It is not surprising that here, among the more ambiguous heaps of stone – fowling shelters, summer huts or shielings from the nineteenth century, whose corner cupboards raised above the earth floors were intended to keep the dairy products cool – is something which seems to emerge from an extraordinarily distant past. Like almost every other structure noticed by Pat, no one had seen it before. Some way up from the beach, settled into the grassy slope below the cliffs, a few yards away from the edge of the enormous screes into which the tumbled blocks of columnar dolerite have collapsed, are a pair of rock shelters.
A many-tonned lump of rock, about ten feet across, has fallen so that its two edges rest on other rocks, leaving an irregular hollow beneath it, six or eight feet across and about four feet high. Its floor is very crudely but quite unmistakably paved with small, flattish slabs. Where the boulders do not quite make a neat seal around the place they enclose, small lengths of dry-stone walling have been built to fill in the gaps. Inside the shelter, structures which look like stone shelving have been built. Although it is a little sheepy now, and there are rats that run in and out of the place, it is not at all difficult when you crawl in there to imagine this as a kind of home. It is a tent made of boulders. As my son Ben said to me, it is the sort of shed Fred Flintstone might have built.
There is another slightly smaller one just downhill from the first and alongside them, where the sheep have kicked open the turf, limpet shells and pieces of crude, undatable pottery tumble down the slope: the midden, the rubbish heap, of those who used the shelters. It is not possible to date them yet. Extremely careful, microsurgical excavation might do that in the future and all Pat Foster will currently say, once again, is the careful non-commitment of the archaeologist: ‘multi-period’.
We went over to Eilean Mhuire, but here the mystery remains as profound as it has ever been. Most of its upper surface is made up of the soft Jurassic rocks which are also to be found at the Bagh on Garbh Eilean. The rocks have meant that nowhere on the Shiants is more luscious than these soft, easy slopes. It is salutary to remember that almost the entire history of the Shiants would have been shoeless. Even in the early twentieth century on Lewis there were families living without shoes. That understanding transforms your idea of the way in which people lived here, their canny, prehensile toes, gripping the rocks with an assurance and a fittedness which we have now lost. And after climbing up from the beach on Mary, a stiff, crumbly climb on a narrow path through the igneous rocks that underlie the sedimentaries of the upper surface, you can feel today, if you do this shoeless, the beautiful relief of arriving at Mary’s luxuriant pastures. This is the island of fertility and welcome. It is all too easy to imagine these Atlantic islands, as Yeats said of the Arans, as places ‘where men must reap with knives because of the stones’. That is not true on Eilean Mhuire. It would always have been the Shiant islanders’ granary. It was their garden island and the sheep that graze here are still the fattest that either the Shiants or anywhere else in Lewis can produce. It is and always has been good land.
Did people live on Eilean Mhuire in prehistory? That question cannot yet be answered. There are the remains of seventeen houses here, two or three of them making mounds that stand seven feet above the surrounding land.
Such an accumulation of material surely indicates long occupation. But there is a difficulty. Because the Jurassic rocks crumble so easily there is almost no building stone on the upper surface of the island. These house remains are made of turf, which has itself broken down to soil. There is, in other words, no hard structure which archaeology can interrogate. So how old are these buildings? How many of them were in use at the same time? Were they permanent or temporary habitations? Certainly this is the richest place in the islands, but it is also one of the windiest, and its water supply, from a deep, rushy hollow on the southern side, is not entirely reliable. Would people have lived here if they could have chosen to live at the Bay or at Annat or at either of the spots on Eilean an Tighe? Probably not. Eilean Mhuire would have been of central importance for the Shiant Islanders’ food supply but would not have been a favoured place to live, particularly in the winter, when gales from all quarters would sweep across it.
