That day of the scuttle centenary, while they laid their waterproof wreaths and rang their bell, I had been up at Skaill Bay on the west coast of Mainland, as they call the biggest island—as though the inhabitants of this little archipelago of seventy or so islands had long since forgotten the great blocks of land to the south and the continents beyond, and had floated free, into the North Atlantic, a world to themselves.
I had been up there peering into the twisted bulkheads and rent hulls of the scuttled Neolithic settlement of Skara Brae.
Most of the islands hereabouts are low-lying, undulating, and bucolic. It is a settled landscape, long-since unforested, set to fields and mostly to grazing, what arable there is being for winter fodder. It is cattle country, grazing boundaries marked with low well-kept stone walls. But if you drift out to the margins, especially in the west, facing the setting sun and the boundless ocean, it is suddenly all wild heath and wrecks and stone ghost-villages. Orkney is celebrated for its world-heritage Neolithic monuments: the islands are littered and fringed with geometric standing stones, bone-crazed Neolithic villages, barrow after barrow; to move around in this landscape is to transition one moment to the next from a working pastoral to a spectral boneyard of settlement.
The village of Skara Brae is the most famous draw. The cruise ships docked in Kirkwall send fleets of buses up there, along the Neolithic corridor which runs past the great tomb of Maeshowe and the standing stones of Stenness and Brodgar. It can get quite crowded. But Joan, my landlady in Stromness, who works in a shop in Kirkwall and is attuned, therefore, to cycles of cruise ships which come in and go out as regularly as the tides, tells me that on Friday the islands will be free of them, and that is the day to go to Skara Brae.
I drive up.
My mother has been dead a week. The moment I arrive at Skara Brae, the priest who is to officiate at her funeral, an elderly and rather deaf Dominican called Father Bob Eccles, calls me to discuss details of the service. Would I like to come in for a chat? I would, I say, but can’t, because I am in Orkney; specifically, I am at Skara Brae. What? SKARA BRAE. He says he knows Skara Brae well. He has spent a lot of time in Orkney, birdwatching, visiting friends. "What can you see from where you are standing?" he asks a little wistfully.
I can see the car park, I tell him.
...
I meet Father Eccles a few days later, and we have a cup of tea in the quiet garden of mature trees and tended beds behind the Blackfriars Dominican Priory in Cambridge. I explain why I was in Orkney when he called: that I am pursuing a journey looking into settlement, about the will to remain in a place, to stop moving, about what happens when we grind to a halt in this way; and, among other things, I wanted to look at the stone houses there.
He protests. When you read the Orkneyinga Saga, he says, the early 13th century accounts of the Viking settlement of Orkney, it is full of movement and energy and bustle. Orkney is at the heart of a great mobile trading, raiding world. The Vikings were active and energetic settlers. In the saga, people are always coming and going, dashing off on a whim or according to seasonal traditions of raiding, out across the many Viking seas, to Shetland, to Caithness, to Ireland and the Isle of Mann and the Western Isles; to Norway and Denmark and Iceland and beyond, to Greenland and Vinland.
He is right, I say. Orkney, or at any rate the Orkneyinga Saga, is all about movement. But all movement – whether of peoples across oceans or individuals through life – swings around and is anchored by the gravitational mass of settlements. No one wanders free of patterns, at any rate not for long. To make a life is to fix a centre, even if that centre itself can move. He, as a Dominican, a mendicant friar, rooted here in this garden, should know that. You can only record the fugitive, the evanescent by taking an imprint (in Walter Benjamin’s image) of its obverse; you can only properly understand movement and restlessness if you look into stone houses. And vice versa.
Or perhaps I don’t actually say this to Father Eccles, merely think it while we choose our readings from the book of Apocalypse. Best not get into evanescence with a clever, smiling Dominican, in the garden of his own priory.
...
What remains of the Neolithic village of Skara Brae was uncovered in stages by great storms, the first in 1850, and the second, following some desultory excavation and occasional pillaging, in 1924. In 1927 the archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe arrived to examine the site more systematically. Childe took it to be an iron age or Pictish village—radiocarbon dating did not place it in the early 3rd millennium BC until the 1970s.
Both through Childe’s, and subsequent, efforts it has long since been, in the jargon, ‘heritage-stabilised’. You follow neatly-laid paths around the little cluster of stone buildings more or less at the level of their roofs, and look down into them, admire the neatly-laid narrow courses of variegated stone, wonder at the Flintstone furniture—beds, hearths, dressers.
In one of the houses there is a little window, punched through, so the story goes, by the laird, William G. Watt, in the 1850s for his little daughter, who liked to use the building, known as Structure 1, as a playhouse. The originals would have had no windows, would have been deep interior places.
There are known to be other structures lying beneath adjacent dunes to the south-east, and much has been lost to the sea—the original settlement would have stood some distance inland, next to a vanished lagoon which stood between it and the shore; and no doubt further and more extensive excavation would reveal more about the site, but its place at the ‘Heart of Neolithic Orkney’, as its world heritage status describes it, precludes any further digging.
