Sightlines

by Kathleen Jamie

  * * *

  What was being excavated was a ‘henge’. Henge, hinge, to hang—the word first applied to Stonehenge, with its great stone lintels, had come to mean any Neolithic circular enclosure, which is to say a circle of standing stones or wooden posts, with a surrounding ditch and possibly a bank. Spanning the ditch, which can be deep, there may be one or two causeway entrances. Henges are not uncommon, but their purpose is still obscure, and might always be. They attract baggy words like ‘ritual’ or ‘ceremonial’. Some, like Stonehenge, are orientated toward solar or lunar events, but thirty years ago that was still a moot point.

  This one, on a farm called North Mains, had been discovered—or rediscovered—from the air. Two years before, in 1977, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments had conducted an aerial survey of the whole country. When Antoine de St-Exupéry said, with typical hauteur, ‘the aeroplane has unveiled for us the true face of the earth’, he meant the vastnesses of the Sahara, the rippling oceans he saw beneath him, against which human habitation was a paltry thing. But it’s true of human traces, too—the small and lost and intimate are also revealed. Prehistoric sites, invisible to a walker on the ground, can show from high above.

  ‘Crop mark’ is the phrase. On the black-and-white photo this henge had shown up as thick dark circle, which the field wore like a tattoo. And, like living memories, crop marks are fickle: they respond to different weathers and seasons. One stalk of corn will grow taller than another a yard away, because of ancient disturbance to the ground in which it was sown. It knows a secret, which everyone else has forgotten, and which it discloses to the sky.

  * * *

  My own memory of that summer is patchy now, inevitably. Some images, a ‘taste’, some names, a feeling of being much out in the sun and wind, and of being caught up with new excitements and possibilities.

  The site was already well under way. It was an orderly place of scraped earth and excavated holes and spoil heaps. It lay beyond the sycamores, five hundred yards away from the farmhouse, on the same flat terrace, near the lip of a defile that fell away sharply down to a meandering tree-lined burn. There was the River Earn on one side of this raised terrace, and a burn, the Machany Water, winding along on the other, and, farther in the distance, that wall of hills. Due east lay the farmlands and wooded slopes of Strathearn, the long fertile river valley that became, eventually, the Firth of Tay, and the North Sea.

  We worked by day, but the long midsummer evenings were our own; we were free to linger outdoors in the cool gloamings, at leisure until work began again in the morning. About twenty of us dossed down in the farmhouse at night, and every morning we filed out onto site. I loved it.

  The exams I’d just taken were already far from my mind. The Stone Age was closer to me than secretarial college ever would be.

  May was cold and blustery and often we were rained off, and obliged to sit in the wooden site huts—a couple of big garden sheds—drinking tea, smoking roll-ups, watching the rain slant across the door. At day’s end, dusty and weary, we trooped back to the farmhouse. Every day, on a rota, two people quit work mid-afternoon and retired to the farmhouse kitchen to assist on a marathon of cooking. What did we eat? Who did the shopping? I couldn’t say.

  The farmhouse was due to be demolished. That’s what we heard. It had obviously been empty a while, but there were many derelict farm buildings then. People were still leaving the land; there was as yet no appetite for renovating old mills and steadings and the like. In short, there was no great need to take care of the house; this youthful invasion was its last hurrah. If there were what estate agents call ‘original features’—fireplaces, shutters, panelled doors, I was oblivious to them. There was a lot of brown varnish and the floors were bare, good for sleeping and dancing. In every room—five, I think—were rough furnishings: old mattresses, rucksacks and sleeping bags. Of the two large public rooms downstairs, one had been commandeered by more longstanding volunteers, the weather-beaten old hippy element. They had installed a couple of old car seats.

  One of the inhabitants was a long-haired man we called Pete the Lech. He did to me as he did to all the girls: sidled up while my back was turned, slunk his arms around me and asked, huskily, if I’d sleep with him. I remember the texture of his hair on my face and the smell of patchouli as, laughing, I said, ‘No’. ‘Fair enough,’ he said and wandered off. By then I’d read enough of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to recognise the quotation painted gleefully on his door. It was Ken Kesey’s great scrambled pun, ‘No left turn unstoned.’