These were the five places in which people would have lived on the Shiants, at least in the last few centuries: two on Eilean an Tighe, two on Garbh Eilean and one on Eilean Mhuire. Pat found one other cluster of what looked like prehistoric houses. It was the most intriguing. On the high ground of Garbh Eilean, some four hundred and fifty feet above sea-level, in an area which is now no more than acid peat bog (with the marks of some nineteenth-century peat cutting still visible in it) are one or two rushy pools and sour, reddish moor grasses. This is the area now occupied most densely by the great skuas. They have only been there since the mid-1980s, spreading south from their breeding grounds in the northern isles. In early summer, when defending their young, they are terrifying birds, an imperial presence on the heights of the island, carefully shadowing your arrival on their ground, making an admonitory ‘kark’ at first from a distance, sometimes accompanied by a beautiful, high-winged display, as two birds fly one above the other, both with their wings lifted in a steep-sided V of victory and viciousness. If you persist with your trespass, the skuas come for you, flying as adroitly as hunter-fighters in a mountainous battle zone, concealing themselves behind the natural mounding of the island until the last minute, when they emerge, feet from your head, with a rushing of air in wings. I have never been hit but Kennie Mackenzie, John Murdo Matheson’s uncle, knew a man who had his scalp split open by a passing skua. ‘It was the shock more than anything,’ Kennie said.
Here, in their territory, are several stony mounds which are likely to conceal some form of prehistoric habitation. Many of them, all now visible from hundreds of yards away because their better drainage and the enrichment of the soil allows sweeter, greener grasses to grow there, had summer huts or shielings built on top of them in the nineteenth century. And that is where the skuas make their surveying stands. It is a Hebridean stratigraphy: possible Bronze or Iron age houses, nineteenth-century shielings in which the girls and boys would stay in the summer, tending to the cattle, making the cheese and butter, and above them the skuas, Viking birds, heroic, bitter northern, aggressive, magnificent modern invaders. Bits and pieces of puffin and kittiwake litter their nests.
No one of course would think of living up there now. The conditions would be intolerable and there would be nothing to draw you there. You could grow nothing in those waterlogged soils. But if you wanted a demonstration of the deterioration in the climate, this is it. What is now peat bog might, in the Bronze Age, have been freshwater pools. What is now sour moorland through which the sheep pick to find their sustenance might then have been arable fields. On Lewis itself, near the stone circles at Callanish, archaeologists from Edinburgh University have cut through the peat, sometimes five or six feet deep, to find Neolithic fields, complete with stone walls, houses and the marks of primitive ploughs lying underneath, exactly as they were abandoned, the people retreating through the thickening of the rain and wind. Up here are the remains of what may well be ancient habitations and, under the ruin of a nineteenth-century summer shieling, the remains of the largest structure ever built on the Shiants. It is an Iron Age house, sitting on a mound or platform fifty feet across and six feet high. The house itself is perhaps thirty feet in diameter, able to accommodate perhaps as many as fifteen people, and with clear marks of radial dividing walls still poking out between the nettles. That too awaits excavation.
Apart from that ancient anomaly, high on Garbh Eilean, there is distinct pattern here. It seems that the Shiants – like many parts of upland Britain – divide into two sorts of landscape, which are inter-dependent and can broadly be defined as ‘core’ and ‘margin’. In the cores, you have arable ground, fresh water and easy access to the shore. In the margins you have rough grazing, bogs or stagnant pools and a great distance from boats and beaches. People bu
ild their houses and live permanently in the core areas. In the margins, they go in the summer, building shelters and temporary lean-tos, but little more.
Pat also discovered a fascinating extra dimension to this relationship of core to margin. Arranged on the skylines, as seen from these core settlement areas, are a succession of prehistoric ritual sites, deep in the sour and marginal country. On Eilean an Tighe, a series of Bronze Age cairns stand sentinel on the high ground to the east and south of the settled areas. On Garbh Eilean, there are other Bronze Age cairns on the heights, while, above the north-western cliffs of Stocanish, the Shiants’ own diminutive menhir, standing only eight inches high on a mound about four feet across, perhaps marks a Bronze Age grave.
As will emerge later, when the Norse arrived, they too seem to have made use of the dramatic skyline for their own burials.
