Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain. James Canton

script as some form of memorial was one that had held strong since the modern unearthing at the start of the nineteenth century. There was a logic in seeing a funereal nature to the engraving; that the stone had been a gravestone and the words an epitaph. Certainly, that was what I had assumed. In a paper published in 1882, the Earl of Southesk – the writer offered no other name – had noted that when ‘trenching’ of the Shevock area had taken place around 1,837 human bones had been found ‘a few yards’ from the original site of the Newton Stone. On the sleeper train up to Aberdeen, with notions of the Newton Stone and its enigmatic engraving playing along to the motion of the tracks, I had tucked down to sleep and begun to imagine that I was indeed one of the dead and was in fact lying in a sarcophagus of some sort, starting on that journey to the next world, the narrow bunk bed and the low roof helping to frame my fanciful thoughts. I placed my most valuable possessions about me, in the soft edges of the upper bunk, as though they were some form of modern grave goods – items that I would need in my next life: iPod, mobile phone, torch, glasses, and wallet.

      When I stepped from the stone circle on Candle Hill two wagtails mobbed me, fluttering about my head. The open road ran south down the hill. Two goldfinches flew alongside, rested a while on a fence wire as the sun broke out from behind cloud, their black and red striped hoops reminding me of coral snakes. At Strathorn Farm, an old boy sat high in a tractor, slowly raised a hand and reversed. A heap of metal detritus was piled about the farm sheds in that way some old farmers have of simply dumping unwanted goods all out in the open: a lawn mower; a Flymo with fading 1970s orange; bits of metal pipes twisted to tortuous angles; a rusting washing machine; discarded gas canisters. A collection of waste, all weathering slowly away, seeping back to their residual minerals, metals. I thought too of the sense that though I now walked this ancient roadway boldly towards three Pictish stones planted somewhere over the wooded horizon, that I too in time would slowly weather back to my residual parts, until my calcareous deposits too would leach and litter the land.

      I wandered on towards the Elphinstone estate. Two oystercatchers stood upon red-tinged clods. A yellowhammer called from a phone wire. Down a hawthorn-lined lane in the estate lands, a miasma of St Mark’s flies filled the air such that I was forced to walk along through a cloud of long, shiny, black bodies, each one dangling dark legs that hung as though paralysed from the fly’s torso. The religiosity in naming these creatures after St Mark supposedly comes from their emergence close to the saint’s day of 25 April, and yet the manner in which each fly flew with wings wide and pendulous legs dangling reminded of a shrunken dark cross, a crucifix. I pictured St Mark being dragged about the streets of Alexandria, a rope tied about his neck, his black-robes hanging dirty about his lifeless form, and wondered if this image wasn’t the inspiration for the beatification of these flies by Carl Linnaeus when he had named them Bibio marci in his tenth edition of the Systema Naturae back in 1758.

      The flies vanished. I stepped back into woodland where the bare pine carpet was littered with tiny, bright green posies that were bunches of new growth snipped from the higher branches of the pines by the flocks of finches and that now lay like votive offerings – minute nosegays or scattered sea anemones lost in the woods. Each was perfectly soft to the touch, the young needles in gentle clumps, the severed attachment turning brown in the air. I picked several from the floor, some truly no bigger than an agate stone, smelt each one, and put them into my shirt pocket. When I found them later that day they had already lost their soft lustre.

      By Logie Elphinstone House I found the three symbol stones. The setting was stunningly elegiac. I sat on the bare earth, sheltered under a canopy of elephantine-limbed beech trees, surrounded with sprays of bluebells interspersed with the pale heads of albino-white variants and the dying embers of daffodils. A single red tulip burnt crimson like a dying sun. In the peace of that space I massaged my aching feet and watched two tree creepers flit from one huge beech trunk to the moss and lichen cover of another. On the stones there were those strange symbols that told the archaeologists they were Pictish. Each was half the size of the Newton Stone. They had been found in 1812 when the nearby Moor of Carden was planted. Later that century, they had been placed with due reverence in this setting. A line of shrunken tombstones had been added. These stone lozenges, each perhaps nine inches across and a foot and half tall, each bore the name of faithful pets – dogs, I assumed.

Wee White			Lady
1919			1918
1929			1926

      Fitting with the notion of a place of the dead, the sense naturally emerged that beneath each of the three larger Pictish symbol stones there lay too the body of some brave and loyal being. These stones had various lifetimes, various roles not only for separate generations but for separate eras of human existence on this land, for distinct and different peoples. In the short time since they had been prised from the peat in 1812, these three stones had served as sections of wall in the plantation boundary and then later as some form of mock burial markers in an Edwardian pet cemetery. I wondered how long they had lain upon the Moor of Carden. Had they been carved there or elsewhere? With these wondrous whirls and circles, these sceptre lines so straight, these crescent curves of a moon, the symbols were mesmerising. I thought back to the Newton Stone, to the turns and curls of the script that I had travelled all these miles to see. How many times had the Newton Stone been moved about these lands? How many hands had sat and touched that hard stone and prepared to etch into its dark surface their own lines, the messages of their peoples?

      These stones were reused across time. Perhaps these stones were picked out as they had stood as the chief standing stones in the stone circles that ringed the hilltops of the lands, those Candle Hills where fires burnt furiously on sacral days and nights. The Newton Stone had first been raised from the soil for its shape, its size, its standing. Then many, many generations later, the stone had been selected again, to be shifted, brought down a hillside to begin a new existence: the rebirthing of the Newton Stone as a surface for scripture; in time a palimpsest to three forms of script, three formal writing systems, each carved across the body of the stone. Here was the journey from an existence of preliterate sacred significance to becoming a literary landscape, an inscribed monument. Beside those three Pictish stones, I lay back against the soil, closed my eyes to the fractured light of the beech leaf canopy, and stretched my bare feet out into the cold, cooling leaves of bluebells. I thought of the hands that carved those lines, sought Buchan’s strange shrunken men.

      I returned to Insch along the B9002. A steady line of passing cars told of commuters back from Aberdeen. At the modern ruins of the Archaeolink Prehistory Park weeds rose from an empty car park and a sign in the smart, new, glass-fronted bunker building told the site had been abandoned due to lack of funding. I paused and looked north across the railway line to where my map told of further sites: another Candle Hill rose beside a series of fine black dots marked Stone Circle and an outlying single dot labelled Standing Stone. More vast stone markers hauled and framed into the landscape by peoples long forgotten. I had already passed a sign to the Maiden Stone back on the turning to Garioch. Yet none of these neighbouring stones held that same cursive script as the Newton Stone.

      I walked on. On a bridge over the railway line I stared west and suddenly noticed that in the sky a series of inky black streams of cloud now rested over the land like vast dark sheets or veils formed of gossamer thin threads that seemed to waver in the air. I had never seen anything like them before. The clouds – for these dark waves could be nothing but – appeared to be formed from translucent silk shrouds that were falling gently from the sky. The single, dark body of a crow flew beneath while beyond the sky was pale blue with banks of foaming white cloud like seahorses rising from the waves of an incoming Atlantic storm. I found myself transfixed by these strange cloths of cloud which were certainly made more dramatic that afternoon as they lay above and seemed to mimic the flowing motion of the hills below and where in the distance I could clearly make out the Gothic ruins of Dunnideer Castle, the remains of a thirteenth-century fort that sat on the highest hillside overlooking Insch and consisted of what appeared to be a single triumphal arch, a window