  There must have been a bathroom, some means of washing, an outside toilet even, for the twenty-odd ‘diggers’ billeted in the house, but that’s another nicety I can’t recall. The tribal elders, our bosses, were in their late twenties. Everyone was young. It’s a wonder to me now how people so young could carry all this. As in wartime. As in the Neolithic.

  * * *

  No stone was left unturned. That was the day job. There was a Neolithic monument, it had lain in the earth for four thousand years, and our task was its swift and meticulous destruction. The site, the henge, was subdivided into four areas, each area the responsibility of one archaeologist, all of whom reported to the overall director, Gordon Barclay. These real archaeologists were remote figures who lived aside in caravans, who told us what to do, and who hauled us back to work when the rain showers passed.

  Mostly I worked within the inner sanctum, an area about twenty-five metres in diameter, and was engaged in ‘stripping down’—that is, carefully and, with the trowel, scraping away just a centimetre’s depth of the hard-packed subsoil which formed the interior of the enclosure. Several of us did this job. Hair in my face, knees on the ground, I held my new cast trowel and scraped at the earth. Had they still existed, we’d have been within a circle of twenty-four wooden posts, possibly with a wattle fence strung between them. Immediately outside the ring of posts, there would have been a ditch almost three metres deep, like a dry moat, and then encircling that, a raised bank, six foot high in its day. Such had been the original, Neolithic construction. Every day some diggers were seconded into the outer ditch, to empty it of long centuries of infill. I didn’t envy them, stuck down a hole all day. All the post-holes and the ends of the ditch were emptied, and the fill carried away in wheelbarrows to the spoil heaps. I still loathe wheelbarrows.

  So this was what we did: kneel over a portion of earth, a metre square or so, and scrape with the trowel’s edge, trying to apply the weight evenly, so as not to score or scratch, or make one side tilt lower than the other. Some diggers were better at this than others. Although the word ‘diggers’ still carried a whiff of the radical English movement, the seventeenth-century communitarians, and they were often ragged and long-haired, there was, even amongst them, a hierarchy. A sign of experience was a trowel worn away to a thin dagger-like blade. With this one tool, it was possible to spend half the year in a journeyman or gypsy way, hitch-hiking from site to site, working a few weeks here and there. In the right hands it was a sensitive tool—you learned to feel, or hear, the grind of an earth-hidden stone or pottery shard before you saw it. Sometimes a little pebble tumbled away as the trowel edge passed over it, but a larger stone, as yet hidden, just beginning to emerge, sent a tiny seismic thrill along your arm. This was what you wanted, the excitement of a ‘feature’.

  We can talk a great deal about post-holes and ditches, but what actually happened at that place so long ago, at what time of year, and who travelled how far to attend, and what they called the place, and whether they came by boat or on foot, and if there was a distinction between those deemed fit to enter the inner enclosure where we worked, and those who, like a crowd outside a cathedral, were obliged to stand at a remove, we have little way of knowing, though some bold theories are emerging. You can’t help but suspect social distinctions have been with us for a very a long time.

  Over the last week of May the ditches were excavated, the post-holes within the ditch all empti
ed out, measured, photographed and the enclosed area carefully scraped down. You could tell where a hole had been dug 4000 years ago, and a wooden post put in, by a change in colour and texture of the soil. You could tell that the posts had, over the course of the years, simply rotted away. They had not been set ablaze in a great spectacle, as had apparently happened at other henges. People bent over their patch of soil, squinted through theodolites, drew on paper pinned to boards, and for this were paid a few pounds a week pocket money, fed, given a space on a floor. For a while it felt like a life. It was rough and ready, but with more purpose than a commune and too short-lived for much tension to build.

