Ancient Wonderings: Journeys Into Prehistoric Britain. James Canton

      sadness.

      …

      Remedies

      never were,

      remedies,

      not within my reach.

      I cannot go on as I am.

      The threnody that runs through the heavenly, Arcadian vision of England seen by Wordsworth or Blake or Edward Thomas, ran here too. I stared with watery eyes. The sudden intensity of the moment was unanticipated.

      England

      …

      It leaves a taste,

      a bitter one.⁴

      A few days later, I rang Professor Dumville. An Old School voice answered. I explained who I was and he apologised for not making the Aberdeen meeting. I said I wanted to know his thoughts on the Newton Stone.

      ‘Well, it’s certainly acquired a sense of mystery,’ he said.

      His voice was deep, confident and fully of authority.

      ‘Exemplifies in spades the notion of the Picts being odd.’

      Scattered across my desk were various articles collected from Sally Foster beside various other pencilled notes. One piece of paper was labelled ‘Ques for DD’. I couldn’t find it.

      ‘Thing is, the archaeologists have gone all PC about the Picts,’ he continued. He seemed happy enough to talk. I was sure the sheet was somewhere in the pile.

      ‘I was first shown photographs of the stone way back when taking my MLitt, as a graduate. “What is that script?” I’d been asked. “Old Roman cursive,” I’d answered. “That’s what it is.” But then that means it was carved before 300 AD.’

      Professor Dumville’s words were worth waiting for. His chatty honesty was utterly refreshing.

      ‘If it’s not a fake …’ he added.

      I stopped.

      ‘A fake?’ I asked.

      I hadn’t even questioned the script’s authenticity before. I found my sheet. The first question was a good one. Why was it that a recent paper on Pictish stones was using a transliteration of the Newton Stone script from 1922? The answer was simple.

      ‘There’s been no modern work done on the stone. The family wouldn’t let anyone in to see. It’s only been in the last year or so that the house changed hands. The new owners seem rather friendlier. Did you get to see it?’

      ‘Yes,’ I said, rather proudly now I knew so few had managed to.

      ‘So what of that work from the 1920s?’ I asked. ‘Is it all wrong?

      ‘Well, Francis Diack was rather demonised,’ said Dumville. ‘But now he’s starting to be considered. Good starting point, really.’

      I asked more on the aspect of the script itself.

      ‘Well, it’s been read as Greek, Palmyrine, Phoenician. You name it …’

      ‘Oh. Waddell,’ I said, remembering my research.

      ‘Indeed.’

      ‘So it’s not Phoenician?’ I asked

      ‘No. It’s not. It’s old Roman cursive,’ he repeated happily. ‘It’s very useful to tease people with.’ He laughed. ‘All I can say is my interest was epigraphic. Why would someone put cursive on a monument? Why was someone doing this inAD 300?’

      While I tried to fathom this, tried to fit it with all I had read, Professor Dumville had moved on. He talked some more, on the nature of insular script, a Gaelic written form that had emerged out of the new Roman cursive, before returning to the problem of the Newton Stone script.

      ‘There has to be a physical way of explaining the nature of the letters in that scripture,’ he explained. ‘Such that their age can be properly assessed and a better sense built of when they were carved.’

      But no real archaeological study of the stone had taken place for close on a century.

      ‘I suspect it’ll turn out to be a fake,’ he declared firmly.

      Remarkably, The Newton Stone and other Pictish Inscriptions by Francis C. Diack (1922) popped up for sale when I searched online under ‘Newton Stone’. It was twenty pounds. I bought it immediately and the book arrived two days later carefully wrapped in brown parcel paper. I pushed everything else on my desk aside. The book was really a booklet. It was just sixty-four pages long. Diack began with a familiar description:

      It is a monolith of blue gneiss, rather over six feet high, and bears two inscriptions. One is in ogam letters along one of the edges and part of one of the faces, ogam being the peculiar Celtic alphabet used on early monuments in Ireland. Higher up on the same face is the other, consisting of six lines of Roman letters in cursive of the first three centuries AD.

      That tied in perfectly with Dumville’s words. I read on. Diack turned to the meaning of those six lines. They could be divided into two sections. The first three lines read:

      ETTE

      EVAGAINNIAS

      CIGONOVOCOI

      I read on:

      It is apparent at once that we have here proper names, and that the monument is, like every other known example of similar age, a sepulchral record, commemorating the name of the person buried there.

      It was a funereal stone. The first three lines Diack read as, ‘Ette, son of Evagainnias, descendent of Cingo, here’. Only the mother’s name was given, fitting with the matriarchy practised by the Picts.

      The second three lines record the name of another person. Whether they were cut at exactly the same time as the first three must be doubtful, and whether they were by the same hand, though the technique looks the same.

      Those second three lines read:

      URAELISI

      MAQQI

      NOVIOGRUTA

      Diack read them as meaning, ‘The grave of Elisios, son of New Grus.’⁵ The name of New-Grus was another form of reference linked to Pictish matriarchic traditions.

      I made a cup of tea.

      So if we were to accept Diack’s words, the Newton Stone was indeed used as a burial stone, though Professor Dumville reckoned it would turn out to be a fake. I flicked back through my photos of the stone, to the curved lines of the letters and zoomed in until they blurred to grey cloud. They were carved into granite. If the script was a fake, someone had taken a good deal of effort over it. I thought of those early Victorian antiquarians who had apparently found the stone. They had the time. And the money. And perhaps also an imperfect knowledge of cursive Roman.

      I drank my tea. There was something else. Something I’d missed. I opened up all the files I had made from the various works I’d read. It wasn’t from those nineteenth-century ‘Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland’. It was more recent. I found it. It was from Iain Fraser’s The Pictish Symbol Stones of Scotland:

      Recent examination of the [Newton] stone has also identified a mirror symbol on one of its lower facets, and the remains of a spiral or concentric ovals towards the base of its rear face.⁶

      Then there was that third inscription: Pictish symbols carved on the back of the monument. It was yet another reincarnation for that block of blue gneiss, another rebirth for the Newton Stone as a sacred monument. Those six lines of cursive Roman writing that had so entranced with their mystery, their unknowing, were probably nothing more mysterious than the epitaphs to two men whose bodies were once laid in Scottish soils and whose souls had long since flown. The stone had then formed a slate for later generations to carve