail of the Newton Stone, tucked away in the recesses of the British Library, that I had discovered John Buchan’s The Watcher by the Threshold. 1 The work was a collection of stories first published in 1902 and all set in Scotland. In a dedication to his friend Stair Agnew Gillon, Buchan stated:
It is of the back-world of Scotland that I write, the land behind the mist and over the seven bens, a place hard of access for the foot-passenger but easy for the maker of stories. Meantime, to you, who have chosen the better part, I wish many bright days by hill and loch in the summers to come.
J. B.
R.M.S. Briton, at sea
September 1901
It was the first of the stories – ‘No-Man’s Land’ – that most intrigued. Buchan’s tale tells the sad fate of a young Oxford academic, an archaeologist called Mr Graves, who is holidaying in his Scottish homeland. Graves is entranced by the Picts:
They had troubled me in all my studies, a sort of blank wall to put an end to speculation. We knew nothing of them save certain strange names which men called Pictish, the names of those hills in front of me – the Muneraw, the Yirnie, the Calmarton. They were the corpus vile for learned experiment; but heaven alone knew what dark abyss of savagery once yawned in the midst of this desert.
Graves tells of his own journey into the heart of this landscape. He meets an old shepherd and his wife who talk of lost lambs, of sheep found dead with a hole in their throats. Graves laughs at mention of the Brownie – those mythical, half-forgotten beings; shrunken, ancient men who were said to still live in the wildest spaces of the moors. He heads out for a place called the Scarts of the Muneraw:
… in the hollow trough of mist before me, where things could still be half discerned, there appeared a figure. It was little and squat and dark; naked, apparently, but so rough with hair that it wore the appearance of a skin-covered being.
Graves has met the Brownie – those remnants of the still-surviving Picts. He flees in terror but is chased, bundled to the ground and knocked unconscious.
I had paused my reading to check up on the Picts. They were a people of north and eastern Scotland dating from pre-Roman times until the eleventh century or so when they merged with the Gaels. These were Buchan’s Brownies. Then I had rung Professor Dumville’s phone number again.
‘The number you have dialled has not been recognised. Please check and try again.’
I had been expecting a Scottish voice to answer. Instead the recording was oddly clipped – the Standard English of an imperial English voice from a century ago – in fact, a voice rather well suited to a figure like Buchan’s Oxford academic Mr Graves. Professor Dumville seemed to have vanished from all possible communication. I rang the main university switchboard. The operator tried the number. The same imperial English voice answered.
‘Yeah, that’s very strange,’ she agreed in a Scottish tone. ‘I’ll report it to the engineers.’
In the meantime, she put me through to the Department of Archaeology’s general office. I left another message then returned to ‘No-Man’s Land’.
Graves wakes to find himself ‘in a great dark place with a glow of dull firelight in the middle’. He gathers his courage and speaks in dimly recalled Gaelic. A tribal elder from the back of the cave stumbles forward: ‘He was like some foul grey badger, his red eyes sightless, and his hands trembling on a stump of bog oak.’ The old man speaks. Graves is spellbound:
For a little an insatiable curiosity, the ardour of the scholar, prevailed. I forgot the horror of the place, and thought only of the fact that here before me was the greatest find that scholarship had ever made.
Graves hears of the survival of the Picts – of girls stolen from the lowlands, of ‘bestial murders in lonely cottages’. Then he escapes. He flies from the hill cavern and from Scotland, back to the cloisters of St Chad’s, Oxford where he burns all books, all references to the moorlands. But, of course, Graves is tortured by the knowledge he now holds. Reluctantly, he returns to the Muneraw and finds himself once more in that hidden hillside where now a young local woman is being prepared for sacrifice. Graves fires on these strange ancient relics of men and flees with their captive. A final struggle on the edge of a ravine sees one of the remaining Picts fall ‘headlong into the impenetrable darkness’. Graves is badly injured; dazed, but still alive.
There the narrative breaks. The last chapter of ‘No-Man’s Land’ is told by an unnamed editor. Graves’ words were written before he died of heart failure. An obituary notice in The Times is quoted which remembers the great potential Graves showed as an archaeologist, though tempered with the caveat that:
He was led into fantastic speculations; and when he found himself unable to convince his colleagues, he gradually retired into himself, and lived practically a hermit’s life till his death. His career, thus broken short, is a sad instance of the fascination which the recondite and the quack can exercise even over men of approved ability.
