Surfacing Read online

  I said, ‘That bloke’s looking for treasure.’

  Treasure, and you have the greatest Neolithic assemblage not a mile away.

  Hazel turned back in her seat. ‘The richest Viking graves ever found, pagan graves, were discovered here in Pierowall. They’re under the council scheme now.’

  Later, in the twilight of my room, I lay on the bed. It was a lovely room, with lace mats under glass tabletops, embroidered samplers on the walls, and an old spinning wheel set as a decorative feature in what had been the fireplace. Three tall windows, a mahogany chest of drawers. A refined, ladylike room well removed from the daily wrestle with the earth.

  I lay there and went over in my mind the objects and artefacts I’d been shown, had held in my hands. Bone pins, figurines. Then, I wondered which I would choose, if God forbid I had to, to send into outer space in hopes some other intelligence would find it, identify it, and know it as a marker and statement of our species. What would I load onto the Voyager spacecraft? A bead? A polished stone axe?

  I suppose it would be one of the ugly, grunting-looking stone ploughshares, as long as my forearm and twice as thick. It spoke of hard labour, not of decoration. The breaking of the earth. Of what we still call the ‘daily grind.’ It spoke to the ‘Neolithic package’ that revolutionised the world. Yes, I’d send that. It could hurtle through space like a meteorite, in hope that it might make landfall on some new shore.

  ‘Was your world once wild?’ a distant intelligence might ask.

  Yes, we’d say. Till it went under our ploughs and the hooves of our cattle. Under the weight of our stuff.

  * * *

  * * *

  There is a chambered cairn that quietly overlooks the site. A green hump on the hill. You could see it from the houses here, and they, the dead, could oversee you.

  It seemed to belong to farmland west of the site, where the land rises.

  Through binoculars I could see it was damaged. A single large stone was jutting out. Had it an entrance passageway, buried under the mound? A spiral-incised stone? A solar alignment? It had been got at by Victorian antiquarians, opened like an egg from the top, but no report survives. It had never been excavated since. I’d resolved to go up for a look and, that evening, after the others had left site, I happened to be passing just as the farmer was lowering himself from his tractor, two spaniels leaping after him.

  His was the common arrangement, a modern bungalow adjacent to more ancient buildings. There was a row of low byres with repaired flagstone roofs that may have been houses once, and were full of straw and farm machinery now.

  The farmer, burly in a blue boiler suit, had the strong slow accent of the island, rich like beef or cream.

  ‘Would you mind,’ I said, ‘if I went up there and saw the chambered cairn?’

  I asked just out of courtesy, neighbourliness, and because no one misses anything here.

  ‘You could go,’ he said, ‘but there’s kye up there. And a bull!’

  ‘Maybe I’ll not, then.’

  ‘I wadnae advise it. They’ll be there a good few weeks yet, maybe into October.’

  The door behind him opened and his wife looked out quickly, to see who he was talking to.

  ‘There’s no much to see. But a few years ago a wumman came and she spent near the whole day sitting up there. I don’t know what she was doing.’

  ‘Getting into the mystic?’

  ‘Aye, maybe that!’

  Being a bit frightened of kye, I walked up onto the hill as far as I dared, to a field gate, and then farther up a rough slope, until the route between me and the cairn was blocked by the typical Orkney confection of barbed wire and stone strainers and bits of driftwood tangled in. It was not something one could leap in a hurry. Beyond the fence, four pale bullocks were already clambering to their feet, yellow tags in their ears. I wouldn’t be the woman sitting there all day, not with this lot nosing and trampling.

  I turned to go down again. ‘There’s nothing much to see,’ the farmer had said, and maybe not. But it depends whether you are looking at the cairn, or from it. I’d wanted to see the view from it.

