Surfacing Read online

  Graeme or Hazel would stop what they were doing to explain the site, making a slow tour of the perimeter with the interested parties. Most left enthused, but the team told me they had once had a visitor who declared it was ‘all impossible – because people were monkeys then, five thousand years ago.’

  One afternoon an elderly couple made their way up from the beach slowly through the soft sand to the site’s edge. As was often the case, they were retirees, holiday-makers with the means to follow their interests into their sixties, seventies, even eighties. After Hazel had explained to them what was going on, they worked their way round the perimeter of the site to where I was standing, still trying to get my eye in.

  They were Australian, and the man was on a sentimental journey. He joined me overlooking the site, watching the archaeologists, but what he wanted to talk about was his own family. He was tall, rheumy-eyed, and he told me his forebears had come from Westray. To be precise, his great-great-grandfather had left the island in 1870, at age nineteen.

  He had never been here before, but he had asked around and found, been shown, actually been to visit, the very cottage his forebear had left. ‘See...’ – he held out his camera so that I could see a photo of a typical nineteenth-century island two-room but and ben. Its original roof, probably flagstones, had been replaced with one of corrugated iron, its windows were broken, but nonetheless it was the croft on the hill, and it was still there.

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ I said. ‘Thrilling to have found it...’

  ‘It was easy. I asked the islanders. They just said, “Huh, you’re one o’ them. That was their house up there...” We even saw the pier he had sailed from...’

  Then the woman spoke. ‘And now we’re at the other side of the planet.’

  She looked at the Neolithic houses which had lain cold in the ground these five thousand years, now in the process of being dug out. Perhaps a frisson about time and its passing touched her, because she said, ‘We don’t live long, do we?’

  At tea break I told the archaeologists about the Australian man seeking his ancestral home, but they just laughed.

  ‘I bet they send everyone to the same old house ... Look! This was your grandaddy’s,’ said Criostoir.

  ‘I bet it’s for sale!’ said Emily.

  Later a group of three English women arrived, determinedly wearing flowery summer skirts. ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘we live here now, on Westray.’

  Half the island’s population are incomers, mostly from England. It’s English accents you hear in the shops and hotel bar. Because of this influx, Westray’s population has risen to seven hundred, following a slump that imperilled the school and shops.

  ‘Visitors think it’s lovely and wild,’ said Graeme later, ‘but it’s a monoculture.’

  ‘You mean the farms? All the beef cattle?’

  ‘They do one thing, but they do it well. There’s less diversity, even since we came here. Fewer tattie patches, less arable. Since the new ro-ro ferry came, people can easily get to Tesco in Kirkwall.’

  At the end of the day, Graeme stood at the theodolite, as he did every afternoon, to note the position of the finds. Numbers are called: 3015 flint, 3016 flint, 3017 pot. Occasionally ochre or rose quartz. The finds are taken in plastic bags to await their journey to the store, where they will wait again until the excavation is over and the long ‘post-ex’ business of analysis and study begins. Well, they’ve waited long enough anyway, the flints and bones, for their moment of fame.

  After the finds were noted, at about ten to five, he gave the nod and trowels were thrown into buckets, buckets piled onto wheelbarrows and trundled round to the site hut.

  No one hung about on site any longer than they had to, except Graeme himself, who remained standing in the middle of the enclosure, in his blue coat and woolly hat, looking pensive.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s all a bit confusing. It’s not coming together yet.’

  ‘Will it?’

  ‘It’ll have to! Else ... we’ll just have to forget about it.’

  * * *

  * * *

  The evenings were long and light, so usually I went out. I took myself down a sandy path between fields toward another bay, a sheltered one called the Mae Sands.

  Inevitably, a few cows grazed and a gang of ravens called to each other and tumbled in the air. In rare places where no cattle could reach, like the verges of the little path, there grew purple knapweed, yarrow, self-heal, and orange bees foraged.

  The path opened onto a half-mile of sand curving away eastward, with a wall of dunes behind. On the sand grew clumps of sea-rocket, which were in flower. It was so calm, their faint perfume scented the beach, while sand formed sculptural vanes on the plants’ downwind side. At the strandline, turnstones worked over the weed, and a party of sanderlings scuttled away from each new shallow wave. Seals watched from the water, two or three.

  Being on site often left me freighted with thoughts about time, how it seems to expand and contract. I kept having to remind myself of the ages that passed during what we call the Neolithic or the Bronze Age. How those people’s days were as long and vital as ours.

  I tried to picture that pioneer generation, landing on a lonely shore with provisions stowed and live animals tethered in the bottom of their boats. Sheep under a net, seed corn and tools, the transforming ‘Neolithic package’ that had been pushing across Europe for a couple of thousand years before it reached here. It was a way of life that bound you inescapably.

  But does it matter, how it began? What Links reveals is the long and various ‘middles,’ the daily getting on with it that most of us inhabit, if we’re fortunate enough to live in times of peace.

  Was there peace? They’d found no evidence of real conflict or warfare. But they had discovered a body roughly buried, a body without a head.

  ‘You wonder what transgression that was...’ Graeme said mildly.

