He never did and the torc became the possession of the fishermen who had found it. There was a symbolic struggle between museums. The National Museums of Scotland, then in the process of creating the new glamorous Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street in Edinburgh, wanted it for their new displays. It was of national importance, they could argue, and so should be shown in the national capital. The Museum nan Eilean, the Museum of the Western Isles in Stornoway, forever feeling that whatever was marvellous from the Hebrides was whisked off to Edinburgh, whatever second-rate left behind, also wanted it for their own exhibition. In the end it came to money. The Western Isles Council was still recovering from the financial catastrophe they had suffered in 1991 when £23 million of ratepayers’ money had been lost. The Council’s funds had been deposited with the high interest, high-risk Bank of Credit & Commerce International. When the bank collapsed, there was certainly no money for archaeological acquisitions. Stornoway couldn’t afford the torc and nowadays there is a small photograph of it in the Stornoway museum on Francis Street. The real thing was bought by the Edinburgh museum, for a sum which Donald has asked me not to mention, which was split half and half between him and Kenny and which was substantial enough to have ‘paid off the debts’. It was certainly the best day’s fishing either of the men had ever had. Their catch is now in a high glamour setting in Edinburgh, shut behind glass in a display case made by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi in the form of an aggressive automaton, his hands raised and his aspect fierce, the torc both displayed and protected by his strange and armoured body.
Can one say any more about this wonderful and mysterious object, the most valuable thing ever to have come to the Shiants? Certainly you can tell nothing from the form in which it is so carefully preserved in Edinburgh. That is simply the shape given it by Miranda Grant in her moment of ecstasy. It has no historical significance. But you can at least see that the torc is beautifully made. A square, golden rod, a single ingot hammered to the correct length, has been fluted on each of its four sides so that the four ridged edges of the rod stand out. It has then been held at both ends and carefully twisted, so the four edges of the bar now spiral around it as a continuous decoration. To the ends of this twisted rod two long plain terminals have been welded or soldered, although the junction is carefully concealed within a tiny gold cushion. Those terminals are made so that they will hook around each other, the torc itself providing the spring and elasticity which keeps them locked together on the neck or arm of the wearer.
It is a delicate thing. Alongside it in Edinburgh are examples of neck ornaments from other times and other parts of Scotland. Many of them take the form of vast money display: the huge, early Bronze Age golden collars from Dumfriesshire, which are positively Incan in their scale and vulgarity, or the extraordinary Pictish silver neck-chains from the centuries before the Vikings’ arrival, heavier than dog-collars, perhaps made from melted down late Roman silver, paid to the Picts as protection money; or even the massive Norse brooches and neck rings from the hoard stumbled on in the nineteenth century at Skaill in Orkney, in which the brooches are six inches across, normal objects inflated as a display of power.
The Shiant torc is not like that. There is a simplicity and subtlety to it which perhaps means that it is not intended as a form of dominance. It is meant to decorate rather than to impress and would have graced the body which wore it. One might even have taken a moment or two to recognise that the person was wearing it. This is, in other words, a civilised and not a violent thing, as subtle as scent. Its presence here seems to me as exotic as a silk dress on a cliff face, Audrey Hepburn, somehow, en route to the North Pole. No torc of this kind has ever been found this far north.
What is it doing here? Were the Shiants themselves in the Bronze Age a place of significance, to which objects of this kind would naturally gravitate? Or was it washed it here from somewhere else by the currents of the sea? Did it go down with a boat that was wrecked on the Galtas? Was it dropped overboard by mistake? Or was it, perhaps, deliberately thrown in?
It seems wildly unlikely that the Shiants in the Bronze Age were a place of any importance but how could I tell? The past is so opaque here. Did I really want to poke around in the body of the Shiants? Wasn’t it better to leave things in a state of uncertainty?