I stepped away from the stones yet was loathe to leave. In the woodland, the extraordinary song of a tree pipit reverberated bold and fluid as a Highland stream, rattling and ranting over the low cover of creeping ivy and floods of pink campion.
The track left the trees and followed the line of the River Kellock to a sheep field that had been fenced off. I stepped gingerly over, scattering sheep up the hillside towards the incongruous and faintly unnerving sounds of traffic coming from the nearby A96. I held close to the Kellock. A farm track carved by tractor wheels ran beside the riverbank, which was smothered with the triffid-like leaves of hogweed. I glanced at the map where the track marks ran straight to the original site of the stone. Before me was more barbed wire. Beyond, through a copse of trees, I could make out a building of some sort. I followed the farm track, down to the flood plain of the river. The stones had been described as being in a plantation near the Shevock toll-bar. This was the raised triangle of land I now stood before. I looked about. Three crows flew by. Sheep stared. I tried to picture the stones earthfast on the embankment above. South ran the valley of the River Shevock; north rose the dark Hill of Rothmaise. This was no place to linger. I felt it. Something was hurrying me away. I was standing on someone else’s land. The enclosed copse with the smallholding felt full of shadows. I looked back to the map and traced the snaking, red line of the A96. I had circled in pencil the stone circle on Candle Hill past Old Rayne. I turned back to the land. Barbed-wire fencing surrounded. I walked on heedless, away from the copse until the Shevock blocked my path, then lurched ungainly over a section of fencing and clambered up towards the road.
Past Pitmachie, I crossed the bridge over the Shevock and wove into the village of Old Rayne, up past the market cross where a line of schoolchildren snaked downhill as I went up, climbing the inclines to Candle Hill where a starling greeted my arrival from the rooftop of an abandoned farm shed. I sat on one of the fallen outliers of the stone circle. The clouds of earlier were clearing. A breeze blew. There was blue sky to the north over Gartly Moor and the Hill of Foudland. I gazed back and could make out that triangular embankment of raised land, the original site of the stone.
The belief that the Newton Stone had been carved in that strange script as some form of memorial was one that had held strong since the modern unearthing at the start of the nineteenth century. There was a logic in seeing a funereal nature to the engraving; that the stone had been a gravestone and the words an epitaph. Certainly, that was what I had assumed. In a paper published in 1882, the Earl of Southesk – the writer offered no other name – had noted that when ‘trenching’ of the Shevock area had taken place around 1,837 human bones had been found ‘a few yards’ from the original site of the Newton Stone. On the sleeper train up to Aberdeen, with notions of the Newton Stone and its enigmatic engraving playing along to the motion of the tracks, I had tucked down to sleep and begun to imagine that I was indeed one of the dead and was in fact lying in a sarcophagus of some sort, starting on that journey to the next world, the narrow bunk bed and the low roof helping to frame my fanciful thoughts. I placed my most valuable possessions about me, in the soft edges of the upper bunk, as though they were some form of modern grave goods – items that I would need in my next life: iPod, mobile phone, torch, glasses, and wallet.
When I stepped from the stone circle on Candle Hill two wagtails mobbed me, fluttering about my head. The open road ran south down the hill. Two goldfinches flew alongside, rested a while on a fence wire as the sun broke out from behind cloud, their black and red striped hoops reminding me of coral snakes. At Strathorn Farm, an old boy sat high in a tractor, slowly raised a hand and reversed. A heap of metal detritus was piled about the farm sheds in that way some old farmers have of simply dumping unwanted goods all out in the open: a lawn mower; a Flymo with fading 1970s orange; bits of metal pipes twisted to tortuous angles; a rusting washing machine; discarded gas canisters. A collection of waste, all weathering slowly away, seeping back to their residual minerals, metals. I thought too of the sense that though I now walked this ancient roadway boldly towards three Pictish stones planted somewhere over the wooded horizon, that I too in time would slowly weather back to my residual parts, until my calcareous deposits too would leach and litter the land.
I wandered on towards the Elphinstone estate. Two oystercatchers stood upon red-tinged clods. A yellowhammer called from a phone wire. Down a hawthorn-lined lane in the estate lands, a miasma of St Mark’s flies filled the air such that I was forced to walk along through a cloud of long, shiny, black bodies, each one dangling dark legs that hung as though paralysed from the fly’s torso. The religiosity in naming these creatures after St Mark supposedly comes from their emergence close to the saint’s day of 25 April, and yet the manner in which each fly flew with wings wide and pendulous legs dangling reminded of a shrunken dark cross, a crucifix. I pictured St Mark being dragged about the streets of Alexandria, a rope tied about his neck, his black-robes hanging dirty about his lifeless form, and wondered if this image wasn’t the inspiration for the beatification of these flies by Carl Linnaeus when he had named them Bibio marci in his tenth edition of the Systema Naturae back in 1758.