  * * *

  * * *

  On site, where Anna and I were still trowelling away our ‘deposition layer,’ I cleaved to the idea of the encircling wall, because it was simple and a boundary. There were structures outside the wall which had already been excavated, other houses, Bronze Age things, but for now the enclosure helped me to understand the site. Within the wall, the village. Beyond the wall, beyond the pale – there was the wild unknown.

  Hazel had made a remark that stayed with me. She had said that the early Neolithic farmers were only a step away from the wild, and they knew it. I began to wonder what it might have meant to them then, back when ‘wild’ was a new idea. Did stories linger of a way of life before farming, before cattle raising and sheep? Did ‘the wild’ thrill them, darkly? Shame them?

  Arrowheads had been found on the site; people still went hunting. An intrigue had arisen about deer because deer-bones had also been found – whole skeletons, in fact. But there are no deer on the island now; it’s too farmed, too small. It’s possible that deer might have been imported by Neolithic people and set free to roam the still-wild hinterland, occasionally to be hunted. But mostly they were cattle-rearing folk, and how.

  Some years ago, the team found cows’ skulls set into the walls of a largish building, set slightly apart from the houses. Built into the fabric of its wall was a complete ring of cattle skulls, all placed upside down, with the horns facing into the room. Then the wall was built up over them, and clay packed on top, so they were no longer visible. But presumably their presence was felt by those who used the space.

  ‘What did it mean?’ I asked. ‘A mass slaughter? Some kind of grand sacrifice?’

  ‘No,’ said Hazel. ‘Why would you do that? It would be suicidal to slaughter all those beasts at once, if you couldn’t preserve the meat. No, the dating has shown that these cattle had died, or had been slaughtered, over a span of two hundred years. The skulls must have been coll
ected...’

  ‘Curated’ was Graeme’s word.

  ‘... accumulated in some way before the building was made, and then inserted.’

  ‘You mean, a collection must have been built up over several generations, and then built into a wall?’

  ‘They must have had symbolic or aesthetic significance.’

  Hazel and Graeme were in the shipping container that served them as a site office, files and stores around them. Insurance documents pinned to the wall, the number of the island surgery. Hazel went on, ‘I think they just had a collection they didn’t know what to do with. Too many to keep, too precious to throw away. You know what it’s like. So this was a solution.’

  I’d begun to understand that, although Hazel and Graeme didn’t agree on everything, their general attitude was like this. An Occam’s razor. Don’t reach for a flamboyant interpretation when a more straightforward one would do. There are other Neolithic sites all over Europe, even on Orkney, where cattle skulls have been discovered in prominent positions or in great number. Sometimes the rush to publicise has meant garish headlines. Huge sacrificial feasts are invoked, with spectacle and conspicuous consumption.

  ‘But you think they simply kept the skulls of their cattle – or some of them, at least – and then eventually they just had to de-clutter?’

  ‘Remember,’ said Graeme, ‘these animals would have had biographies.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘They would have been known as individuals. As personalities. Spoken about.’

  ‘Named?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You think they revered their cows?’

  ‘Worshipped!’ Hazel laughed.

  And loved their horns. It is possible that the Links people managed their cattle herds, and favoured a ‘wild’ look. They liked big bulk, and long horns, and to get that, there is some suggestion, yet to be fully explored, that they’d breed a wild aurochs into their herd now and again. Aurochs were massive wild cattle, now extinct. If someone wanted an aurochs, he’d have to catch it, albeit a calf, from mainland Scotland, truss it in a boat and bring it over the Pentland Firth, then island-hop it back to Westray. No mean feat, if that was how it was done. And all because the Links people loved the sight of horned cattle, because cattle were their pride and joy. If that was how it was. At the moment, this was just a hint among bits of bone, a speculation among skulls.

  * * *

  * * *

  Sometimes, on my evening outings, I cycled the last mile of road on the south side, near to the marvellous house where I had my room. The road climbed a short steep hill, passing an open byre where a hundred starlings roosted, and some fields where cows grazed, then ran on along a hillside before ending in a yard. From the road-end you could walk all the way to the lighthouse on its cliffs.

  A particular breeze-block shed usually gave shelter from the wind and I liked to hunker there and look for birds. It always took me a while to settle. After a day spent in company concentrating on a square of ancient earth, it was a shock to be alone in the vast moment of now.

  Before me was the shining Firth; sometimes the sea roared. A kestrel often hunted the shoreline there, and one evening, when the tide was high and waves were washing onto the rocks, and a flock of curlew was sleeping out of the waves’ reach, I saw a swallow leave. The swallow was just a flicker of dark that caught my eye. It ventured out from the land, directly southward over the waves, and was at once lost to view, so brave and small.

  Mostly what I noticed, however, was dereliction. The new farm buildings didn’t interest me; the breeze-block barn just kept the wind off, but increasingly I noticed old byres and ruined but and bens, and those odd corners where farmers threw worn-out tyres and pallets and bits of broken machinery.