  Mostly, we were just clearing, but the work had its own satisfactions. It was hand work, nitty-gritty. I liked the bite on the point of the trowel as it scraped back a layer of soil, the feel of earth. For long moments, though, I thought of nothing but tea break, and discomfort, the nuisance of having my hair blow over my face. But at other times you could lose yourself in that minuscule landscape, a tiny Sahara seen from miles high. It often surprised me, when I leaned up to rest my back, that I was in a field in Perthshire. I liked to see the unchanging, stalwart ridge of hills, to be reminded of the wider landscape, of which we, bent over our trowels, seemed to be the centre—possibly with reason. I mean, there was a reason these ‘ceremonial enclosures’ were constructed where they were. Prehistoric people may not have had aeroplanes to reveal the face of the earth to them, but they could certainly read a landscape.

  * * *

  A few photos: one shows a dozen diggers sitting on the ground, legs outstretched, backs against the wooden wall of a site hut. A sunny, blustery day, but cool, judging by the jackets and windblown hair and the squinting into the sun. Everyone is under thirty, and everyone has a mug; we are engaged in the ritual/ceremonial of the tea break. Five more minutes and we’d be summoned back to work.

  Another shows a young man standing down in a ditch, for scale. He is friendly-looking, thin and red-haired. I forget his name. The end wall of the ditch is a third taller than he is, maybe nine foot.

  In that ditch it was possible to tell where, one day four thousand years ago, one labourer had finished his shift and another had taken over. Plus ça change. When he’d climbed out, he’d have seen the same ridge of hills as we did, the same long river valley, with woods and clearings. He’d have gone off, maybe down to the burn to wash away the grime, to take a drink, maybe to lie looking up at the clouds before he had his meal.

  The director in his report calculated that a hundred people would have been required to build the henge, probably organised in gangs. A similar team, organised in gangs over two seasons, dismantled it again.

  A third photo shows four diggers in the golden evening light, outside the farmhouse. They are dancing. Their shadows are long, and reach right across the yard.

  * * *

  It was because of the Avro Lancaster that the henge had to be excavated. That was what we heard. The site was being dug because the landowner, Sir William Roberts, intended to extend a runway over the top of it, because of his Lancaster.

  Westward of our site, still on the same level of land, were couple of large hangars, a grass landing strip and a windsock. They constituted the Strathallan Aircraft Museum, a private collection of mostly WW2 aircraft. It was open to the public and, in the hangars, amongst other things, were two Spitfires, a De Havilland Mosquito, a Lysander and a Hawker Hurricane. The Hurricane still flew, and often passed above our heads as we worked. It came low over the henge, over the perimeter fence, to land and taxi to a standstill down at the hangars. We grew accustomed to the sweet snarl of its engine. It was a wartime sound, as evocative as the wail of an air-raid siren. But now—this is what we understood—Sir William had acquired a Lancaster.

  What can we say of the Lancaster? Some reckon it a most beautiful aircraft. The most beautiful-sounding. The little Battle of Britain Hurricane had but one Rolls-Royce Merlin V2 engine. Lancasters had four, wing-mounted, 1400 horse-power. At about 40,000 lbs unladen, throttled up and ready to go, they made the earth shake—way too heavy for the present landing strip. The plane was bought, however, and would be flown over from Canada when the runway was extended to receive it. But the survey had shown this henge, this long-kept secret of the field. Sir William had provided the disused farmhouse, and now we were engaged in a ‘rescue dig—meant to salvage something of the deep past before it was destroyed.

  Few if any of us kneeling over our Neolithic and Bronze Age site with our little cast trowels had been alive during the war; that was our parents’ and grandparents’ day. We were more concerned with time out of mind. We pored over the earth, seeking tiny clues about the prehistoric past. When we were done, the heavy bomber would be brought thundering in.

