A History of Ancient Britain (21 page)

The stones of Sunkenkirk, like the stones of every other stone circle, beg some obvious questions from even the most casual observer. For a start they make a person wonder at the sheer physical
effort involved in finding 60 boulders, each weighing tons, and manhandling them into position on high ground so that they overlook hundreds of square miles of territory. Presumably these were busy
farmers with plenty of practical demands on their time and yet they found the need to co-ordinate their manpower and
resources for the construction of a large and
complicated monument with an astronomical alignment.

Sunkenkirk also seems similar in many ways to other monuments far away. The porch entrance, for example, is found replicated at the stone circle of Ballynoe on the north-east coast of Ireland.
Other similarities – including the likelihood of some kind of levelling of the sites having taken place before the stones were put up – hint at links to other circles, further south in
the region of the Wicklow Mountains. It is important from the outset to appreciate how the designers and builders of such monuments were not working in isolation. Instead they knew what was
happening elsewhere and were plugged into a network that meant they were connected to people thinking the same way, in other places.

A glance at a map reveals that only 80 or so miles separate Sunkenkirk from Ballynoe in County Down. The Isle of Man appears as a handy stepping-stone between the two locations; and something
like a third of all the polished stone axes found on that island are from the Langdale Pikes. Rather than being divided by the Irish Sea, the communities of Cumbria and Ireland were more than
likely united by it – by links established in the Mesolithic, long before the arrival of the farmers and their monuments.

Whatever the reasons, from around 5,000 years ago people – living in Cumbria in the shadow of magical mountains, and all over Britain and Ireland besides – began making spiritual
connections that had never been made before. If the commitment to the dead remained, with its associated attachment to the land, then it was joined during the Neolithic by a new connection, between
the living, the dead and the sky. It may even be regarded as the very idea of Heaven itself.

To understand all this it is vital to bear in mind, at all times, the connections between people living all across Britain and Ireland. Representatives were travelling between communities, from
north to south and from east to west, and ideas were being disseminated, shared and expanded.

Floating like green rafts moored in open sea almost 10 miles north of Caithness, Orkney feels remote now. For many people, even some Scots, the islands seem far enough away to be classed as
another country altogether. Since the archipelago appears in its own little box on the television weather map, even pointing out Orkney’s exact location, relative to Britain, is a stretch for
most. For the 19,000 or so folk who live on the 20 inhabited Orkney islands (out of a total of more than 40 and a whole host of what can only be described as large rocks standing proud of the sea)
the
most annoying mistake made by outsiders is calling the place ‘the Orkneys’ – as though anyone would ever talk about the New Zealands.

But if Orkney seems remote in the twenty-first century it is largely an optical illusion, and a modern one at that. Take a map that shows Britain in the context of northern Europe and
Scandinavia and turn it upside down. Viewed from that unfamiliar and disorienting perspective, Orkney becomes once more the hub it likely was for much of its history. For people travelling around
the North Sea – especially those heading south towards the long island of Britain itself and north towards Scandinavia and northern Europe – Orkney is not at the edge of things but at
their centre.

Before the Romans arrived in Scotland in the first century
AD
and began writing things down in Latin, the people there spoke a language similar to Welsh, or Scots Gaelic.
This was likely the language of the Picts – the people encountered in north Britain by the Romans – and the northern islands were the territory of a Pictish tribe that seemingly had the
wild boar for their totem. We know this because Irish historians later wrote about Inis Orc – the Islands of the Orcs – and in so doing fossilised the word
orc
, Pictish for wild
boar. Later still the Vikings colonised the islands and misheard their name as Orkneyjar, a Norse word meaning ‘Seal Islands’. To say the least, it has been a convoluted tale.

So Orkney has mattered since the beginning and has known human habitation since at least the Mesolithic period. Until around 15,000 years ago the islands were physically connected to Scotland by
a low-lying valley that was later submerged beneath rising sea levels at the end of the last Ice Age. The history of the place is as deep and rich as any. An unnamed ‘King of Orkney’
was among 11 monarchs who bent the knee to Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, Emperor of Rome and Conqueror of Britannia, in Colchester in
AD
43 – an event
commemorated on a fragment of triumphal arch in the city of Rome itself. Until the latter quarter of the fifteenth century Orkney was part of the Danish kingdom. But in July 1469 King James III of
Scotland married Princess Margrethe of Denmark and in lieu of a dowry her father, King Kristian, mortgaged Orkney and Shetland to the Scottish Crown. In 1472 Kristian defaulted on his repayments,
James promptly took possession and the islands have been part of Scotland ever since.

Orkney may not be as distant as some think, then, but it is and always was a wild place. First-time visitors are generally struck at once by the absence of trees. There is also a near-incessant
wind blowing across it and
it is tempting to think the trees have been swept away along with everything else that is not tied down. But more than the wind is responsible,
and in fact the deforestation of Orkney began during the Neolithic period. As they did everywhere else, the farmers began cutting down the trees to make room for fields and farmsteads. Since Orkney
is not a big place – just over 200 square miles of habitable land – it probably did not take long to fell every last one.

Fortunately for those determined to live there, Orkney is rich in another kind of building material altogether: stone. Strip away the grass and topsoil practically anywhere on Mainland Orkney
and you reveal a brittle carapace of horizontally bedded and fractured sandstone that splits easily and naturally into slabs and sheets. From around 3300
BC
Orcadians
– for that is what the inhabitants are called – began employing their limitless building material in the construction of some of the most enduring and enigmatic structures in the whole
of the ancient world.

Some places on Earth are mostly about the present, while others seem to belong more completely to the past. Nations and empires have their moment too; some high point that, once reached, can
neither be sustained nor ever reached again once it has passed. They say time marches on, as though there were an even rhythm and an equal weight to each footfall of its passing. But in truth only
a few moments weigh heavy enough to make deep prints, while most skip by leaving barely a trace.