For a long time I hesitated. One of the reasons I loved the Shiants was that they were away from the world of definition. When I was a boy, the masters at school would always say, whenever I produced any work, ‘Yes, Adam, but have you thought it through?’ The answer would invariably be no. I never think things through. I never have. I never envisage the end before I plunge into the beginning. I never clarify the whole. I never sort one version of something from any other. I bank on instinct, allowing my nose to sniff its way into the vacuum, trusting that somewhere or other, soon enough, out of the murk, something is bound to turn up.
I’m wedded to this plunging-off form of thought, and to the acceptance of muddle which it implies. Something that is not preordained, that hasn’t even envisaged the far wall before it has started building the near one, has the possibility, at least, of arriving somewhere unexpected. There’s a poem by the American, Denise Levertov, with the marvellous title ‘Overland to the Islands’, which in four words makes a bright little capsule of that frame of mind. Thinkers-through would never go overland to the islands. They would never expect to find the islands there. But Levertov, drop by drop, takes you out, on a mapless walk full of suddenly grasped fragments, each to be treasured for the way it is stumbled on, out of nowhere, with no context. ‘Let’s go,’ she says, ‘much as that dog goes, / Intently haphazard …’
And she does, musically, elegantly, chancily, discovering the Mexican light, the iris ripples on her dog’s back, and his nose sniffing for the next thing.
There’s nothing
the dog disdains on his way,
nevertheless he
keeps moving, changing
pace and approach but
not direction – ‘every step an arrival’.
If I were to erect a motto over the Shiants, I could do worse than almost any one of those lines. ‘Every step an arrival’ should be on the door of the house. Give everything a sniff.
The dogs love the Shiants. It is a dog’s world of not thinking through, of beautiful incoherence and the thing seen for itself, the rocks and mud under the dog nose, that travelling to and fro along the margins of a path, an excited ‘What next?’ as the motivating force in life, a stodgelessness, an inability to plan.
All of this is the opposite of the fashionable qualities. The modern world likes the complete, the systematic, the self-sufficient, the clarified and the unabsorbent. Softness and haze are things to be cleared away. Hard truths are to be revealed by stripping back obscuring surfaces. The landscape you see, with all its fluff and uncertainty, only hides the bones of a lurking reality which archaeology or psychotherapy will all too happily cut back to. Suggestiveness and ambiguity, the half-conditions, in which one thing is not entirely distinct from another, are seen not as something in themselves but as failed or incomplete versions of something else and better. Ignorance is not bliss; it’s a missed opportunity.
‘Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep,’ were the words Byron used to describe one evening twilight. It is a phrase which, with clean-edged condescension, would be considered sentimental now. But what about twilight, dusk and the burnt-out ends of smoky days, as the times in which most understanding is to be had? What about the virtues of ambiguity and the incomparable beauty of a lit sky over a dark earth? Isn’t it reflected, and not direct, light that illuminates the mind?
These were all troubling thoughts for me when I was considering the idea of making a long, deep investigation of the Shiants’ history. Would all the business of finding out destroy the islands’ enveloping magic? Would as much be lost in finding out as was gained? I spent a few days there trying to think it through. Only at the end of the last day did I decide. The blue evening was cre
eping over from the west. ‘Already night in his fold was gathering / A great flock of vagabond stars …’ And the answer was this: once the questions had arisen in my mind, it would be purely sentimental not to attempt to answer them. For many years I had walked across these islands without a question in my head. I had noticed, of course, the ruins here and there, the short stretches of wall, the cultivation ridges, the lazybeds, on whose ribs the forget-me-nots and meadowsweet grew, with the yellow flags and watermint in the ditches between them. They all had remained, so to speak, in a dusky condition, contentedly ambiguous, a sign of the undifferentiated past.
That had changed now. I had changed. I wanted to know. I wanted to bring this ambiguous sub-conscious of the place up to the level of full consciousness. Why? Perhaps because I felt more social about the islands. In my twenties, they had been somewhere to escape from a fretful marriage and from a fretful job in a publishers’ office. They were cut away from the adult world, somewhere a kind of ideal and delayed boyhood could be lived out for a few weeks. Isolation was integral to that. This was a place where I was happy to be alone. The idea of investigating earlier lives, and all the team work that would have involved, would have been an interruption to the pleasures and safety of solitude.
