Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain. James Canton
sat in the car and opened the sunroof. The sun had come out this morning, banishing the grey. Tiree lay flat and green beneath blue skies. I rang the number. Doc Holliday answered. He had a meeting later but would happily meet me in the local museum at Scarnish in fifteen minutes. Perfect.
Doc Holliday drove up in a red car with a green emergency light on the roof. He wore a light grey suit and sported matching grey beard and glasses. There was a quiet, intense intelligence to him. We sat in the museum and he asked what I was after. I talked of seeking the Mesolithic of Tiree, of linking those people to the peoples of Doggerland. He listened attentively; nodded. He couldn’t have been more accommodating. He told me of the Mesolithic sites I was after, marked them on my map for me before taking me into the museum archive and opening a wooden case, one of a stack of antique boxes containing the archaeological collection of George Holleyman, an RAF policeman posted to Tiree during the Second World War. Seven Stone Age flints sat on a bed of cotton wool. All had apparently come from Balephuil. A label stated:
These flints are almost certainly of Mesolithic age, that is made by the hunter-gatherer groups who populated Scotland before the arrival of the first farmers in the 4th millennium BC. Microlithic (small stone) tools like this were used all over northern and western Europe at this time.
Doc Holliday and I sat and talked more of the Mesolithic.
‘You have to imagine Tiree not as it is now,’ he explained, ‘but covered in woodland; trees stunted, twisted by the winds.’
Pollen analysis had shown the extent of the coverage. I asked which species had been revealed. Doc’s eyes stared out before he spoke as though reciting an incantation.
‘Alder, birch, hazel, willow, oak, ash, juniper,’ he said.
There was abundant fuel, readily available.
‘You see, the population would be determined by the worst climate rather than the best,’ the Doc explained. ‘You have to have enough resources to get through winter.’
The Mesolithic would overwinter on Mull or perhaps on the mainland at Oban, tucked down from the storms and the cold in more settled camps. Then they would adopt a more migratory nature once the spring came round again.
‘The entire population of Mesolithic Scotland would only number perhaps five thousand.’
It would be a small collective, perhaps forty or so – an extended group or family – who would head to Tiree in the summer months for flint-knapping. Flint was so vital to the Mesolithic and a seam of flint ran right across the southern tip of Tiree through to Ireland. Doc Holliday traced the extent of the vein of rock with his hand over the map. That was why the Mesolithic came here – for flint.
Nodules of flint would be gathered in places like Balephuil and then worked, knapped. Doc explained the process.
‘First, you take the head off, like an egg.’
His left hand swept over an imaginary flint stone.
‘Then you work the skin off the flint,’ he said, chopping down with the side of his hand. ‘Until you are left with the cortex.’
Flint fragments could then be broken off and retouched to refine edges, points and blades. It was skilled, precise work but essential to produce those tools vital for catching, cutting and cleaning food. Stores of flint blades could be built through the summer for the following seasons.
Doc had to go to his meeting. I had to return to Balephuil. We shook hands and said our goodbyes.
So later that morning, I stood on a Mesolithic beach, two hundred yards inland from today’s high tideline. It was a perfectly warm summer’s day: blue skies and fluffy white clouds. I crawled on a bank of pebbles that ran for twenty yards or so, protected by towering sand dunes ten metres high. I walked barefoot – toe to stone, on all fours, eyes a foot above the ground, peering for flakes of flint. A bumblebee alighted on a golden daisy beside me. I knew immediately – declared out loud that it was a Great yellow bumblebee: a Hebridean rarity.
All day after leaving Doc Holliday, I worked the bank, building a small collection of stone fragments that I laid out on a pad of paper – the larger to the left, smaller to the right, a middle line that might be shell or flint. I smiled at myself, at the ordering, the creation of lines of findings exactly like some Victorian amateur collector. But I had yet to feel the sense that I had truly stepped back into the Mesolithic mind.
I scratched with a broken pencil, scuffing at the surface and pulling out fragments of flint last touched six thousand years ago or so. I pictured a Mesolithic hand holding and dropping. Time had passed. Then my hand had touched and lifted the very same stone splinter from the ground.
It was midday. It was time to leave.
I had been searching the site all morning. It was as I walked away, stepping over the ancient pebble beach, that I saw it.
Grey.
A ghostly grey square of flint sat flat on the surface before me. As soon as I lifted it from that prehistoric beach something shifted. In that moment the cold touch of a past world became tangible – a Stone Age hand touched mine through time. Thousands of years shrank into a second.
It was an arrowhead. An inch or so square, the stone had so obviously been worked away at, carefully retouched to form the sloping edges of the point. The base too had a series of tiny shelves, minute steps where the flint had been delicately chipped away.
That night, as a storm blew in from the north-west, I stared by torchlight at the beauty of that arrowhead. The tent was pitched in the green marram grasses of the dunes, planted between today’s beach at Balephuil and the Mesolithic beach of six thousand years ago.
The next morning, I met up with Doc Holliday once more in the museum to show him my finds.
He was wearing the same grey suit. From the car, he carried a heavy-looking doctor’s bag from which he retrieved an otoscope. He began his examination, lifting his glasses to the top of his head. His fingers picked one of the smaller fragments I had brought along. He inspected the item.
‘Shell,’ he said.
I passed the arrowhead over. Under the microscope and lit by a powerful beam, the flint became almost translucent.
The Doc went quiet.
‘That’s a tanged point,’ he said finally.
Over the next week I stepped further back from the present into the Mesolithic. I walked the coastline of Tiree, scanned the landscape tracing an imaginary line six metres or so above the present tideline where Mesolithic tides would have lapped, then sought out places where people would have sat some thousands of years before to work quietly away at flint. I listened for sounds: for the thin crack of flints being knapped ringing out about the rocky outcrops. Lithic sounds echoed out through time. Click, click, click.
I camped far away from others – out in the machair with the hares, on the edge of the land. I started to learn to shunthe furtive oddity of man. Out in the dunes alone, murmurations of starlings washed over me, startling with their dark shadows, coming out of the summer sun and clouding the skies. I walked prelapsarian lands. A storm blew in and blew out. I crossed to Coll and continued: at night by torchlight scanning the maps, the books for hints of ancient sites, for caves, for places where Mesolithic bodies would have rested. By day, in muddy hollows dotted with hoof marks, I crouched and scratched at the ground. My eyes grew practised at spotting shards of flint in the soil, the sand. Even in the sky, I saw stone. Wandering a hare path one day through the machair at Hugh Bay, a female hen harrier swept over and the pale, flint-white band at the base of her tail stood out clear against her muddy brown coat. In the lee of enormous erratics, I hid from the wind and rain as others had done long before me. Fragments of collected flint chimed in my pockets.