Surfacing Read online

  When the scale of the site was realised, Historic Scotland commissioned excavations to record, maybe protect, what remained before it was lost. There have now been nine summers of excavations – no one could have predicted that, least of all Historic Scotland’s accountants – and new features were still coming to light. The area we were looking at, six hundred square metres, was only a fraction of the whole.

  The working site had a raw, slightly wounded look, like skin after you peel off a sticking plaster. Other parts of the Links were protected under black plastic sheeting weighed down by tyres and stones. The sections under wraps were mostly of the Bronze Age, as was the big mound on the shore. The exposed areas which were being worked at present were Neolithic. People had lived here, developing and changing and toughing it out, for a very long time. As Graeme said later, as far as people were concerned, the Links were a very successful wee bit of Orkney landscape.

  Hazel led me round, introducing me to the team as they worked. In truth I saw their motley garments before I registered their faces, as they unbent from the ground: earth-caked jeans and fluorescent jackets, knitted headbands and piratical scarves, everyone seemed weather-worn under the Orkney light and salt winds. Archaeologists are accustomed to appraising what turns up; I felt duly appraised.

  It appears that the first farmers had built a hefty enclosing wall and, within it, several discrete houses with various yards and passageways and ‘activity areas.’ Or maybe not. It’s possible the few houses came first, and at some early point a wall was built around them. Either way, having defined their space, the people just kept building on top of it.

  ‘How many layers of occupation have you gone down already?’ I asked Hazel, and she sucked in her breath.

  ‘A simple answer? Three or four layers, within the enclosure. A metre and a half in depth. But they didn’t raze the place then start again. Buildings just fell out of use, or were closed, or robbed of stone or reinvented and rebuilt. It was in use for about seven hundred years.’

  In brief, as Graeme put it later, with Links of Noltland, they have a second chance at Skara Brae. That Neolithic village was excavated in the 1930s, but not before it had been plundered. Links of Noltland was a bigger settlement: here were homes, field systems, boundaries. ‘Everything that was chucked away at Skara Brae, or not recognised, we have here.’

  Skara Brae is hugely famous now, with a visitor centre and reconstructions and all. If a couple of big cruise liners are in port, so many buses take visitors there that they have to drive around in circles till a parking place becomes available. Or so it’s said.

  But Links doesn’t look like Skara Brae, with its manicured grass and made paths and interpretation panels. At least, not yet.

  This season the team was concentrating on three or four houses, early ones. With expert eyes, and deft use of trowel and brush, they could tell one house from another, and identify the Neolithic fads and changes of mind. They could here, too, discern the homely features that make Skara Brae so popular: each house has an entranceway, a central hearth and often a ‘dresser,’ or stone shelves facing the entrance.

  Some even have covered drains leading out of the house under the wall. Drains, conducting water and waste, or alternatively flues, bringing air into the fire. It’s one of the many small mysteries, hard to tell because, as Hazel said, they seem to have been all intention, but never actually used.

  We toured the site, stepping stone to stone, clay floor to clay floor. Stones and bone. In one house, I was aghast to see the orange earth of a hearth being trowelled away. A Neolithic hearth! But I was told not to worry, they were certain there was another, older one beneath.

  At lunchtime, when the day had warmed, everyone downed tools and retired to the shipping containers to eat. We left the Neolithic and sat among the detritus of our own age. The mess-hut had a gathering of picnic chairs and upturned buckets, but because it was warm, people preferred to lie on the sand looking at the clouds, or read books, or moan about the complete lack of mobile signal because the island’s only mast was being repaired. One digger, Emily, had mastered the art of sitting in a tilted wheelbarrow as though it was an armchair. They were robust, good-humoured people. You’d have to be, to live as they do.

  The ten or so employees on the site are all professionals, there were no undergraduate students or volunteers. Several held PhDs, some had been coming here to Westray every summer for years. By chance, half were Irish. Irish accents predominated across the site. One of them told me Links was a ‘godsend,’ graduate jobs being so hard to find. But it does mean they live an itinerant life often into their thirties or forties, with months spent in rented rooms or holiday lets, with the same people at home as they work with. They all have worst-house-you’ve-ever-lived-in tales. They are all quick to laugh.