That is what has changed and this book is evidence of it. I have known the ecstasy of being alone here but at least partly I have left that behind. It was fuelled by a feeling that the presence of other people could only be damaging and that islands at least allowed the solitary self to exist without apology. I don’t feel that any more. Solitariness now seems to me a diminished rather than a heightened state. It is one way of being alive, with its own rewards, but it is not necessarily the best way and, besides, solitude can only mean anything in counterpoint to sociability. Now I want to people these islands, both in reality, and in that deeper sense, to discover what life the Shiants might have nurtured over the years.
I left with my mind made up. In the University Library at Cambridge I found a series of volumes published by various archaeological expeditions to the Hebrides. One in particular drew my eye. It described the discovery of a Neolithic house, lying just under the floor surface of a late-eighteenth-century house in the obscure valley of a stream called Allt Chrisal in Barra. The excavations had summoned an exact and ancient past, full of ghostly suggestions of hearths and sleeping places, potsherds and flint tools, from a landscape which all others had looked at with scarcely a second thought. Its authors were Keith Branigan and Patrick Foster, from Sheffield University. I rang Branigan. He was too busy and put me on to Foster, now attached to the State Institute of Archaeology in Prague. I rang him there. Would he leave his Hallstatt burials and Neolithic riverside timber halls for a while and come to the stony exigencies of the Shiants? He jumped at it. His Hebridean programme had come to an end. He had been longing to return. When could he come?
Pat is a remarkable man and gifted archaeologist, of enormous, cheerful enthusiasm and a wide variety of experience, (son of a Northamptonshire stonemason, gunner in the Royal Artillery, stationed for two years on St Kilda, mature PhD student at Sheffield University, studying the reuse of Roman building stone in Saxon churches, tyre salesman, collector of postcards, guns from the Wild West and a variety of mementos of the British Empire).
He is passionate, physically strong, full of unstoppable energy and with a commitment to the field realities of archaeology, to getting your hands dirty. He arrived one afternoon on Malcolm Macleod’s boat from Stornoway. I went out to meet him and as he stepped down into the dinghy, he was rubbing his hands like a hungry man about to sit down to dinner. I gave him a cup of tea in the house and he began surveying the territory. From morning till night, he walked up and down the islands. You would see him from time to time on the skyline, or peering down at some tumbled stones, or just occasionally, in the lee of an old wall, catching a few minutes sleep in the sunshine. I came with him as much as I could and we walked across the islands together, for many hours, arguing, suggesting, attempting to find coherence in the evidence he was turning up.
The places in which people have lived here are not scattered at random across the islands like confetti after a wedding. Just as the puffins cluster in some spots particularly suited to them – ground good for burrowing, steep enough for easy take-off – guillemots and razorbills in others – room for communal clustering on convenient shelves, access to fishing grounds – people over the millennia have used what the landscape has given them.
As the days went by, I took Pat to the different parts of the islands where I thought people must have lived. We treated the Shiants like prospectors, newly arrived in a new world. What would we make of this? What kind of life could we sustain here? The first place, of course, was around the modern house on Eilean an Tighe. Down there on the coastal shelf is where anyone would choose: near a landing beach and and within a minute or two of both west and east coasts, lots of sweet water in the small seeps at the cliff foot, mounds of seaweed from the bay on the west coast, good growing ground, easy, level, relatively rich, convenient. It is not surprising that the modern house and other early and recent buildings are here. It is where, when I am here with my family, we spend most of our time, moving between boats and shore and well and house, digging over the vegetable garden, cooking sometimes on the flat rocks beside the ruins. It is the most obvious place for a Shiant home. As a result, there is little that is identifiable as prehistoric on the ground. Pat was convinced, though, that it was certain to be there, buried under later structures. Any investigation would have to wait.