The flies vanished. I stepped back into woodland where the bare pine carpet was littered with tiny, bright green posies that were bunches of new growth snipped from the higher branches of the pines by the flocks of finches and that now lay like votive offerings – minute nosegays or scattered sea anemones lost in the woods. Each was perfectly soft to the touch, the young needles in gentle clumps, the severed attachment turning brown in the air. I picked several from the floor, some truly no bigger than an agate stone, smelt each one, and put them into my shirt pocket. When I found them later that day they had already lost their soft lustre.
By Logie Elphinstone House I found the three symbol stones. The setting was stunningly elegiac. I sat on the bare earth, sheltered under a canopy of elephantine-limbed beech trees, surrounded with sprays of bluebells interspersed with the pale heads of albino-white variants and the dying embers of daffodils. A single red tulip burnt crimson like a dying sun. In the peace of that space I massaged my aching feet and watched two tree creepers flit from one huge beech trunk to the moss and lichen cover of another. On the stones there were those strange symbols that told the archaeologists they were Pictish. Each was half the size of the Newton Stone. They had been found in 1812 when the nearby Moor of Carden was planted. Later that century, they had been placed with due reverence in this setting. A line of shrunken tombstones had been added. These stone lozenges, each perhaps nine inches across and a foot and half tall, each bore the name of faithful pets – dogs, I assumed.
| Wee White | Lady | ||
| 1919 | 1918 | ||
| 1929 | 1926 |
Fitting with the notion of a place of the dead, the sense naturally emerged that beneath each of the three larger Pictish symbol stones there lay too the body of some brave and loyal being. These stones had various lifetimes, various roles not only for separate generations but for separate eras of human existence on this land, for distinct and different peoples. In the short time since they had been prised from the peat in 1812, these three stones had served as sections of wall in the plantation boundary and then later as some form of mock burial markers in an Edwardian pet cemetery. I wondered how long they had lain upon the Moor of Carden. Had they been carved there or elsewhere? With these wondrous whirls and circles, these sceptre lines so straight, these crescent curves of a moon, the symbols were mesmerising. I thought back to the Newton Stone, to the turns and curls of the script that I had travelled all these miles to see. How many times had the Newton Stone been moved about these lands? How many hands had sat and touched that hard stone and prepared to etch into its dark surface their own lines, the messages of their peoples?
These stones were reused across time. Perhaps these stones were picked out as they had stood as the chief standing stones in the stone circles that ringed the hilltops of the lands, those Candle Hills where fires burnt furiously on sacral days and nights. The Newton Stone had first been raised from the soil for its shape, its size, its standing. Then many, many generations later, the stone had been selected again, to be shifted, brought down a hillside to begin a new existence: the rebirthing of the Newton Stone as a surface for scripture; in time a palimpsest to three forms of script, three formal writing systems, each carved across the body of the stone. Here was the journey from an existence of preliterate sacred significance to becoming a literary landscape, an inscribed monument. Beside those three Pictish stones, I lay back against the soil, closed my eyes to the fractured light of the beech leaf canopy, and stretched my bare feet out into the cold, cooling leaves of bluebells. I thought of the hands that carved those lines, sought Buchan’s strange shrunken men.
I returned to Insch along the B9002. A steady line of passing cars told of commuters back from Aberdeen. At the modern ruins of the Archaeolink Prehistory Park weeds rose from an empty car park and a sign in the smart, new, glass-fronted bunker building told the site had been abandoned due to lack of funding. I paused and looked north across the railway line to where my map told of further sites: another Candle Hill rose beside a series of fine black dots marked Stone Circle and an outlying single dot labelled Standing Stone. More vast stone markers hauled and framed into the landscape by peoples long forgotten. I had already passed a sign to the Maiden Stone back on the turning to Garioch. Yet none of these neighbouring stones held that same cursive script as the Newton Stone.