Tentative, uncertain and provisional as it is, not making any firm distinctions between different periods of prehistory, a kind of answer emerges from the survey. The place was occupied in prehistory with evidence of Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age houses. The Shiants are a microcosm, if a slightly impoverished one, of the Hebrides as a whole. There are armies of ghosts here. One can make a guess at how many Shiant Islanders there have ever been. If each of the core areas could accommodate a family of, say, five people; if the islands were occupied from, say, 3000 BC until the mid-eighteenth century, a length of about four thousand, eight hundred years; and if people lived on average until they were thirty, that would give you about three and a half thousand people who would have known the Shiants as home. This is not an empty rock; it is soaked in memory. At the moment little more than that can be said.
My question remains nearly unanswered. Would the Shiants have been the sort of place in the Bronze Age to which an object such as the golden torc dredged up off the Galtas would naturally have belonged? Probably not. It is not rich enough. The island group is too small, too poor and too difficult to access for any great or rich man ever to have made it his headquarters. In prehistory, as ever, the Shiants were in the shadow of the bulk of Lewis to the west. The torc, in other words, came from somewhere else.
Was it, then, somehow wafted here? Perhaps. Because the sea-bed in the Minch is extremely lumpy, the passage of anything across its floor would be difficult, but it is not inconceivable that a light metal object such as this might be drifted from one place to another. Stones of all sorts are to be found on the Shiant beaches. There are always one or two cobbles of black and white banded gneiss from Lewis to be found among the cool grey of the Shiant dolerites. Some of those will certainly have been dropped here by glaciers. There is a large lump of gneiss sitting on the turf at the eastern end of Eilean Mhuire, brought here by glacier from around Stornoway, twenty miles to the north. But other stones, red granites, green cupric metamorphics, even the occasional tiny natural flint nodule, all of which you find on the beach and all of whose origins can only have been to the south or east, could not have been brought here by the ice sheet, which was travelling in the other direction.
So the torc might have been washed here by the tide or by the slow underlying current which pushes slowly north, year in, year out, up the Minch. The existence of that current was only detected in the 1980s when the movement of radiocaesium from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant on the west coast of Cumbria was tracked up the Minch and out into the North Atlantic. Thanks to the persistence of radiocaesium, that current, it is now known, moves at about two and a half miles a day, nine hundred miles a year. The torc has had three thousand years to get here – it is contemporary with Greeks laying siege to Troy. It had time enough to have come here from anywhere.
The simple wafting of the torc must remain a possibility, although perhaps an unlikely one. So did it, then, go down in a Bronze Age wreck? Divers and marine archaeologists have asked Donald MacSween exactly where he found the torc. He will not say. Not that he can know precisely. On the trawl which picked it up, the scallop dredge had been down for several hours as the Favour followed its usual spiral path round and round the sea-bed. He has gone back himself but nothing else of the sort has yet emerged from the spot. But perhaps there is a Bronze Age wreck down there. Evidence is accumulating that the Bronze Age seas, while not exactly crowded with shipping, would not have been an utterly alien environment to man. Bronze Age boats have long been known from the Humber Estuary, where three have been dug out of the clay ooze. Their heavy oak planks were laced together with lashings made of yew, part of a sewn boat tradition that extends around northern Europe, through the Baltic and across the Kola peninsula to northern Russia.
The Humber boats were probably only used as ferries across the estuary but more relevant is a large sea-going Bronze Age boat, about forty foot long, found in Dover in 1992. The boat, which was about the same age as the torc, was partly pegged together and partly stitched with yew withies. The seams had been made watertight by squeezing moss between the huge oak planks. John MacAulay knew a man whose father was still doing the same in the Hebrides early in the twentieth century, the only difference being that he soaked the moss in Stockholm tar. The bottom of the Dover boat had clearly been run up again and again on stony shores and been grooved and scuffed in the process. And inside it the archaeologists found part of its ancient cargo, a piece of shale from Kimmeridge, a hundred and eighty miles away along the south coast of England.
