‘Try not to stand on it,’ says Martin and I try. He explains that this was the site of a densely populated campsite with lots of charcoal traces from campfires, worked flints, hazelnuts, fish bones, the bones of deer and aurochs, all embedded in the clay. He uses a small builder’s pointing trowel to prise out a lump of charcoal for me to look at. Eager to join in, I lift out something the size of my fingernail and he says it’s cooked bone, deer probably. He asks where I got it from and I look at the clay and have no idea, but I make a rough guess. He produces a satellite locating device looking rather like a mobile phone and places it next to where I think I found the bone; then he makes a note in his notebook and puts the bone in a plastic pocket and the plastic pocket goes into the toolbox.
We find a little square piece of stone which is probably from a hearth. Then a blackened hazelnut, perfect for carbon dating because they live for just one year. He prises a bit of flint from out of the clay and says it is a broken fragment from a pot-boiler: you heat flints in the fire and drop them in a wooden bowl or a skin bag filled with water and three good-sized stones will bring the water to the boil. Now that I am accustomed to looking at it, I can see that the clay is thickly flecked with these hieroglyphic stories that make me think of the drawings Enrique made when he was staying on the Coast of the Dead in Spain.
We walk further out on this wet new land that is steadily emerging. Here there is a much wider and lower expanse of clay, marked with little metal pointers and plastic tags from previous researches. Martin dips a plastic bowl into the shallow sea and washes off the scattering of sand to reveal something which he says is a human footstep. It’s no longer in good condition and it looks like nothing at all, but next to it is the clear imprint of a crane’s foot, a beautiful splayed leaf shape in which you can see the articulation of the toe bones and get a sense of the weight of the body of the bird pushing down. It’s either an extinct species or today’s common Grus grus, which was probably much bigger then, with more food to eat and more time to grow fat.
We see other cranes walking by in another realm, and the single hoof of a deer, and humans that I can more or less recognise from the shape and size of their feet, but what impresses me most of all is the constellation of little pockmarks imprinted on the flesh-like softness of the clay and made by the rain that was falling on one particular day between 5500 and 5200 BC. As I look I can hear the pattering sound and I can feel the wetness of it soaking into my hair and skin. The crane has flown away, the children have gone, but the rain goes on falling.
The tide is pulling further and further back; apparently the seabed is only exposed like this for a few days every month and we are lucky with the brightness of the sunshine, the washed stones, the gentle lap of the waves. We are on a patch of harder ground again and I am busy in my search for fossils, my pockets rattling with the weight of the ones I have found already. I pick up a pale piece of flint, white, but marked with streaks of grey and black as if the colours had run like ink on paper. It is an oddly shaped flint brought to a long narrow point at one end, with something like a backbone to it and very sharp edges along its sides. I show it to Martin and ask him if it is interesting and he lets out a yelp as if he has stubbed his toe.
He regains his composure and says he’s pretty sure that we are looking at a tanged point, otherwise known as a Font-Robert Point. It’s the fourth of its kind to be found here on the estuary and one of eleven examples from the whole of the British Isles. The distinctive flint stone comes from a chalky area some forty miles to the south-east. ‘The Gravettian culture,’ he says. You can put the date between twenty-three thousand and thirty-two thousand years ago. They were the ones who made those heavy-breasted Venus figurines. They walked across from France during the Ice Age, using pockets of time that lasted for a thousand years or so when there were warm snaps in the weather. Not many of them, perhaps just one family group who were over here for half a dozen generations or less. They were used to wandering very widely. Exactly the same design of tanged points have been found in a burial site on the Gower Peninsula in south Wales and at other sites across Northern Europe.
He asks me to show him exactly where I had found it and this time I have a much better idea. He photographs it lying on the mud and among the pebbles. He locates it with his satellite device, he photographs me holding it and smiling. He says he will write a paper on it. He says a student of his had found one of these a few years ago but she stuffed it in her rucksack and only produced it when they were back at the café and by then she had no recollection of exactly where it had been picked up.
More than five hours have passed when we begin to make our way back towards the sea wall. The tide has already covered the land where the crane had walked and the rain had fallen and the shallow waves were pulling in on all sides but Martin is in no hurry to go and so we potter on.