  And here it was, the view from the dead-house, and it was stunning. On this bright day, from this hillside you could see for ever, overlooking the settlement on the Links below, and then the whole island beyond, its scattered farms and turbines, bays and cliff and sea to the northern horizon, and over to the island of Papay, which has its own Neolithic houses and cairns. You had line of sight to the little house called Knap of Howar, reckoned the oldest standing house in northern Europe. You would command miles, being dead, and the living could glance up at you from their fields, feel your presence, your authority, legitimising their place on the land. ‘Yes,’ you could say, as an elder might to a teenager setting out into the world. ‘You’ve left the wild behind, you’re doing fine. You’re doing great, this is your land.’

  I went home to my room, over the island, past fields of cattle and of barley. Pipits and wagtails flew up from the road. I entered the house, then opened the door to my room. The room was flashing. The calm, carefully furnished room was crazy with a silent pulsing light-and-dark. I stumbled back out into the gloom of the hall. Then I went back in. It was still there: the room was flashing fast enough to make me feel sweaty, druggy, glad I wasn’t prone to seizures.

  It was the sun lowering behind the turning vanes of the wind turbine. Just chance. It could only happen right now, this minute. A few minutes more and the sun would be too low in the sky. A couple more days and the sun would have tracked southward, toward its halt at winter solstice, when it would shine down the long passage of the tomb at Maeshowe. Then it would start edging back north. So just for a few days, maybe twice a year, it would sink into the Atlantic exactly behind the turbine, exactly in line with this window. For a few days, twice a year, at this point in the evening, if there was a wind, the spinning vanes would slice the sunlight sent into this room and fill it with a frenzied rhythmic flashing.

  Our Neolithic friends would have loved it. Pity I couldn’t invite them round.

  * * *

  * * *

  ‘The farmers. The island folk, the cattle farmers – they must be really interested in what you’re finding here,’ I said to Hazel the next day, when we were back on the site, but to my surprise she shook her head.

  ‘They’re interested, but not connected. It’s only the Vikings they’re interested in. It’s the Vikings the Orkney and Shetland islanders identify with. They’re not British, not Scottish, but Norse. Not prehistoric, Viking.

  ‘We have well-wishers, but incomers are more interested than the locals. Not in every case, but by and large. Someone actually complained about the archaeology “cluttering up” their Heritage Centre.’

  ‘But the Vikings are so recent, relatively.’

  ‘The Vikings “won”,’ said Hazel, with a shrug. ‘If we had some names, that would help.’

  ‘Prehistoric names?’

  ‘Place names or personal names. That would help.’

  The very names of the Orkney islands are Norse. The ‘-oy’ or ‘-ay’ suffix is Norse for ‘island.’ Eday, Stronsay, Westray, Shapinsay – all Norse, all a mere twelve hundred years old.

  Criostoir leaned back from his patch of earth and declared, ‘Sure – I don’t understand this interest in the feckin’ Vikings. And the Romans – the English are obsessed with the Romans. The Normans in Ireland. All conquerors. What’s wrong with the people who were here first?’ He gestured across the site. ‘These are your ancestors!’

  ‘What do you mean, the Vikings “won”?’ I asked, reluctantly, thinking of the ancient burial mound I could see from my window, which the Vikings had chosen to use as a fishing station.

  ‘Just that. After the Vikings arrived, all traces of the older culture ceased. That’s what the archaeology is suggesting.’

  * * *


  * * *

  The site continued according to its own rhythm. Round and down, intense work in cramped spaces. For all we were outdoors all day, there was little exercise involved and it could be cold cramped work even in August. The waves drove ashore, the lobster boat toured the bay. From time to time bigger ships with strange superstructures moved along the horizon. But every day brought enlivening moments and laughter. One day a BBC crew appeared, driving down to the beach in a big black Range Rover. Everyone kept their heads down and pretended to be very busy as Hazel did the required. She showed the presenter Neil Oliver some prize finds, such as a polished Bronze Age pendant, but the producer wanted a retake. ‘Can you emote more?’ she asked Hazel. Then they went away.