  I admitted I was confused by the site, despite Hazel’s tour. So many stones! But the archaeologists just laughed. ‘Join the club!’ They said. ‘Us too!’

  The midday sky was clear, but for one cavalcade of clouds over the sea. Directly above a kittiwake passed, bright white, rimmed with light.

  * * *

  * * *

  Graeme is calm of manner and less voluble than Hazel. His concern of the moment was the enclosing wall. After the lunch break he took over from Hazel and showed me how this wall had been traced and exposed around two thirds of the site. It was almost a metre wide, two skins of stone packed with a core of clay. In places it stood intact a few courses high; in others it seemed just a strew of rubble. Where it had been excavated, you could admire its sharp Neolithic stonework, clean and unweathered, having been buried so long. The stone was the reddish island sandstone, lovely for building with, and the Neolithic masons had taken care, especially on the exterior. The wall had been made to impress anyone approaching it from outside.

  ‘Impress who?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Graeme.

  In other parts the wall had collapsed, and you could walk on its remains as if it was a crazy-paving garden path. On the east side was a clear breach, the entranceway into the huddle of buildings. On the west, however, this enclosure wall vanished. It looked as though it was continuing outwith the site. Today, this was the job in hand. One of the excavating team, Dan O’Meara, had dug a trial trench where he suspected the wall might run, and sure enough, when he got down deep enough, there it was looking up at him. The problem was, if it followed its arc, the wall would be continuing under the site’s spoil heaps, something that couldn’t have been foreseen back when work began.

  Graeme had arranged for a local farmer to come with a small JCB to bulldoze away those spoil heaps, so they could excavate underneath, find this enclosure wall, complete its circle and finally get the full measure of the Neolithic settlement. Furthermore, if the wall ran where expected, Graeme postulated that there would be room enough within its embrace for two more houses, or structures of some sort, also presently buried.

  ‘Isn’t that exciting?’ I asked. Well, yes, of course. But new developments were also a bit of a headache. Historic Scotland had told the Links team repeatedly that this season must be the last. There could be no more funding – not least because Historic Scotland no longer existed as an entity. The Scottish government had amalgamated it with another body to form Historic Environment Scotland, presumably to save money.

  ‘They’ve said that before, though, about the funding. More than once. But this time they seem to mean it.’

  ‘So what will happen? It won’t just be covered in sand again, will it?’

  By accident or design we had worked our way right round the site, and were back by the shipping containers. The blue one was stamped with a logo of an eagle bearing an anchor, with ‘United States Customs.’ How do these things get here, on a beach on Westray?

  Hazel was within at a makeshift desk, doing paperwork. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It won’t be covered in sand. It would be safe if it was pack
ed with sand. It will just be destroyed by the wind.’

  Graeme said, ‘But for now, if there are new structures, our job is to excavate them, so we’ll just get on with it.’

  That was a phrase I heard several times over the next couple of weeks. If I asked how life was for people in the Neolithic or Bronze Age, chances are I’d receive the reply: ‘People just got on with it. They didn’t know they were Neolithic or Bronze Age.’

  In the spirit of ‘getting on with it,’ I took from the green shipping container a spare trowel, bucket and kneeling mat, because trowelling is hard on the knees. Graeme despatched me to the site’s west side, the side with the emerging wall and still-hidden structures, to help do preparatory work before the arrival of the JCB.

  The weather was lovely by then, the island skies vast, its low green hills scattered with farmsteads. People had even taken their coats off. I spent the afternoon trowelling back a ‘deposition layer’ with Anna Maria Diana of Sicily, who had just completed her PhD in human osteo-archaeology. Anna had studied in Edinburgh, so we had that city in common to talk about as we trowelled out earth and occasional pieces of pottery or flint, which we had to bag and label as ‘small finds.’