I walked on. On a bridge over the railway line I stared west and suddenly noticed that in the sky a series of inky black streams of cloud now rested over the land like vast dark sheets or veils formed of gossamer thin threads that seemed to waver in the air. I had never seen anything like them before. The clouds – for these dark waves could be nothing but – appeared to be formed from translucent silk shrouds that were falling gently from the sky. The single, dark body of a crow flew beneath while beyond the sky was pale blue with banks of foaming white cloud like seahorses rising from the waves of an incoming Atlantic storm. I found myself transfixed by these strange cloths of cloud which were certainly made more dramatic that afternoon as they lay above and seemed to mimic the flowing motion of the hills below and where in the distance I could clearly make out the Gothic ruins of Dunnideer Castle, the remains of a thirteenth-century fort that sat on the highest hillside overlooking Insch and consisted of what appeared to be a single triumphal arch, a window of light framed by stone – an ancient solitary dolmen.
When I returned to the Commercial Hotel in Insch, I climbed the three flights of unstable stairs to my rooftop room. I lay on the bed and when I woke after a short sleep it was to find that soot-fingered dusk was finally falling on the day. Through the skylight in the bathroom it looked as though the world was on fire. I opened the window in the roof and gazed south towards the Garioch Hills where it seemed an inferno was burning beyond the still green hillsides and as if the flaming embers of those furious fires were reaching up to the sky, for the undersides of the clouds blazed with unholy colour, blushed as they were with an incredibly unnatural and bloody hue; deep shades of fiery reds, incarnadine and darkening with every second that I stood and gazed.
The following day I was due to meet Sally Foster in Aberdeen. She had assured me the mysterious Professor Dumville would be there too. Yet there were still sites around Insch to see. As I packed, I juggled the options. I would march to the Picardy Stone – another classic Pictish symbol stone two miles or so north. The map was splayed on the bed. The neighbouring hillside was labelled as another Candle Hill topped with a stone circle: if there was time I would nip up the Hill of Dunnideer, get a close up of that strange Gothic arch.
Past the edges of Insch, the road north rose steadily, flat and empty. I walked at marching pace. There were the remains of another stone circle on the hillside west. I headed on. The road fell into a dell where birdsong blew over me from a sheltered glade soft as cherry blossom. I did not halt but strode on down a perfect avenue of beech trees which reminded me of the passageway towards Newton House the day before and which, even in the clear light of that morning, held a strangely sinister sense, an oddly tangible touch of malevolence that I could only trace to a feeling induced by the emptiness of the road, the overarching, enclosing nature of the beech trees as they framed the way ahead, funnelling me towards a distant vanishing point. I passed a sign pointing to the Leys of Largie. The Picardy Stone appeared in the edge of a green field between two beech trunks, coloured the same tone of grey as the trees. I stumbled over the stile. The stone had been encaged. I stepped into its enclosure, touched its shoulder. There were some of those same Pictish symbols carved on the body of the stone: a serpentine shape; two elaborate circles or discoid figures; and the outline of what looked like a hand mirror. An information board for Historic Scotland stated:
Welcome to the Picardy Symbol Stone
A Place of Burial
Beneath this Pictish symbol stone are the remains of a small burial cairn,
probably erected 1,300–1,500 years ago. An empty grave-shaped pit was
found under one side of it.
On the grey stone stile, I balanced a cup of Thermos tea. A still had descended. The winds had died. I glanced up towards the heights of another Candle Hill, then over to the Hill of Dunnideer. There would be no time to climb either. The Picardy Stone was within view of both. Was that significant? The Newton Stone – even at its earlier setting where it was found in 1804 – was on low ground. It could be seen from the high points but was sited where people actually lived. You wouldn’t live on the hilltops. You might head there for special occasions. Yet the symbol stones and the Newton Stones were on the low ground. They were placed for daily viewing. You didn’t bury the dead on the high ground. You went up there on specific, special occasions. To speak to the Gods. To celebrate and to appease.
I touched the Picardy Stone a final time, stepped over the stile down to the road. What of those Pictish symbols? I thought of a carved, wooden figure I had at home that my daughter Eva had loved to hold when she was only a toddler and which still rested on her bookshelves. It was a Buddhist statue I had bought from a street trader in north-eastern India many years before of a man sat cross-legged, in the lotus position, meditating. In his hand he held a hand mirror to see the reflection of his soul. That mirror and the symbol on the stone seemed remarkably similar. I walked on, strolling now back down the avenue of beech trees. So what was I saying? That there were Buddhist links to the Picts? I was heading down the same road as those Victorian antiquarians of the past who had seen Phoenician in the Newton Stone script, who had traced an Eastern ancestry for the ancient people of Britain. It was easy enough to do.