We pause to look at the traces of several lines of Mesolithic fishing traps that came into view just three months ago. Such traps have been found in Denmark and Holland but never in England and Martin had been looking for them since 1991, thinking they must be here somewhere. The stubbed heads of a little wooden post protrudes a couple of inches out of the mud and then I can just distinguish the tops of little sticks which are the wattle fence leading to another post, on and on for about a hundred yards. They date from c. 5000 BC. It would be difficult and expensive to excavate them and even more difficult and expensive to preserve them once they were out of the water, but what matters is that they are here and a moment in time has been recorded.
Children are checking the fish traps, the crane is lifting its bedspread wings, a thin line of smoke is rising from a campfire, the rain has stopped. And there within another layer of that same picture a man is turning a white stone into a weapon that can spear a mammoth or a bison and as he works on it little chips of stone are flying off, black and white and grey like the feathers of marsh birds.
40
I had contacted Jim Leary because of his book about Doggerland in which he imagines the consequences of the rising sea levels: people trying to save their lives as the territories they had known so intimately became a flooded underworld.
We met one morning at the Royal Academy in London. We sat at a low table in the cafeteria, surrounded by the clatter of crockery, the murmur of people and curiously dim lighting, which made it feel as if night had already fallen. The American Abstract Expressionists were on show in the upstairs rooms.
We started on Doggerland, but quickly moved to the new book Jim is writing about the nature of walking. He told me of the skeleton of a Bronze Age boy found in a recent dig in Wiltshire and how tests have shown that he had the extra bone growth you see in athletes and this could only be caused by an awful lot of walking. From measuring the isotopes in the teeth you can find out where the boy was born and his bones offer clues about his health and diet, but what remains a mystery is where he was walking to or from and, above all, why he was walking so much.
Jim said that the process of walking can change your view of the world and yourself within the world. I thought of a ten-day walk I did with my husband on the Alta Via that follows the backbone of the Ligurian Alps. Much of it was originally made by Neolithic shepherds, the carefully fashioned stone paths worn smooth by their feet and by the sharp hooves of their animals. I remembered the steady quiet that surrounds you as you move between the far distance of where you have been and the far distance of where you are heading. Thoughts and worries and fears lose their urgency, dissolving within the slow rhythm of your movement. The path becomes the trajectory of a whole life, like those paintings in which you see a saint setting out on his journey from birth to death, the entire story contained within the one landscape.
Jim said that for him archaeology is an act of remembrance, even if you are remembering things you never consciously knew. The actual process of excavation is what delights him most, when he is fixing on where to start and then
stripping the first turf off the topsoil in order to enter the darkness that lies beneath it. More often than not it’s just soil that you find, but occasionally you come across a pristine landscape.
Between 2006 and 2008 he led an excavation of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire. It was built over a period of a hundred years four thousand years ago and was first excavated in 1849 and then again in the 1960s. It has always seemed as if the hill must contain some secret: a dead warrior, treasure, anything to put a stamp on its value and importance for the people who erected it, but the mound is nothing more than itself. It holds a kaleidoscope of different soils, gravels and big stones. It also holds a few simple discarded tools, an entire ants’ nest, some perfect insects – their blue-green carapaces gleaming like jewels – seeds and berries and an area of slightly yellowed flattened grass, as if a family had been camping there on the previous night.
The mound was not especially visible from far away and it’s unlikely that it retained its original chalk whiteness for long. At some stage in its construction, small boulders were put into it, ‘scattered like currants in a bun’, but no one knows why; maybe people imagined seeing the stones within the soil, just as the inhabitants of Doggerland must have imagined seeing the hidden gifts that lay beside the remains of their dead.
Jim said that in an attempt to understand Silbury Hill, he had been reading about the American Indians who were building similar but smaller mounds when the first Europeans arrived and recorded what they saw. Everyone would gather together to listen to the story of how the world was made by a creature who dived into the great ocean and brought up a lump of mud and this mud swelled and grew until it had become the place they now inhabited. As they listened, the people participated in the story, taking handfuls of earth and making their own mound and from this simple act of imitation, the distant past was brought into the present moment and everyone could share in its immediacy.