  It’s a good way to have conversations, side by side, concentrating on another task. Anna was half-Italian, half-Romanian, and spoke both, and also perfect, Italian-accented English. We chatted about various Edinburgh cafes where she’d worked, and the city’s mouse-infested tenements.

  We scraped away until larger stones began to reveal themselves. It seemed an incoherent spread of stones, but when Graeme came by on his director’s rounds, he said, ‘Looks like you’ve got something here.’

  ‘Really?’

  He pointed with his trowel, ‘Coming round here...’

  I liked the texture of flint, serious and no-nonsense, tumbling under the trowel. They were little knapped-off pieces, brownish-pink or orangey colour. The Neolithic people probably found nodules on the shore, back then, part of the island’s bounty.

  Anna said, ‘I don’t mind not finding anything much. I enjoy the colours of the earth. The smell of the earth. But not this dung-smell!’

  It was true, there was a dung-smell. The farmer on the hill was spraying his fields. We could straighten up and watch the red tractor and trailer climb the small field, turn, then process down again.

  Personally, I thought the smell was quite funny, as we trowelled away. Appropriate. A sort of scratch’n’sniff archaeology. In its Neolithic day, the whole place would have reeked of dung and smoke.

  ‘And smelly humans,’ said Anna.

  ‘What do you think this settlement was like?’ I asked her. ‘In its time, five thousand years ago?’

  ‘Gorgeous, I think. I envy them.’

  ‘But they died young?’

  ‘On average. Almost everyone had arthritis by their twenties.’

  ‘I find it hard to believe, that people died so soon.’

  Working like this meant kneeling with our backs to the sea. On a calm day, you could forget it was there, except when you stood, stiffly, to empty a bucket or barrow. Then you could see the ocean, all the way to the northern horizon, with gannets diving and a lobster boat working the creels.

  * * *

  * * *

  I’d been offered a rented room in a fine tall house on the far side of the island. The house stood where the road ended, almost on a promontory. Hundreds of years old, it was grey with crow-stepped gables, and ought to have been the epitome of Scottish gloom. But it was warm and light, with solid old-fashioned mahogany furniture. There were chandeliers and a doll’s house, a piano and a huge dining-room table.

  Many nine-pane windows gave views to all sides, and just outside, under the shelter of stone dykes, grew those white dog roses with thick leaves you get at the coast. A donkey grazed in a paddock, and beyond the paddock wall the land sloped greenly down three-quarters of a mile toward the Westray Firth, with other islands rising beyond.

  In a work of love and great spirit, Sandy and Willie McEwen had restored the place from a ghostly, roofless wreck. Twenty-first-century interventions, a wind turbine and ground-source system, provided the heat and electric light. For the first time in its long life, the house was not damp. It was as though the house had been built three hundred years before the technology arrived that would allow it to flourish.

  ‘Do you see that mound there?’ Sandy had stopped beside me at the window. She was petite, with a thick plait of grey hair. ‘At the land’s end?’

  ‘I see it.’

  ‘It’s an Iron Age burial mound. It’s on an islet. There were over a hundred skeletons in there, many babies. It was being eroded away, so they excavated it. That’s how I met Hazel and Graeme. I liked them. They were respectful of the babies. It was a prehistoric cemetery for hundreds of years. Then the Vikings came and put a fishing station on it.’

  Sandy and her husband are Quakers. ‘We had this house blessed by eight different kinds of faith,’ she said.

  ‘I can sense that,’ I said. ‘It feels fine.’

  It became my habit to oscillate back and forth across the island, from the wuthering heights of West Manse to the blown sands of Links of Noltland. Sometimes I drove, sometimes cycled. The skies were huge, there were cattle in the fields, and flocks of common gulls and starlings, wagtails and pipits on the road. I learned where the flocks of sparrows lived, and which rough fields were favoured by curlew. Most of the farms and houses were inhabited, but a few were derelict. Daily my eye was drawn to one particularly grand farmhouse on a hill, or rather its south-facing walled garden, an island rarity. The house was clearly long abandoned, and the garden now sheltered the island’s only woodland, an acre of tight-packed, wind-sculpted sycamores.

