Blood of the Isles (21 page)

It is barely 12 miles across the sea from Fair Head on the north-western tip of Ulster to the cliffs of the Mull of Kintyre, rising above the waves of the North Channel. Scotland is bounded on three sides by the sea: by the wild Atlantic to the west and north and by the temperamental North Sea beyond the eastern coastline. Across its historically fluctuating southern land boundary lies England, at different times enemy and friend, but never indifferent neighbour. The western sea boundary is fringed with several large, inhabited islands and hundreds of small ones deprived of inhabitants. Off the north coast lie the Orkney Islands, and 60 miles further to the north-east and halfway to Norway are the Shetlands. The total land area, including the islands, is just over 30,400 square miles, only slightly smaller than Ireland. Mountains dominate the mainland, with the rugged Scottish Highlands reaching to over 1,300 metres. Ben Macdui (1,309 metres), highest of the Cairngorms in the north-east, and Ben Nevis (1,344 metres)
in the west are the highest mountains in the whole of the Isles.

The mountains continue all the way to the northern coast of Scotland, especially on the west side, where millions of years of erosion, compounded by the gouging action of the glaciers, which covered the whole of Scotland in the last Ice Age, have left a dramatic landscape. In the far north-west, Old Red Sandstone peaks like Suilven and Stac Pollaidh stand isolated above featureless country of bog and lochan. In the extreme north, the mountains relent, leaving a fertile coastal strip where the thin, acidic soil of the Highlands is invigorated by calcium-rich limestones and sandstones.

The effect of limestone, wherever it occurs, is always dramatic. It neutralizes the otherwise acidic soils and in so doing transforms the colour of the landscape from a yellow-brown to a vivid green. In the Highlands and the Hebrides, the occasional limestone outcrops are marked out by the rich growth of grass and wild flowers. But nowhere is the effect of neutralizing the soil more noticeable or more delightful than in the Western Isles, the long chains of islands that protect the mainland from the full force of the Atlantic. On the western edge of these islands are some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. Brilliant white in the sunlight and lapped by turquoise, translucent seas, they are not made of the usual sands to be found on the crowded holiday beaches of southern England. The white beaches of the Western Isles are composed of the pulverized shells of countless billions of sea creatures that have been ground to a coarse powder by the
pounding waves of the Atlantic. The wind, which for 300 days out of 365 roars in from the ocean, has blown the shell sand inland for a mile or two. And there it works its magic on the soil, neutralizing the acid and supplying essential phosphates that are otherwise entirely lacking. The result is the
machair
, a thin strip of meadows and grassland which, so long as the sheep don’t get there first, is full of wild flowers – purple orchids by the hundreds, blue harebells and the purple and yellow flowers of heartsease, the wild pansy. A couple of miles further inland, beyond the reach of the wind-blown shell sand, the moss and dark rushes are back, signalling the return of the acid lands.

The white beaches are also spread along the north coast, but there they are not needed to help the soil. The older gneisses and schists of the Highlands, among the oldest rocks in the world, are replaced by alkaline sandstone. Green grass grows far inland in Caithness at the extreme north-east tip of the mainland, and is rich enough to support large herds of sleek black cattle. The fertility of the sandstone soil is even more remarkable in the Orkneys, now a few miles from the Caithness coast but joined to it until 7,000 years ago. On the east coast, there is good low-level farmland around the Moray Firth near Inverness and inland of Aberdeen, at the eastern edge of the Cairngorms. One deep geological fault divides the Highlands along the Great Glen, running between Inverness and Fort William. Another fault line runs between Stonehaven, on the east coast just below Aberdeen, and Loch Lomond to the north of Glasgow. This southern fault line separates the Highlands from the rich farmland of the Central Lowlands, which is
also the location of the major cities of Dundee, Stirling, Glasgow and Edinburgh. Most of the 5.2 million Scots live in this Central Belt, a great many having moved there from the Highlands. Further south the ground rises again to form the hills of the Southern Uplands. Lower and less rugged than the Highlands, these hills have been eroded by glaciers into smooth-topped plateaux separated by narrow, flat-bottomed valleys. Beyond the hills, the valleys open out into the rolling farmland that surrounds the River Tweed, which flows into the North Sea at Berwick on the east coast. On the west side of the Southern Uplands, the hills give way to the Galloway peninsula and the flat lands bordering the Solway Firth.