A thin, old path leads from that house settlement up into the middle valley of Eilean an Tighe, skirting the upper edge of the cultivation ridges, running between them and the steep screes above. The path is as wriggly as a thread fallen on carpet and after a climb of a hundred and fifty feet or so it emerges on to the wide, level plateau of the central valley. Here there is a second cluster of buildings. They do not seem older than the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but with good corn ground here (now undrained and so boggy) and sweet running water, it is nearly inconceivable that these later buildings do not overlie much earlier structures. They are not near the shore, but are within fifteen minutes’ walk of the landing beach. This, too, hidden beneath the early modern ruins and the rushes and flag irises that have grown up around them, is another place of ancient habitation. It is the site, as I shall describe later, of the house we excavated.
This was a strange experience for me. Places in which I had only ever walked and looked before were now subject to analysis and investigation. Everywhere we came to I could remember playing football with my children, or lying in the shelter of the walls away from the wind on a sunny day, or going there in the middle of a summer night, with the starlight dropping around us and the snipe fluting in the marsh. I had never, curiously, considered much beyond an idle thought what had happened there before. So this was an intriguing and rattling experience: the archaeologist and the psychoanalyst are close cousins.
Then I took Pat over to Garbh Eilean, dragging him up the steep southern face, Sron Lionta, and over to what has always been to me one of the most lovely places on the Shiants, tucked into the south-west coast of the island. It is called Annat, a name whose resonances I will explore later. A stream comes down to the shore there, dropping from one peaty, basin-sized pool to another, running between little meadows and then tumbling over the black rocks into a deep, seaweed-lined pool, where on calm days a boat can be brought in as if next to a quay, and where you can swim with twelve feet of water below you, glass-clear to the red of the dulse and the fretted lionskin of the wrack, while the fresh, cold moorland water drops through a beard of green weed on to your head. There is ruin after ruin here, one laid on top of another. The soil is not particularly rich, although it is not as sour as the moor above and has obviously been improved. A huge, round stone platform, perhaps a hundred feet across and up to eight feet deep, has been built here next to the place where the stream falls into
the sea. Pat thought that it might well be the foundations of a large Neolithic house. There are vestiges of other buildings, including what might be a small, round Bronze Age house, and a large, mysterious D-shaped enclosure, perhaps for animals. In the nineteenth century, shepherds built a fank here, a sheep-gathering pen, using the stone they found on the surface, and little of what had been there before is now obvious.
Annat, too, awaits its excavation. It may well turn out to be the richest place of all the places on the Shiants.
Up from there, over the heights of Garbh Eilean and down at the far north-eastern corner to the place now known as the Bagh, the Gaelic for ‘Bay’. It was like showing Pat my treasures, opening box after box. Here, around the lush and bright green slopes there is another set of tumbled and ruined buildings. This, too, feels like a favoured place: the best shelter from the southwesterlies in any part of the islands, in under the lee of the big north cliffs; a supply of fresh water seeping from the rocks, which I have never known run dry; luscious red and pink campions grown from the turfy cushions; highly productive land on the underlying band of Jurassic rocks, some of the best soils not only in the Shiants but in the whole stretch of the Outer Hebrides from the Sound of Harris to Stornoway; a convenient landing place in the bay below; plenty of easily harvested seaweed to enrich the soils; and the enormous quantities of sea birds which nest in the surrounding screes and grassy slopes, in their hundreds of thousands.
One of the miracles of the Shiants is that a place like this, no more than a few acres, and no more than a mile from the modern house and the landing beach, feels as if it is in a different world. Perhaps because of its shelter from the wind, perhaps because of the sweetness of the turf in which the daisies grow like on a southern lawn; perhaps because of the way the puffins wheel across this corner, their shadows cast onto the grass like the revolving patterns of light and dark on a Fifties dance floor; perhaps because from here the Shiants are spread out before you to make an auditorium, cupping the bay of the islands in their arms; perhaps because from here there are such wonderful views across the Stream of the Blue Men to the long, tweed-coloured coast of Pairc, blue in its prominences, black and brown in the depths of its crevices, so near on a bright day you think you could touch Kebock Head; perhaps because a long habit of occupation is so obvious here, this, I think, is where I would have lived.
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