No one has found any convincing evidence of a Bronze Age sail, at least outside the Mediterranean, but it seems likely that early journeys across the Minch would have been under sail. It was a case then, as now in Freyja, or any craft with vulnerabilities, of picking your day. Surely to the south of here, the large paddle-driven boat would have aimed to make a crossing, perhaps from Ireland, perhaps from Wales, both possible sources of the gold in the torc, to the Scottish or English shore. It would have felt good, as ever, when they set out. The boat would have seemed large and capable in the calm and the sunshine. People have surely always laughed at this moment, when the sea seems kind and the future a sequence of possibilities? Then the weather turns wrong, and the experience is one only of fear. The boat was surely driven north in the storm, rather than making its way here. For what could a man or woman who had in their possession such a torc want with this northern place? Perhaps for a day or two, they were driven before the wind. It is two hundred miles to the Shiants from Malin Head, the nearest point of Ireland. It would take a day and a night at five knots, suffering the cold of hell, baling hard as one roller after another came aboard, to cross that sea. Suddenly, out of the storm those bitter rocks would materialise, and the people would die as the surf threw them at the pinnacles. One piece of geometry is significant: Donald and Kenny found the torc on the southern side of the Galtas. That was the side from which the Bronze Age boat was slammed into them. Those rocks, a bar set by the Shiants, mark the northern limit beyond which the golden torcs of Celtic Europe never reached.
The experience of shipwreck would have been the same millennium after millennium and almost every one would have gone unrecorded. Only after the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854 were the Receivers of Wreck in every port around Britain obliged to make an Examination on Oath of the master of any ship that was lost in the waters for which they were responsible. Finally, in the last few decades before marine combustion engines changed for ever the relationship of man to the sea, the pitiable condition of ships in a storm are recorded.
There is an account taken down by the Stornoway Receiver in January 1876 which goes some way to re-enacting the loss of the Bronze Age boat. The Neda, a large, wooden barque, three hundred and seventy-four tons, registered at Newcastle, had as master Joseph Clark, a Newcastle man. His wife and child were on board and there were ten crew, including the Irish mate Patrick Brady, an illiterate. The Neda had been at Dublin and cast off from the docks at noon on 17 January, destined for Newcastle, the tide at half flood and the wind blowing a fresh breeze from the west. The intention had been to go by the Irish Sea and English
Channel but because of the wind backing into the south-west, it was, as Brady told the Receiver ‘decided to go north about’.
All went well until they passed the light on Skerryvore, the shipwrecking rock, one of the richest of all British graveyards, standing ten miles out into the Atlantic south-west of Tiree. They had passed the light at nine o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, and soon afterwards ‘a heavy gale, accompanied by drizzling rain and a high sea sprang up’. Half-way through that afternoon, in steadily deteriorating conditions, the Master laid the ship to, under nothing but her reefed main topsail. The storm worsened and visibility sank. Constant watch was kept for any land. At three o’clock the following morning, land, somehow, was sighted and they stood in towards it. Only at six did the day lighten enough for them to recognise it as the south-west corner of Skye, dominated by the heights of the Cuillins. (That is the reason all mountains in the Hebrides have Norse names: they are the only seamarks in foul weather.)
Immediately, Clark put the Neda onto the other tack and headed for the western side of the Minch. About ten o’clock that morning, Sunday 23 January, they sighted an island to the north but it could not be identified, ‘the wind at the time rising in the SSW and blowing a gale and the weather very thick with rain.’ They had no idea where they were. For safety’s sake, he brought all the crew on deck and turned east again, away from the Harris shore. The wind had shifted a little, now south by west, and was shrieking in the rigging. Mrs Clark and their child were cowering below. Quite suddenly, ‘a quarter of a mile ahead, a little on the port bow’, the Shiants came at them, out of ‘the thick rain gale’. The ship was immediately ‘hauled to the wind and every effort made to escape the land’, as Brady told the Receiver of Wreck, ‘but this being found impossible Master ordered said ship to be run ashore on the largest of the Shiant Islands.’
Sea Room Page 11