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      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.