In the wide field beyond the beeches parallel ridges ran through the red, iron-rich soil. Three tractors traced the lines. Passing here earlier I had seen a lone farmer pushing single potatoes into the topsoil of a drill: stooping and rising; stooping again. And though he had surely only been testing the depth to set the tractor to, I had immediately thought of that learnt motion of labour, that mechanical precision built into muscle and passed down through time, generation to generation until our time when those patterns of history were splayed and broken. I thought too of the words of Seamus Heaney’s ‘At a Potato Digging’ where:
Centuries
Of fear and homage to the famine god
Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,
Make a seasonal altar of the sod.2
We no longer worshipped at that altar; no longer knew that fear. We had come so far from those days. I wondered, as I wound back to Insch, whether it was indeed still possible to step into the feelings, into the thoughts, the fears, hungers and desires of our ancestors, of those people who lived here one thousand, two thousand years before.
A yellowhammer was sat on a post singing his song. I walked past only feet away.
‘Please stay,’ I whispered under my breath.
His head turned. I do not know if he heard me but he did stay. On the rise of the hill heading back into Insch, I looked east across to where the Newton Stone lay, made out the Matchbox cars and lorries criss-crossing on the A96. The buzzard was there; tracing widening circles in the sky. Below, on the roadside I could make out the copse of three pine trees, their dark-topped canopy and from that distant place heard the pale cries of those buzzard chicks though only the wind blew about me.
When I met Sally Foster later that day in Aberdeen her office floor was patterned with sets of third-year archaeology exam papers laid out like pale gravestones. Sally sat serenely at her desk amid the layers of paper.
‘So you did get to see the stone?’ she asked with a smile.
She knew of the difficulties of getting to the site. I told of clambering over barbed-wire fences to the original site of the stones on Shevock. Sally laughed.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘Professor Dumville was due to join us, but he’s had to leave for Liverpool.’
I started to wonder if he really existed.
‘He sent his apologies,’ added Sally as though reading my thoughts. She picked a card off the table. ‘And he’s given me his mobile number for you to call.’
At lunch we picked over ideas on Pictish stones.
‘They’re unshaped, previously used,’ Sally said.
The notion of multiple lives for these ancient blocks held such practical sense. At first they were hauled to become standing-stone monuments. The inscriptions on the Newton Stone could easily reflect different periods of time entirely; separate carvings holding distinct meanings and senses for different generations, for different peoples living in that same landscape.
Sally had to return to her marking.
‘You must have a look at the cathedral,’ she said. ‘There’s even a gravestone inscribed with Ogham – a professor of mathematics, I think.’
She drew directions to where the Ogham gravestone would be. Her detailed directions were like a tiny treasure map. I thanked her again and headed off through the cobbled medieval alleyways, wandering through the botanical gardens before finding myself at the biological sciences department where the bones of a blue whale filled one wall.
The cathedral of St Machar was perfectly solid and squat, the granite frame appearing resistible to all forces: an apparently everlasting monument. Machar had travelled with Columba from Ireland to Iona, carrying Christianity across the treacherous waters of the Irish Sea. Machar was meant to have built a place of worship on this site sometime around 580 AD. I stared at patterns of the heraldic wooden ceiling, at the mosaic web of the stone walls, and thought of the notion of multiple lives for ancient stones like the Newton Stone. It ran true here. In the cathedral graveyard, I followed Sally’s map to the modern Ogham in vain, getting happily distracted by the sweet calling of a goldfinch from the summit of a grand elm tree high above the gravestones. The sky was empty; perfectly summer-blue. I stopped and sat. I was surrounded by stones that had been shaped and carved, many placed together to form a place of collective shelter, of worship; many others had been inscribed to memorialise individual lives. It was obvious. This was what we had always done with stone.
On the train south I started to really drift and wonder. That running screen of land and sky, the space the train affords and the motion of easy speed often acts as a conduit that allows thoughts to well and rise. So it was that day. In many ways, though I had reached out and touched the Newton Stone, had stood on the land where it had first been raised, I had got no nearer to answering the mystery of the script.
As we left Aberdeen I watched as the blocks of stone high-rise housing blurred into rocky outcrops patched with sulphurous yellow gorse. Sitting opposite me were a couple that I took to be from Norway. Like me they stared through the window to the drama unfurling: morning mists rolled in the space between sea and land; green fields seemed to fall into a grey void. I listened to their whispered talk, catching their excitement though their words meant nothing.