  Little wonder, then, if we felt dislocated sometimes. Not dislocated, the place remained the same, the topography altered little. The range of hills, the plateau where we worked, the twin flowing rivers, the pines and cawing rooks—these were constant. But it was easy to feel unhooked from time, to be uncertain which era one was alive in. Under our knees, in the earth, a Neolithic henge, which was now beginning to yield Bronze Age artefacts too. In the air, the sound of the ‘finest hour’, the Hurricane lifting off from its grass strip. There was a lingering 1960s feel around the community of diggers—and, as I say, something of the seventeenth-century English radicals of that name, who were concerned to ‘level all estates’. And now Margaret Thatcher, antithesis of all that, was chasing her new broom round Downing Street.

  In his Battle of Britain speech, Churchill said this: ‘If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.’ There was no quarrel, because the past, the various pasts, were all present. It was what I’d felt in my fanciful visits to standing stones, that to level all estates, to abolish all layers of time, took only a little imagination.

  On one of our long leisured evenings, a boyfriend and I slipped away from the farmhouse, away from the site altogether. We made our way down the steep defile to the meadow beside the Machany Water which was, and still is, just a tiny tree-lined burn. The burn was easy to cross, but the meadow on the far side felt like a faraway secluded place. There we discovered, parked in the buttercups and apparently forgotten, the fuselage of an aeroplane belonging to the aircraft museum. He said it was a DC10. I had never then been in an aeroplane, so, as no one was around, we scrambled up, slid into the cockpit and pretended to fly.

  * * *

  ‘Features’ were the great excitement. Features happen when, under your trowel, a something, you know not what, a true earth mystery, begins to loom up. It might be just the surface of a stone, or a change in the colour of the earth: a hearth where a fire once burned stays black for ever. It’s dusted with the hand, appraised. The archaeologist’s skill is in telling a something from a nothing, human intentionality from nature or chance. They learn to read stones, but sometimes stones stay shtum. But it’s a ruthless business: even as the mystery is revealed, it’s dismantled and destroyed.

  Each of the four assistant archaeologists wrote a daily logbook, in which they kept track of the progress of their portion of the site, and of ‘features’ as they emerged. The logbooks still exist: they are fawn-coloured A4 school jotters. ‘Supplied for the Public Service’, they say, which makes them historical artefacts in themselves. If something was unearthed that looked like it might develop into a feature, it was allocated a number. One can follow its progress day to day by checking that number in the logbooks. Many features come up, burst, vanish like bubbles in champagne.

  Depending on which of the assistants is writing, the small regiment of volunteers, of whom I was one, is referred to variously as ‘diggers’, ‘rabble’ or even, sardonically, ‘work units’. Which ‘work unit’ first happened upon Feature 455 I don’t recall, and the logbook doesn’t say. Lowly diggers were not entrusted with ‘features’. If something exciting looked like it was emerging, backwards, like a dog out of hed
ge, a more experienced worker would be sent to take over. Of course, everyone knew when a feature was slowly being revealed. They were the subjects of our conversations, central to the life of the site.

  Feature 455 became the responsibility of a pleasant man called John. There were several Johns, all with by-names. There was a John the Veg, who ate no meat, and raffish John the Pilot, to whom a certain glamour accrued because he did indeed hold a pilot’s licence. This site, with its regular fly-pasts of WW2 planes, must have been a joy to him. But it was John the Tent who worked on 455. ‘John’s got himself a feature at last!’ says the logbook. And later, ‘John’s feature worth all the fuss!’

  The rest of us got on with our scraping and stripping down, but you could always find an excuse—dawdling back from emptying a wheelbarrow, for example—to wander over and see how other folk were doing. You could appraise someone else’s little square of desert, or cast a glance into a post-hole. Everyone knew, therefore, that within the Neolithic enclosure other things were emerging, still prehistoric, but of much more recent date. It meant that many centuries after the original celebrants were dead and gone, their enclosure was still potent, was still being used. In fact, it was used on and off for 2500 years. Whatever the henge had been, it lingered a long, long time in custom and memory.

  Feature 455 began as the scratch of a stone under the edge of a trowel. A flattish stone, then next to it another, then a third and so on until an oval area, a sort of crazy paving, had emerged about five feet long and four wide. It was in an important place: well within the ancient enclosure but not at the exact centre.