  Anna, my fellow digger, kindly invited me for a meal at the house she was sharing with Dan and Emily and Dawn. A good Italian cook, she managed to produce an excellent meal for us all of chicken and couscous. It was dark when I left; by then the others were sprawled on their orange sofas watching some old Quentin Tarantino film on Netflix. They looked like the seals hauled out on the weedy shore. If seals could watch Netflix, they would.

  * * *

  * * *

  Near the quarry, now disused, where they found the spiral-carved stone, there are a few new buildings, intended for offices and light industry. One had become a pop-up cafe by day and a youth club by night, a community venture like so much else on the island. The teenagers have a big screen, computer games, fizzy drinks. It’s theirs in the evening, but by day it’s open to all.

  I went in one day for coffee and home-made cake and fell into conversation with the lady who oversees things. Shy teenagers do the serving. She stood behind the counter. A woman in her late sixties, maybe. She told me she had been born a stone’s throw away, on a croft of the kind that had remained until not long after the Second World War. That was when the horses went off, the tractors came on.

  ‘We had a small croft,’ she said. ‘We had four cows, and hens. A lot of hens.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Hah, we had to boil tatties for their feed, chap it up with the oats – then we put light in – whether they laid better or not I don’t know. There was aye work. There was thinning neeps. I didn’t like that. But when you look back on it ... you didn’t know any different.’ She paused. ‘My mother didn’t keep good health.’

  ‘Did you have electricity?’

  ‘We had small engines.’

  ‘Generators? Must have been noisy.’

  ‘And a tilly lamp. A gas light!’ She laughed, paused. ‘I must be gettin auld ... We were never bored, we come home from school and changed our clothes, for you only had one set ... we got on with it.’

  She paused again, looking around. ‘It can’t go on like this...’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything on your doorstep. The kids come home, it’s phones, TV...’ She paused again. ‘There was something aboot a tilly lamp, it was warm...’

  Again that pause, as though images were crowding back to her mind.

  ‘No so many small crofts on the island now. When a small farm comes up for sale, a bigger one buys it, they dinnae survive.’

  And paused again.

  ‘It mightna be lang till Westray is just aboot a couple o ferms...’

  ‘A big cattle ranch?’

  ‘So ... I’m no sure what’ll happen ... Kirkwall is too accessible, you can go anytime. We nivver did that. We just went away on the County Show day, or that. That was exciting!’

  Pause.

  ‘We just worked away.’

  My coffee arrived in a cafetière. I tapped the WiFi code into my laptop.

  ‘Would you go back to those days?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I would not.’

  We all know it. We can’t go on like this, but we wouldn’t go back either, to the stone ploughshare and the early death. Maybe that’s why the folk here don’t embrace their Neolithic site much. It’s still too close to the knuckle.

  The cafe lady turned to her tasks and I to the Internet. According to Facebook, font of all truth, Scotland had that day generated all the electricity it needed from renewables. Just enough for one windy summer’s day, still.

  Also that the world had used up its ration of resources for the year, and it was only August.

  Also, according to the BBC local news website, the world’s biggest tidal turbine was undergoing its final tests here on Orkney. It had been towed to Orkney from its manufactory at Harland and Wolff’s, Belfast.

  Also that the oil rig, being towed the other way, still sat where it had run aground on Lewis, still leaking oil.

  From Shetland, too, news about tidal energy. The company concerned were ‘absolutely delighted to be the first company in the world to deploy a fully operational tidal array, and deliver electricity to the grid.’

  * * *

  * * *

  It was late August. My time on Westray was drawing to a close, but before I left there was a visit I hoped to make, to a young couple Hazel had told me about. Hazel had said: ‘If you want to know about cattle farming, you should meet Nina and Jason Wilson at Noltland Farm. Just go to the door. They’re South African. They make the cheese.’ The small herd of cows which grazed a mere slingshot from the Neolithic site belonged to Nina and Jason. The cows were Ayrshires: creamy-coloured with archipelagos of brown marks on their flanks.