The countryside of Flanders – those parts of Belgium and northern France devastated by the Great War of 1914–18 – is a landscape trapped by a time. All the most memorable
places there are dedicated to death and remembrance. The modern world is woven throughout but seems as ephemeral as strands of a spider’s web strung between the branches of a tree. The power
of the past – of memories of the First World War – to overwhelm the present is undiminished by the intervening years, partly because great care has been taken to preserve the cemeteries
and other memorials and special places as sacred, and therefore inviolable. More than that, though, there are the experiences and behaviour of people living in Flanders now. The events of four
years of fighting long ago hang in the air around them like the aftermath of the tolling of a bell; the sound has stopped but something of it still resonates. Nothing as important, it seems, has
happened in all the days since.

Something similar has happened to Orkney – but there it is about much deeper time. Whatever passions gripped the place 5,000 years ago are long
cooled; no tears are
shed now beside the empty tombs and no hearts beat fast in the shadows of tall stones so earnestly raised. But something lingers just the same, the memory of a memory. While Flanders has been fixed
for ever in the Edwardian world that was its greatest influence, so the deepest marks cut into Orkney are those left by its most ardent trustees – Neolithic farmers asking the sky above why
they were alive at all . . . and what would come after.

Orkney is therefore a strange and unusual part of Britain. The volume of Neolithic sites and monuments there is exceptional by any standards, and when compared to what has been identified so far
in the rest of the country it can seem as though the inhabitants of that northern archipelago were overcome, 5,000 years ago, by a mania for marking special places.

Those islands have certainly been subjected to less in the way of modern development, the arable fields to much less pressure than their mainland British equivalents, so that more sites may have
survived in Orkney than in other areas. It is also worth bearing in mind that Neolithic architects elsewhere may have had freer access to timber and other organic materials for building houses of
the living and of the dead, and for ceremonial circles – and that such constructions would have had a relatively short shelf life. This is in stark contrast to Orkney, where the early
deforestation would have forced builders to work almost exclusively in stone, a material that is uniquely durable and much more likely to survive the millennia.

But, even taking all that into account, it remains important to allow that something especially intense happened on Orkney during the first centuries of farming. Perhaps behaviours were
magnified there for some reason – made somehow louder and more vivid, so that we are able to hear and see the Neolithic on those islands long after its traces and echoes elsewhere have been
dimmed and dulled, made undetectable by the passing of too much time.

One of many unique aspects of the Orcadian Neolithic is the presence of domestic houses – even whole villages. While such places are frustratingly absent from much of Britain, on Orkney
they appear almost larger than life. Skara Brae is surely one of the most famous villages in the world, and deservedly so.

After spending the best part of 5,000 years buried beneath the sand dunes that had enveloped them, the houses were returned to the light by a great storm in 1850. The waves crashed higher that
year than ever before and washed away a great swathe of sand and grass, exposing the dry stone
walls of ancient houses. Subsequent excavation, as well as further storms,
eventually revealed the marvel that has ever since drawn people to the southern shore of the Bay o’Skaill, in the western Mainland parish of Sandwick, in their thousands.

The stretch of dunes that had entombed the village had long been called Skerrabra in the local dialect, and so the site has come to be known by the slightly corrupted Skara Brae. Visitors
approach it along a path that winds its way past little signs reminding them the houses they are about to see are as old or older than, among other things, the pyramids of Egypt. The route then
leads them towards a grassy mound – and it is this that contains the houses.

By around 3100
BC
a great midden of earth, sand and domestic rubbish had accumulated on the site. Into this cosy but undoubtedly smelly womb of insulation the builders
dug their semi-subterranean homes. There are eight cellular houses today, all connected by a stone-lined passageway. The whole place is an attempt to get out of the wind and rain; and even after
5,000 years the best-preserved of the homes look like the perfect response to the Orcadian climate. There may originally have been more buildings – perhaps revealed and destroyed by other
storms long ago – but what does survive is more than enough to conjure up a clear picture of the lives lived by those industrious farmers.

The individual entrances into the houses, from the passageway, are all crawl spaces, no more than three or four feet high, but the interiors beyond are surprisingly roomy. What strikes the
visitor most vividly is the similarity to the cartoon homes of Bedrock, inhabited by Fred and Wilma Flintstone. The reliance on stone for everything, from beds to shelves to storage containers, is
almost comical and lends the whole place a vaguely unreal feel, like a film set. But this is no land of make believe – these are Neolithic homes.

Directly opposite the entrance of every house, and therefore the first thing to be seen on entering, is a ‘dresser’ – like a Welsh dresser but made entirely of slabs of the
familiar Orkney flagstone. Their prominent, dominant position in every home suggests these would have displayed precious possessions – the Neolithic equivalents of the best china and the
family silver. In the centre of each floor is a square hearth for a fire, and since the houses are windowless the interiors would have been lit only by those fires and by lamps burning oil from
fish and whales. The interiors are roughly square, with rounded corners, and against the walls are stone
settings for beds. There are storage spaces built into the walls and
other recesses too, with drains running behind the walls that may have been used as indoor toilets, ‘flushed’ with water.

But along with the dressers it is the beds that speak most loudly of Fred and Wilma and it is important, in the mind’s eye, to add the soft furnishings that are absent. The homes of Skara
Brae were likely warm and comfortable, with floorings of rushes and straw, bedding of animal skins and fur, roaring fires and soft lamplight. Insulated against even the worst of winter storms
– and in the Neolithic the sea was several miles distant, not lapping at the walls as it does today – the farmers on the Bay o’Skaill had made a good life for themselves.