That morning on the train from Insch, two oil workers, both men in their middle ages, had talked briefly together in a language I did not know before one fell asleep against the windowpane. The other, beside me, had opened his newspaper. The words were constructed of letters that were largely familiar and yet I could not make out their meaning. I had thought then of the matter of translation, of those six lines of script upon the Newton Stone. Who were they intended for? Who was their readership? Why write them unless they are to be read by someone? Then there was another translational matter: the distinction between the person who carved the words into the stone and the person who had devised the script.
I reached up to the luggage rack, pulled down my bag and delved into the mass of papers I was accumulating. In an article titled ‘Literacy in Pictland’ by Katherine Forsyth, I found the passage I was after. Forsyth delineated three figures in the engraving process: the scriptor who ‘drafted the text’; the lapidarius who actually carved the stone; and the patron who held the final say. Perhaps in the rubbing space between the three some crucial meaning to the inscription had been lost. I caught the eye of the man opposite. We shared a polite smile and both turned back to the spectacle of the landscape slipping beyond the train window. The grey-bricked facade of a building flashed by, bearing the name The Newton Arms before vanishing into the soft blanket of a sea mist, a fret that fell over the coast, blurring the edges between shore and sea, between headlands and nothingness.
Here was another matter that was starting to bother me: seemingly strange coincidences. Or rather, if not coincidences, a building sense of synchronicity, as though there was a singularly calm and fluid motion to life and that I had just managed to sneak a vision of the underlying structures of that truth. I shook my head a little and thought rationally, thought of confirmation bias – the psychological underpinning that makes us see what we want to see, find the facts to support beliefs that ring true to us such that we make the connections that are relevant to us. So The Newton Arms sign springs out from the mist for me but not for anyone else on the 11:25 Aberdeen to London train (except perhaps someone called Newton). On the train up I had been musing on the manner in which as a traveller you seek differences, see the changes in the tint of the soil, the rises in the land, the yellow of the gorse. Yet in reality the variance is rather less than the resemblance: much remains the same – green fields and trees, rectangular houses.
I plugged in my iPod and chose Joanna Newsom whose harp strings seemed fitting. I closed my eyes:
The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow
Set to the sky in a flying spree, for the sport of the pharaoh …3
I drifted with the music, the mystery of the lyrics, the movement of the train and woke to the sight of a stretch of water opening beyond the windowpane almost too beautiful to bear as sunshine fell upon the shallow bay at Montrose. On my phone there was a shifting digital dot representing the train making its progress over a map of eastern Scotland. The train was now travelling at eighty-five miles per hour; now eighty-six, now eighty-seven. A constantly updating stream of information swarmed silently, invisibly about me. Yet this simple string of letters that I held in my hand, transcribed from a stone where they were carved hundreds of years earlier, remained an enigma.
Sally Foster and I had talked of the process by which it was possible to gaze back into history, to see shifts over time, movements across centuries and too easily to glaze over the fact that these eras are composed of individual lifetimes – those single units of human existence on the earth – each with their own needs, hungers and desires. One person carved these letters into the granite; one other instructed them to do so. I tried to imagine that moment. Two figures beside a standing stone. Did one of them have paper to write on? No. So how did one show the other what to carve? With a stick in the earth? With dye on bark? Scratched on to clay? The translation of those letters from one to another, from scriptor to lapidarius, was surely where the meaning was lost. If today’s brightest minds could find no meaning then there could be none. Or was that just modern arrogance? Maybe the meaning was still there. Maybe we just couldn’t see it.
I changed the music, scanning through the familiar albums for an old favourite, finding Bob Dylan’s Desire and choosing ‘One More Cup of Coffee’ before settling back as the first chords broke. South of Arbroath the beaches ran wide and empty. I stopped gazing when I heard the line ‘Your voice is like a meadowlark’. That coincidence thing was playing games again.
Past Kirkcaldy, past Kinghorn, the North Sea opened revealing an islet peaked with a red and white striped lighthouse. Sunlight splintered from the slate roofs like spray off the waves. In the distance the Forth Bridge looked like a Meccano simulacrum. The Norwegian woman opposite was pointing at the window, whispering heatedly to her husband. Was she talking so quietly because she didn’t want others to hear or because she was being polite, a foreigner in a foreign land; the manners of the traveller? I followed her finger and saw the lighthouse. The island was Inchcolm – home for hermits for a thousand years; burial site for Scottish nobles. More bones and stones.
