Ancient Wonderings by James Canton

Author:James Canton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-22T16:00:00+00:00

I looked to the north-east where the grey-piled stone hill of the cairn was becoming clear against the backdrop of similarly grey rock outcrops. I slowed and tried to picture the scene here some six thousand years back – in the Neolithic. They were certainly working stone, and working with it in new and impressively elegant ways. I had seen a picture of an amazing carved, black, stone ball that had been found on Benbecula, a few miles north of Cladh Hallan which had been carved from granite with such patience, such skill. Since seeing that image, one of those Neolithic carved stone balls had become a kind of ultima Thule of possible beach findings.

Now I turned my thoughts instead to Neolithic chambered cairns and the emergence of these huge, new monuments from the land. There was an obvious, practical sense to gathering these stones when you considered that the task was undertaken by those prehistoric peoples commonly referred to as the first farmers. If you were going to farm this earth, to work this land, then first you had to clear it; and that was a task that was going to take time – it would take months, years, even generations of hard labour.

I halted as I finally reached the chambered cairn at Barp Frobost. Though much of the cairn seemed damaged there remained an awesome presence to this sacred site, place of burial, home of the Neolithic dead. I touched an upright kerb stone respectfully, fought to breathe more calmly. Here was the remaining evidence of monumental physical efforts executed in hazy distant realms of the past. I felt the touch of the gneiss, of the lichen; then scanned the horizons. Once, this land would have been covered with trees. Now, there was peat and moor and rock – those long-gone shades of green replaced by browns and greys. The woodland had been cleared since Mesolithic times by hunters using fire both to carve safe spaces for their settlements and to provide grazing for the red deer they loved to hunt. By the end of the Neolithic this landscape looked pretty much like now – minus the fence posts, the telephone wires and the odd abandoned house. Except there would have been those first Neolithic permanent settlements starting to dot the lands of Uist – formed of low stone walls and wooden fencing, enclosed safe spaces defined and delineated from the landscape beyond, where a collective of related souls could sleep in peace together in warmth. They could pen pigs and turn them from wild to domestic creatures, could build a home in a land that would gradually become tamed, too.

I checked the map and the skies, then started off again, heading directly north for the summit of Reineabhal. Over that grey ridge, down the gentle slope which fell towards the still, dark surface of Loch an Ath Ruaidh lay a second chambered cairn, larger and more intact than the one I stood beside. In the warming sunshine,

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