  There was one particular row of long-abandoned cottages guarded by nettles, which I passed on this outing. The roofs were all but gone, and through glass-less windows I saw fireplaces, and patches of distressed green paint on architraves. Junk and lumber, all lit through holes in the roof. At one door stood a tank made of flagstones in the island manner. They tugged at the heart, these places. Where had the people gone? Maybe a half-mile away, maybe Australia.

  I noted a tractor so long forsaken that grass was growing up through its engine block.

  This is how it happens, I thought. This was how Links must have been, with new buildings next to old, and old ones put to new uses, then filled with junk, then cleared out again and redesigned by idealistic descendants. Then the whole lot abandoned, and left for thousands of years.

  * * *

  * * *

  Soon the JCB arrived and it was bittersweet to watch it clatter back and forth, making short work of the spoil heaps. It was a small orange machine driven by a neighbouring farmer, and with a few deft scoops it shifted all the spoil, along with an underlying layer of vegetation and sand, dumping it all back against the chain-link fence that separated the site from the cows’ field next door. Months’ worth of sweat and work, hand-shifted earth and sand and stone was removed in an hour. When it was done and the farmer and machine had gone away, what was exposed was flat scraped earth of rich chocolate brown.

  This brown earth, now feeling the sunshine for the first time in three-and-a-half thousand years, was a Bronze Age field surface. It wouldn’t bask there for long, because below lay the Neolithic remains Graeme and Hazel wanted to reach.

  But Bronze Age people had farmed right here, because they knew this patch was fertile, albeit stony and prone to sand-blow. It was fertile because it had been laid over Neolithic midden: the dumps of house-sweepings and shells, dung and ash. Bone-heaps where dogs roamed, looking for scraps.

  By the Bronze Age the Neolithic houses were already buried, mere stones sticking up through the earth, mere annoyances.

  This is what I meant about time contracting and expanding and turning round on itself. I had to remind myself of just how many centuries separated the two Ages, although only a few centimetres of earth.

  Bronze Age, Neolithic. ‘They’re just labels,’ said the archaeologists. ‘People just got on with it. And besides, though we talk about the Bronze Age, very few bronze artefacts have yet been discovered on Orkney.’

  ‘Look at this stone,’ said Emily. She was working in a Neolithic house, or a structure of some sort, and was patiently excavating the skeleton of a small deer which lay on a slab within the house, for reasons unknown. But she stood to show me one of the stones of her structure. Its upper surface was scratched all over, and its edge was dinked where the ploughshare had passed over it, stone on stone. Maybe the ploughshare broke. How they must have cursed, in their lost language. Dug out the offending stones, their forebears’ walls and furniture, heaved them aside.

  Eventually people quit trying to haul crops out of these small, difficult fields. The climate had cooled, sand blew in too often. They moved elsewhere, and in due course sand dunes formed, the same dunes that remained into our own times, till new winds rose and obliterated them.

  But where did the people go once they quit the settlement at Links? Gone was the wild or unclaimed land of two thousand years before. They couldn’t just sail off and found a new place, as their long-ago forebears had done.

  ‘Not far away,’ said Emily. ‘You see that grassy mound along the shore there? That’s an Iron Age settlement.’

  After lunch, taken in the shelter of the site hut, Anna and Dan and I were sent back to work on the newly exposed area. We had to trowel through the field surface to reach any structures beneath. It was hard work. Dan is strong and could quickly tear with his trowel through the packed brown earth. He was nearest the wall.

  He dressed always in black, a black scarf round his tied back hair, slightly piratical, and he wore a big bead on a leather thong at his throat. Anna, who was slightly built, worked in the middle and then came me, the newbie. We moved backwards, side by side, kneel
ing on pads, and, because the earth was thin, the enclosing wall began to emerge, what was left of it. As Graeme had predicted, more structures duly appeared within the settlement it defined, maybe houses, which they would have to excavate in the couple of months left of the season.

  Despite being confirmed in their hunch, Hazel and Graeme looked weary. They had a very modern problem in the midst of the Neolithic: they were coming to the end of their funding. HES – Historic Environment Scotland – had repeatedly warned that this year would have to be the last.

  An hour later I caught Hazel at her makeshift desk inside the shipping container, and I asked her about the funding. The nearer the deadline drew, the more features were being found; how typical. The budget of HES was not something the Neolithic farmers had given thought to when they built and kept rebuilding.

  ‘If HES really pull out, what will happen?’

  ‘We’ll have to look elsewhere and make all sorts of promises. We can’t look to the EU any more. There are other finding bodies, but...’

  ‘What sort of promises?’

  ‘Usually, to engage with people not usually engaged with archaeology. That kind of thing.’

  Outside there was the sea and sand, the same lobster boat in the distance that came by almost every day, some gannets diving. Inland, some farms on the hill, a turbine, cattle grazing quietly.

  ‘What people?’

  ‘The kind of people who don’t usually pee in a sand dune. Seriously, if we were to raise money by opening the site to the public, to visitors, to parties from cruise ships, we’d need toilets. There’s not a metre of land here suitable for toilets that hasn’t got archaeology under it. And I don’t know if I want to be responsible for bringing cruise ships here...’

  ‘What a strange thing to have to pander to, cruise ships. If the oil price jacks up – no cruise ships.’