At Edinburgh, a man sat beside me, placing a large plastic box on the table which contained a small black cat. I caught its stare between the frets of the cage. A feral, wild eye met mine. Just before Berwick where Scotland drew to an end we passed by another golf course. Bunkers of yellow sand stood out from a green baize. Ahead I saw a woman was preparing to drive on the raised dais of the tee.
Then something strange happened: she struck the ball just as she appeared adjacent in my window view such that as the train sped on, it did so at exactly the same speed with which the golf ball flew, which meant that for a few still seconds the ball became a silent companion, travelling along through the open airs to fall on the open space of the fairway and come to a halt perfectly framed in my viewpoint as that woman golfer had been some specks of time earlier. The entire event lasted no more than perhaps six or seven seconds. The sensation of being suddenly immersed in a world that no longer ran on the same lines as it had done a short time before was undeniable. I turned to the black cat. It stared back, held my gaze.
A little while later the train passed on to the bridge that straddled the River Tweed and so I crossed from one country into another. That return into England occurred precisely as the opening bars of a new song opened in my ears; a jangling melody that was soon accompanied by the meandering voice of Polly Jean Harvey warming up:
I live and die
through England.
I listened spellbound. The words rang out to frame a perfectly synchronous moment of travel. The song was ‘England’. I stared through the window to yellow sunshine, to a green countryside; to Elysian fields speckled with wild flowers beyond which rolled distant blue waters topped with white horses. An idealised England.
It leaves
sadness.
…
Remedies
never were,
remedies,
not within my reach.
I cannot go on as I am.
The threnody that runs through the heavenly, Arcadian vision of England seen by Wordsworth or Blake or Edward Thomas, ran here too. I stared with watery eyes. The sudden intensity of the moment was unanticipated.
England
…
It leaves a taste,
a bitter one.4
A few days later, I rang Professor Dumville. An Old School voice answered. I explained who I was and he apologised for not making the Aberdeen meeting. I said I wanted to know his thoughts on the Newton Stone.
‘Well, it’s certainly acquired a sense of mystery,’ he said.
His voice was deep, confident and fully of authority.
‘Exemplifies in spades the notion of the Picts being odd.’
Scattered across my desk were various articles collected from Sally Foster beside various other pencilled notes. One piece of paper was labelled ‘Ques for DD’. I couldn’t find it.
‘Thing is, the archaeologists have gone all PC about the Picts,’ he continued. He seemed happy enough to talk. I was sure the sheet was somewhere in the pile.
‘I was first shown photographs of the stone way back when taking my MLitt, as a graduate. “What is that script?” I’d been asked. “Old Roman cursive,” I’d answered. “That’s what it is.” But then that means it was carved before 300 AD.’
Professor Dumville’s words were worth waiting for. His chatty honesty was utterly refreshing.
‘If it’s not a fake …’ he added.
I stopped.
‘A fake?’ I asked.
I hadn’t even questioned the script’s authenticity before. I found my sheet. The first question was a good one. Why was it that a recent paper on Pictish stones was using a transliteration of the Newton Stone script from 1922? The answer was simple.
‘There’s been no modern work done on the stone. The family wouldn’t let anyone in to see. It’s only been in the last year or so that the house changed hands. The new owners seem rather friendlier. Did you get to see it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, rather proudly now I knew so few had managed to.
‘So what of that work from the 1920s?’ I asked. ‘Is it all wrong?
‘Well, Francis Diack was rather demonised,’ said Dumville. ‘But now he’s starting to be considered. Good starting point, really.’
I asked more on the aspect of the script itself.
‘Well, it’s been read as Greek, Palmyrine, Phoenician. You name it …’
‘Oh. Waddell,’ I said, remembering my research.
‘Indeed.’
‘So it’s not Phoenician?’ I asked
‘No. It’s not. It’s old Roman cursive,’ he repeated happily. ‘It’s very useful to tease people with.’ He laughed. ‘All I can say is my interest was epigraphic. Why would someone put cursive on a monument? Why was someone doing this inAD 300?’
While I tried to fathom this, tried to fit it with all I had read, Professor Dumville had moved on. He talked some more, on the nature of insular script, a Gaelic written form that had emerged out of the new Roman cursive, before returning to the problem of the Newton Stone script.
‘There has to be a physical way of explaining the nature of the letters in that scripture,’ he explained. ‘Such that their age can be properly assessed and a better sense built of when they were carved.’
But no real archaeological study of the stone had taken place for close on a century.