  Each of the small Neolithic houses within the enclosure wall was the property, so to speak, of one archaeologist. There was Maeve’s house, Dawn’s house, Emily’s house and Lesley’s. Each knew her own intimately as she worked round and down, excavating and planning.

  The next day, keen to make more sense of the site, I walked round having a word with each householder. The same phrases recurred.

  ‘To see how this relates.’

  ‘To find out what’s going on.’

  ‘Then, this can come out.’

  ‘This house is early in the sequence, we’re getting new kinds of flint.’ New meaning older.

  Dawn Gooney was working on a house in the middle of the enclosure. She is an expert on bone, and had been working on the site for several seasons. Today she was drawing an inner corner by the entrance to her house where it was obvious, even to me, that alterations had taken place. The doorway was clearly defined in stone, three or four courses high, with sharp corners because the original building had been almost cruciform. But someone had taken a notion to fill in the corners, so making the inner space more rounded. This more recent Neolithic stonework wasn’t up to the standard of the original; you could tell where one ended and the other began. Having drawn it and photographed it thoroughly, Dawn would soon begin to take out the amendment, and reveal the sharper, original stonework behind.

  ‘I like this kind of thing,’ she said, kneeling on the ground, a black band keeping her hair out of her eyes. ‘I’m practical-minded myself, and I like seeing someone else’s mind at work, having these same thoughts thousands of years ago. It’s as if the daughter-in-law moved in and wanted to put her stamp on it. Let’s get rid of these gloomy corners!’

  Also, someone, sometime, five millennia ago, had decided the floor needed re-laying. The old one was too rough and dirty, too full of rubbish and bone.

  He or she had fetched the right kind of clay from across the island and packed a new floor in over the old one, and then, in the centre, had dug slots to accommodate stone kerbs a few inches high, which would define the fireplace. He’d dug a slot, inserted a long stone, decided he didn’t like it
, removed it and back-filled the slot to take another, shorter stone. To Dawn’s eye, the actions were as specific and identifiable as that. A couple of hours’ work, one day very long ago.

  I say ‘he,’ because when these stones had been planned, photographed and were ready for removal, the task fell to the strongest men, Dan or Criostoir usually. They’d heave them across the site to the spoil heaps, and toss them aside, your Neolithic handiwork gone.

  The problem, Dawn said, was the dating. Without organic material for carbon-dating, it’s hard to tell how much time had passed between one modification and another. It might indeed have been the daughter-in-law, or centuries may have gone by. The place might have been a ruin before someone else moved in and rebuilt.

  Whatever the time frame, these long-ago alterations and changes – grand restorations or fiddling about – were domestic. What seemed to be emerging from this cluster of dwellings by the seashore were ordinary people’s ordinary lives, hundreds of years’ worth. Standing at the edge of the site, overlooking the houses, I could see a woman at work in each, crouched to the floor, or bent over a board. So much bending and hauling and kneeling and stooping and lifting.

  It was Dawn who was removing the hearth; fire-blackened, long-buried earth peeled away under her trowel. But underneath, she was sure, lay the more ancient stain of an older hearth, the older floor.

  The original architecture is muscular, too. Like the enclosure wall, the house walls also had two skins of stone and a filling of clay. No wind or weather would penetrate them. They must have been silent inside, except for the fire spitting, movement, voices. And coughing, in the rank smoke.

  * * *

  * * *

  Despite Links of Noltland being difficult to reach, every day brought visitors to the site. If they come by ferry, it’s a ninety-minute sailing from Kirkwall, then a further seven miles across the island from the ferry pier. There is no bus to Links, and no taxis on the island, but nonetheless, two or three or four or five parties could arrive on any given day, walking up from the beach, entering through the ineffective gate and making their way up to the site.