  I did want to know about cattle farming, because it seemed a living link to the Neolithic. The whole island did. In almost every hillside field were cattle. Grazing or kneeling or looking over dykes as you passed, with yellow tags in their ears. Great bulls the colour of honey.

  I knocked at the farmhouse door and was welcomed in by Nina, who was pretty and instantly likeable, with curly hair springing from under her woollen hat. She shut her five dogs away and took me through to their kitchen, and we sat at the table next to the Aga while Jason, tall and lean, came in from his fields. It was Jason who gave me the couple’s story. (‘He could talk for Africa,’ whispered Nina.) They had been on Westray for only five or six years, though Jason had come to the UK back when Mandela was still in prison and the sanctions regime made it illegal for him to work here. He was even thrown in jail himself. But organic farming was what he wanted to do. A long apprenticeship followed, in flat English fields of broccoli. He met Nina. Nina had a background in film and film studies.

  She caught my look. The nearest cinema was an hour and a half away by ferry; it showed the latest blockbusters.

  ‘I know! I’d like to set up a film club here...’

  Back then, they had never heard of Orkney. Then came a chance meeting with an Orcadian, journeys north, explorations, and a saga of failed bids, or blessings in disguise.

  ‘And we got Noltland.’

  The couple moved in one day and, the next, ploughed up the ryegrass to plant a species-rich herbal lay, with thirty varieties of grass. They’ve since seen a great increase in insects and wormcasts.

  ‘What do your neighbours think?’ I asked.

  Jason smiled. ‘Orcadians would never swap. I don’t demonise conventional farmers. I mean, who’s ruining the planet? I start my car in the morning. Farmers are not the enemy, they’re good guys, they’re not bombing anyone, they’re trying to feed people. A good stockman loves his animals.’

  ‘But they must look over your dyke and think that’s interesting?’

  ‘Oh, everyone is intensely interested in everyone else’s farm!’ laughed Nina. Now they have a herd of twenty-three dairy cows.

  ‘And have they names?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘And personalities?’

  ‘They’re as different as human beings,’ said Jason.

  ‘And a bull?’

  ‘Eric. He’s called Eric. We share him with another farm. Lots of b
ulls are called Eric here. I think it’s a Viking thing.’

  ‘Would you like to meet them?’ asked Nina.

  Of course I would. Of course I wanted to meet the cows that grazed the same land as did the Neolithic animals so long ago, at Noltland, the ‘grassy dunes of the land of cattle.’

  They led me outside through the yard and a series of gates. Jason, long-legged in wellies, loped delightedly toward his cows in their field.

  ‘Don’t you feel a connection with the Neolithic folk?’ I asked. ‘They were right here...’

  ‘Of course,’ Jason replied. ‘Their days were the same – summer days like this. They’d have been thinking the same things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘I’m thinking about walls now, about protection...’

  When the cows saw Jason and Nina, they all ambled over, nudging and shoving until the couple were standing in a crowd. Not me, though. I was a stranger and the cows were wary of me.

  Jason scratched their backs while Nina gave me their names: ‘This is Greta, a proper little madam. This is AC/DC. That’s Onsie, she’s a bit goofy. That’s Butterfly, because of her ears. That’s Buttons. Annabel. Daisy.’

  Eric had done the required. All the cows were pregnant.

  Theirs is the only dairy herd on the island. ‘Time was,’ said Nina, ‘when every croft had a cow. But the 1983 pasteurisation act put an end to it. People sold their cows, their churns, forgot about it.’

  The couple make an artisan cheese they call ‘Westray Wife.’ A little picture of the Neolithic figurine features on their labels.

  ‘You got the brand!’

  ‘No one else was racing for it.’

  Amid the cows, we were looking inland at the island’s shallow valley. Their view was of a gloomy castle, and, beyond it, the small loch, then farms on the hills, sheep on the peaty summits, the climbing road, the chambered cairn, two or three small whirring turbines under the huge island sky.