‘I suspect it’ll turn out to be a fake,’ he declared firmly.
Remarkably, The Newton Stone and other Pictish Inscriptions by Francis C. Diack (1922) popped up for sale when I searched online under ‘Newton Stone’. It was twenty pounds. I bought it immediately and the book arrived two days later carefully wrapped in brown parcel paper. I pushed everything else on my desk aside. The book was really a booklet. It was just sixty-four pages long. Diack began with a familiar description:
It is a monolith of blue gneiss, rather over six feet high, and bears two inscriptions. One is in ogam letters along one of the edges and part of one of the faces, ogam being the peculiar Celtic alphabet used on early monuments in Ireland. Higher up on the same face is the other, consisting of six lines of Roman letters in cursive of the first three centuries AD.
That tied in perfectly with Dumville’s words. I read on. Diack turned to the meaning of those six lines. They could be divided into two sections. The first three lines read:
ETTE
EVAGAINNIAS
CIGONOVOCOI
I read on:
It is apparent at once that we have here proper names, and that the monument is, like every other known example of similar age, a sepulchral record, commemorating the name of the person buried there.
It was a funereal stone. The first three lines Diack read as, ‘Ette, son of Evagainnias, descendent of Cingo, here’. Only the mother’s name was given, fitting with the matriarchy practised by the Picts.
The second three lines record the name of another person. Whether they were cut at exactly the same time as the first three must be doubtful, and whether they were by the same hand, though the technique looks the same.
Those second three lines read:
URAELISI
MAQQI
NOVIOGRUTA
Diack read them as meaning, ‘The grave of Elisios, son of New Grus.’5 The name of New-Grus was another form of reference linked to Pictish matriarchic traditions.
I made a cup of tea.
So if we were to accept Diack’s words, the Newton Stone was indeed used as a burial stone, though Professor Dumville reckoned it would turn out to be a fake. I flicked back through my photos of the stone, to the curved lines of the letters and zoomed in until they blurred to grey cloud. They were carved into granite. If the script was a fake, someone had taken a good deal of effort over it. I thought of those early Victorian antiquarians who had apparently found the stone. They had the time. And the money. And perhaps also an imperfect knowledge of cursive Roman.
I drank my tea. There was something else. Something I’d missed. I opened up all the files I had made from the various works I’d read. It wasn’t from those nineteenth-century ‘Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’. It was more recent. I found it. It was from Iain Fraser’s The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland:
Recent examination of the [Newton] stone has also identified a mirror symbol on one of its lower facets, and the remains of a spiral or concentric ovals towards the base of its rear face.6
Then there was that third inscription: Pictish symbols carved on the back of the monument. It was yet another reincarnation for that block of blue gneiss, another rebirth for the Newton Stone as a sacred monument. Those six lines of cursive Roman writing that had so entranced with their mystery, their unknowing, were probably nothing more mysterious than the epitaphs to two men whose bodies were once laid in Scottish soils and whose souls had long since flown. The stone had then formed a slate for later generations to carve their deepest thoughts upon. The deeper mystery surely lay in who those peoples were: the Picts. Professor Dumville had called them ‘odd’. John Buchan had seen them as shrunken, hairy brutes. No one really knew. Yet inscribed on the Newton Stone were three forms of writing that were all very different, all distinct, and all associated with the Picts.
My mind was racing, excited. I started upstairs to my daughter Eva’s room, to that wooden Buddhist statue. On the stairs, I remembered Professor Dumville’s words from a couple of days ago:
‘Of course, you know there’s a history of people going loopy studying this,’ he had said, laughing again; the sound echoing rather demoniacally down the phone line. He had told stories of two well-known academics who had completely lost their minds in studying Pictish stones.
‘There’s a curse hanging over this,’ Professor Dumville had warned. ‘So watch out.’
Eva lay asleep, splayed across her bed, covers merrily askew. I could hear the gentle breath of sleep of my younger daughter Molly in the next room. In the dusky half-darkness, I found the statue and felt the smoothness, the lightness of the wood. The figure was smaller than I remembered and more crudely formed. His legs were crossed in a lotus position. His hands touched on his front and held a mirror that covered much of his chest. There was a pattern on the mirror that I hadn’t remembered: woven lines carved into the wood.
Eva snored softly. For a short while, I simply watched her. Then I returned the wooden statue quietly to the bookcase shelf, tucked Eva in and tiptoed down the steep stairs. Someone else could worry about the links between the Picts and Buddhist mirror symbols.