Walking around the little site is a draughty enough experience. You view the houses from above, as though in plan, hovering like a chill spirit over their roofs. By contrast, to occupy the houses was to experience all this—the chop of water in Skaill Bay, the tug of wind on the heather of the low brown hills, the arctic terns braced on their stubby legs on a ledge of rock against the stiff breeze—as beyond, outside. At a remove. For us, windcheatered tourists, the bay and the sea are inescapable. There is no crawling inside, no warm hearth.
The houses were built of double skinned dry-stone wall, with clay or ash or other detritus filling the space between, and were set close to one another and linked by narrow corridors, curved to baffle the wind and roofed with flat stone slabs. It was Childe’s surmise that they were built into midden – garbage piles. All settlement, to some extent, is developed on layers of its own ordure, builds up over time into tells and settlement mounds; but Childe’s was an especially anxious vision, of a burrowing population living in the warmth and stink and disease of its own landfill, the domed turf or thatch roofs of houses thrown up like worm casts.
This description of life at Skara Brae has now largely been discredited (although, perhaps because of its strangeness, it persists even in reputable minds). The houses were most likely free-standing at their construction, the bracing North Atlantic airs allowed to circulate around and between them; they would probably have had a turf outer shell which, collapsing over time on the abandoned site, have given the place its current appearance. But it is also true that the midden deposits so beloved of archaeologists would have built up naturally over time. On a wintery day in Orkney you don’t want to go too far to chuck your slops, your animal bones, your limpet shells. How far can an arm extend out into the rain? That is already further than you want to go.
So Skara Brae, if not purposely buried in its own shit, was certainly fighting the tide. A midden, however, is if nothing else a sign of life in this bony shell of a place. A sign of neurotic defiance, even. Here, says the midden, we lived and here we threw up our piles of crap, and here we prevailed, for a time.
...
At certain key points in the houses and corridors of Skara Brae—at changes of direction in corridors, for example, or in the corner angles of walls, or at thresholds—there are geometric marks and patterns scratched into the stone. Anxious marks. Chevrons, zigzags, parallel and diagonal and ladder-like and curvilinear lines, often cut into the more chromatically conspicuous red sandstone. And even where they are etched into the more monochrome stones there was perhaps colour: some antler frontlets found at Peterborough in England have similar incisions infilled with pigment, red-brown ochres. It could be that the lines were designed to be infilled, or were cut through pigmented surfaces; and indeed, Childe found paint pots at Skara Brae with remnant red and white pigment and animal fat – one of the pots is in the museum in Stromness, a well-worn heavy square stone mortar with a round depression in which the pigment still sits.
Impossible to know what these marks meant; impossible also to repress the suspicion that they were not made for the eyes of the living. They come in sudden concentrations and clusters, like a panicked flailing of arms, mute gestures of warning.
...
...
Skara Brae is the centre of attention in Neolithic Orkney, but in its day it would have been marginal, a little place. The real stuff was happening just down the road, along the curious isthmus at the settlement and ritual centre at Brodgar, currently undergoing excavation.
Many similar marks have been found there. Because the excavations are ongoing and the walls can be dismantled, the marks have also been found between courses of stone, visible only at the building of the house, or to the eyes, subsequently, of immaterial spirits. Like bricking a cat into your wattle-and-daub wall.
Antonia Thomas, writing of a stone found at Brodgar in the 1920s before the site was known, now kept in the National Museum in Edinburgh, likens the patterns of the marks to those of a Fair Isle sweater. Perhaps it is the other way around, those fishermen’s ganseys borrowing a little apotropaic energy, marking the threshold between sea and soul in ways handed down in the dreams of their ancestors.
...
Both at Skara Brae and at the Ness of Brodgar, and also where they are found in tombs, as for instance in Maeshowe or on the Holm of Papa Westray, these scratches often mark thresholds.
It has been theorised that a threshold mimics a natural boundary between biomes – as you move from one biome to another, from the forest to the marsh, to the lakeside or open steppe, say, you delete mental subroutines pertinent to the one, and activate sub-routines pertinent to the other. What was useful in the forest might be useless or even dangerous now that you are leaving it. Every natural boundary you cross involves a little mental housekeeping.
And then to these natural boundaries we added thresholds. Sedentary communities are especially replete with them. Forager groups understand thresholds and boundaries well enough, but their world is organised into so-called living grounds which are open, not precisely delimited, and which swirl gravitationally about significant points, rather than within mapped boundaries.
Neolithic and subsequent communities, on the other hand, are more tightly packed, their boundaries more strictly defined. An environment of thresholds. We cross dozens each day. Our evolutionary apparatus has not caught up, and in consequence you go upstairs and then wonder why you are there. You have crossed a threshold into a fresh biome and have deleted the memory-loop or sub-routine you started upstairs with. Psychologists call it the doorway effect. The more doorways in your spatial environment, the more thresholds, the more complex, evolved, fretful, forgetful, your spatial environment becomes. The more rooms you occupy, the more fragmented and porous your space, the more savage your spatial dementia.
