Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain. James Canton

      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