Since the whole of Scotland was under thick ice until the end of the Ice Age and again during the cold snap of the Younger Dryas, it isn’t surprising that no evidence, yet, has been found in Scotland of Palaeolithic settlements such as remain in the Cheddar Caves in south-west England. The first signs of human occupation are not found until well after the cold snap and, as in Ireland, these are Mesolithic settlements at or near the coast. The earliest dated site is at Cramond, on the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, only 3 miles from the centre of Edinburgh. It is a picturesque spot, with a small terrace of old houses on one bank of the River Almond, where it flows into the Firth. Swans and ducks bob around in the quiet tree-lined bay and, when I visited on a crisp sunny day in November, I could not have imagined a better spot for a bit of hunter-gathering. A seashore for shellfish and wading birds, a medium-size freshwater river for salmon. All that would
have been missing was the cappuccino that was steaming on the table in front of me. The Cramond remnants, a few microliths and the bony evidence of past meals, are dated to about 10,000 years ago. There are no signs of permanent settlement at Cramond, no post-holes as at Mount Sandel in Ireland, so it was probably just one of many places where the small bands of humans used to camp for a while as they moved around the country in search of food.

The seasonal movements of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers from one site to another are nowhere better illustrated than on the island of Oronsay, off the opposite coast of Scotland from Cramond. Oronsay is a small island, roughly triangular in shape and each side only 3 kilometres long. Despite its small size, no less than five Mesolithic shell middens have been discovered, each containing vast numbers of mollusc shells. Limpets, winkles, whelks, oysters and scallops were all on the menu. Curiously shaped implements, made from the antlers of red deer, have also been found. Their use is immediately obvious when you watch the staff at work in an oyster bar. They are shaped exactly like the knives which, inserted between the two shells of an oyster, then twisted, open it to reveal the silver-grey flesh inside. It is a sight to behold – as it must also have been for the children of Oronsay, 8,000 years ago, for that is the date of the Oronsay midden.

The seasonality of the Oronsay middens has been discovered in a very curious way. As well as huge numbers of mollusc shells, the middens also contain the bones of saithe, a relative of the haddock that is still plentiful in the waters off the west coast of Scotland. The saithe grows rapidly in
its first years of life and the age of a fish can be worked out from, of all things, the length of the ear bone or
otolith
. Otoliths within the same midden tend to be about the same length but there is a big difference in average otolith size between one midden and the next. The conclusion is that the middens marked different seasonal camps where the fish caught were at different stages of their development. What we do not know is if Oronsay was a permanent home or, like Cramond, another seasonal camp, occupied at the same time each year to take full advantage of the harvest of the sea.

Oronsay and its close neighbour Colonsay lie about 15 miles from the larger islands of Islay and Jura, themselves 10 miles or so from the long finger of the Kintyre peninsula. Clearly, the Mesolithic hunter-gatherers – an epithet to which we must surely add fishing – were well used to making these quite substantial sea crossings between the islands and the mainland. No boats remain, destroyed by millennia of decay, but they were probably made from animal skins stretched across a framework of hazel branches. They would have resembled the coracle, still, just about, used for fishing in the rivers of west Wales, and the more substantial curraghs of the west of Ireland. Whatever they used, these boats were perfectly good enough for coastal work and island hopping.

The sea has never been a barrier to the people of the Atlantic. It was their highway, just as the Pacific was to the Polynesians. There are confirmed Mesolithic sites on many of the islands lying off the west coast of Scotland, and where no evidence has yet been found there is a feeling
among archaeologists that, with more field work, every island will be shown to have been occupied, if only for one part of the year. There is even indirect evidence, in the form of unusual patterns of soil erosion, that the Mesolithics reached Shetland, which would have involved a voyage on the open sea of 60 miles from Orkney, the nearest point. Valuable materials were also transported over long distances by sea. Flint is unknown in Scotland and other stones were used for making tools. Bloodstone quarried from the Isle of Rum, where there is a very early Mesolithic settlement, has been found in many sites around the west coast. The Mesolithic was a time of plenty for those bands who lived on the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. There was ample food within easy reach, both in the sea and in the dense woodland that lay behind the shoreline. It certainly wasn’t crowded. One recent estimate puts the total population of the whole of the Isles during the Mesolithic at less than 5,000.