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Neolithic thresholds can be marked in different ways – for instance, by deposition of ritual objects, such as axeheads, or ancestor bones. And more ancient systems of differentiation also exist. In Portugal some rock art is located in caves at the point where the cave transitions from light to dark. The archaeologist Richard Bradley notes that the more physically accessible the rock art, the more its imagery is accessible too; the more distant, the more arcane, the more abstract or strange it becomes.
And a threshold, coiled and fretted over, can become a labyrinth. Labyrinths fend off the dead, the malign. Archaeologists have remarked on the disorientating, labyrinthine Avon along which bodies were likely carried from Durrington Wells to Stonehenge. At the entrance to the great passage grave at Newgrange in Ireland, outside Drogheda, built by a culture which seems to have had close ties with Orkney, there is a petroglyph, a labyrinth design, one echoed in a found stone now kept in the entrance to the visitor centre on Westray.
The Ness of Brodgar and the landscape it threads together is itself a sequence of perilous significant thresholds laid out like tripwires for the spirit: stone circles, colossal walls or dykes stretched across the isthmus, clusters of monumental buildings, hearths laid in doorways to be overstepped. A threshold marks not just a boundary to be crossed, but the fact of enclosure. As a settled landscape matures, it becomes less porous, less accessible. To walk from the Dyke of Sean through the great stone circle of the Ring of Brodgar, down past the Ness of Brodgar settlement and the Stenness stones and the settlement of Barnhouse with its curious priestly buildings, to the great tombs of Maeshowe and Unstan, past all those marked thresholds, would have been a giddy journey of deletion and recollection, of forgetfulness and remembering.
...
The making of marks was perhaps as important as the marks themselves, a fidgety response to a step-change in the complexity of life. How to keep track of all those invisible thresholds and labyrinths? A settler winds the nomad’s anxiety—anxiety over the seasonal movements of game, the presence or absence of water, of food, of predators—into a tight domestic coil. Your worry is now all tied to waiting, not walking. Waiting for the crops to come, for the fishermen to return, for the rain to stop. We do not bring something about by walking towards it; we only bring it about by waiting for it to arrive.
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At some point towards the end of what we call the Neolithic, the citizens of Skara Brae abandoned the place, leaving these stone houses behind like a nest of hatched dinosaur eggs.
We do not know why they left. Childe thought he read in a scatter of beads across a threshold and down a corridor that the village had been abandoned in a great hurry, perhaps because of an overwhelming sandstorm, perhaps because of the sudden arrival of coastal raiders, people snatching up their portable belonging haphazardly.
But there were also interim abandonments – the excavated site seems to have been unoccupied for a century shortly after its founding in about 3000 BC, and then reoccupied. The longer you stay in a place, the more thickly the ghosts encroach. Leave a place for a while, and the ghosts drift away, forgotten.
Later archaeologists have read more method in the abandonment. Certainly in other Neolithic settlements or clusters of buildings, such as at the Ness of Brodgar, formal abandonment rituals were highly elaborate and would have required months of preparation. The most imposing structure at the Ness of Brodgar, Structure 10, seems to have had some special treatment in this regard—an inverted cow skull was placed in the centre of the hearth alongside a large cupmarked block of stone; the interior of the building was then infilled with rubble and soil and midden and animal bones, the walls were demolished inward, the whole overlain with yet more compost and rubble, and then, around its exterior circumference were piled the bones—tibiae and skulls—of more than four-hundred cattle and at least two fully articulated red-deer skeletons. Antonia Thomas remarks that all this looks very much like a burial. The burial of a place.
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For all that, these places are barely haunted. You are more likely to glimpse the ghost of that little girl playing house in the ruins of Skara Brae, or of Gordon Childe, the archaeologist, who ended his life by jumping from a cliff in his native Australia, than you are any more ancient ghost. The Neolithic ghosts are long gone. Perhaps the scratch marks have done their job.
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While they ring their bell over the war graves at Lyness on Hoy, I take one last turn around Skara Brae. The houses look dead and cold now, but would have been warm in life, perhaps stiflingly so, turf roofs and a peat fire always glowing in the central hearth. Take the roof from a house and all life goes from it.
In the end, not even all that stone furniture could keep them in place. No matter how anchored you seem to yourself, at any moment you could feel the great steel of the ship of your life lurch beneath you; one moment you are scratching idle marks in red sandstone while the wind howls in the twisting corridors; the next you are snatching up a necklace and seeing its beads shiver over the floor as you run. Something is coming, coming up the beach, over the water. Scuttle, quick, and run.
If Father Eccles had called me now, I might have found something to say: What can you see? I can see the labyrinth of the fear of death, Father.