There is one tantalizing fragment of evidence – a grain of wheat pollen from the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde – that the Mesolithics were already experimenting with growing their own plant food, well before the arrival of agriculture proper. However, it is only with the arrival of farming that the whole way of life begins to change. Curiously enough, despite the major effect this transition from the Mesolithic lifestyle of thinly dispersed hunter-gatherers to full-blown farming must have had on the early inhabitants of Scotland, there is a distinct lack of material evidence from the early stages. Part of the reason is probably the later growth of thick layers of moss which have
buried early field systems. In Ireland a whole patchwork of fields has been discovered at Ceidi, near Ballycastle, County Mayo in the north-west, lying under several feet of peat and visible only when this layer was cleared away. Even the megaliths suffered from the accumulation of moss and peat. The stone circle at Callanish on Lewis, where the stones reach nearly 5 metres in height, had been almost swallowed up by the peat before it was excavated in the nineteenth century. Only the tips of the tallest stones protruded above the peat.

Covering of a different kind obscured what, in my opinion, is the most remarkable archaeological site in the whole of the Isles. The settlement at Skara Brae in Orkney does not have the grandeur of Callanish or Stonehenge. It is altogether more domestic. Following a violent storm in the 1850s, the sand dunes which back on to the beach in the Bay of Skaill, on the west coast of the largest island, were stripped back to reveal the walls of houses. Unlike today, when such a discovery would precipitate an immediate excavation, nothing much was done either to excavate or even to protect the site until the early years of the twentieth century. Hidden beneath the sand was a small group of interconnecting stone houses, each about 5 metres in diameter and complete with stone beds, stone dressers, even waterproofed stone basins sunk into the floor to keep live lobsters and to soften limpet flesh for fishing bait.

That Skara Brae is still standing and not strewn about the countryside has a lot to do with the remarkable rock found all over Orkney and Caithness. The sandstone comes in flat slabs, about 5–10 centimetres thick. Even without
mortar, anything built with Orkney flagstones is not going to fall down. Ruined buildings, 100 years old, which are a not uncommon sight all over rural Scotland, are still standing. Their roof timbers have decayed and collapsed, but the walls of flagstone houses are as solid as ever. Metre-square flagstones, split even thinner, are even used as roof tiles or stuck upright in the ground as fencing.

The charm of Skara Brae is in its ordinariness. I have to admit that, though I enjoy standing in awe amidst the great monuments from the past, I feel strangely detached from them. But at Skara Brae I really
can
imagine people living there, coming in from the wind to the warm, snug interiors, recounting, in whatever tongue, the events of the day. The beach at Skaill just next to Skara Brae is strewn with broken flagstones and when I was there, during the school summer holidays, families were playing on the beach. But instead of building sandcastles – and there is plenty of good sand – the children were constructing their own miniature stone circles. These rocks are just asking to be stood upright, and that’s exactly what has happened all over Orkney. The Ring of Brodgar, about 5 miles inland from Skara Brae, was originally a circle of sixty stones 7 metres high and 100 metres across. Twenty-one remain in position. A mile in one direction is the stone circle of Bookan, while the same distance in the other direction is another, Stenness, and half a mile further lies the astonishing passage tomb of Maes Howe. Like the tomb at Newgrange on the Boyne, Maes Howe is aligned so that the sun shines along the low passage at the winter solstice and floods the inner chamber with light. Once again, the
wonderful building quality of the rock makes Maes Howe appear much younger than its 5,000 years, the stone slabs neatly laid and corbelled at the top to form a roof. These are only the major structures. All around are burial mounds, many not yet excavated, single standing stones and other remnants of a vibrant ritual past.