Our conversation was over, but before Jim left to meet a colleague he offered to take me on a walk around the Silbury Hill area and then he could tell me what lay beneath the surface of a landscape that is thick with round barrows and long barrows and complex sequences of banks and ditches, as well as the buried remains of wooden structures and the jumbled or carefully assembled bones of the dead.
And so, several months later, I took a train to a station that I used to know very well during a time in my life that now feels as distant from me as the life of a stranger. I was early and so I sat in a café in which pop music from the radio was combined with the circling repetition of world news on a big television screen and with the bird-like screeches of a little boy who sat and stared at me, keeping his back to his family and drinking a purple liquid from a plastic bottle.
Jim arrived in his car and we set off. We drove alongside Silbury Hill, which appeared suddenly and looks like nothing special until the moment you are about to pass it and you see this strange and steep-sided green blancmange in its entirety.
We reached a car park where we met Dave Field, an archaeologist who worked with Jim on Silbury Hill and other projects. A misty rain was falling, throwing a haze over our surroundings and distorting all sense of the solidity of things. We followed a wet path towards the spine of the chalk hills of Pewsey Downs, the thin ridge of the Vale of Pewsey on one side and Stonehenge out of sight in the distance beyond.
Our first stop was a dew pond; empty of water and overgrown with nettles, it looked as if a falling meteor might have made this unexpected dip in the landscape. Dew ponds have been dug and lined with clay on the porous body of the chalk ever since the first domesticated cattle were grazed here, almost six thousand years ago. Awkwardly shaped boulders were lolling around the edges of this one and these were sarsens, the same stone that was used in constructing the big uprights at Stonehenge and was hidden within Silbury Hill. The name is a shortening of Saracens and describes their apparent foreignness in such a smooth landscape. The ones around the dew pond were as big as sofas and looked like lumps of soft mud that you could mould into different shapes with your hands. These stones had metamorphosed from sand after the Cretaceous Epoch and the strange tubes and rounded holes that riddled their surfaces were made by the roots of palm trees that once grew in their long-ago soil.
When we walked to the crest of the hill we jumped into the Neolithic world; the land worked into the shape of ditches and high banks that were clearly serving a purpose although no one is quite sure what they were supposed to be keeping in or keeping out. Around six thousand years ago, the same time in which the last islands of Doggerland were vanishing and the people from there were trying to establish new lives in unknown territories, the first of the farmers were moving in with their livestock and the seeds of edible plants to be sown and cultivated and harvested. Jim thought that perhaps the vague outline of enclosures we were looking at were used in big seasonal gatherings here: crowds of people who scattered over the whole region, feasting together, trading cattle and women, weapons and tools, telling stories, singing songs.
So where were the hunter-gatherers in all of this? I had somehow presumed that there was a gradual overlap between the two peoples: the farmers needing to hunt, the hunters learning to cultivate the land and to keep livestock. While we were walking, Jim said this was probably true, but there was so little evidence to hold on to, and recently new DNA studies have been changing all the preconceptions. Now it is thought that at least 90 per cent of the hunter-gatherers disappeared without trace. For something like that to have happened means there must have been violent and dramatic confrontations, remembered in stories that have since been forgotten.
The farmers had such a different relationship with the land and the life that it supported. They were the owners and they made their mark of ownership wherever they could. They shaped the land for their purposes. They placed their dead within the land and memorialised their absent presence by erecting mounds above them. At first the bones of the dead were heaped alongside those of domesticated cattle and wild animals and no one knows what kind of rituals accompanied such depositions, but then around four thousand years ago, a greater separation seems to have been made between animals and humans and important individuals began to be entombed within their own stone chambers.
The excavations that Jim had been working on during the summer of our meeting were at a site called Cat’s Brain. It had been chosen because from aerial photographs you could see evidence of what looked like a long barrow, but when the team dug down, instead of a burial they found the outline of the timber structure of a great hall, twenty-two metres long and ten metres wide, built around five thousand six hundred years ago. It seems it wasn’t intended to be used as a dwelling, but as a place where a whole community could gather, as if, said Jim, the building was a metaphor of their shared existence.
We continued across the naked body of the land. Every time we passed a mound or a long barrow that had not been excavated Jim stared with an almost comical intensity at the outside skin as if he was trying to see what secrets it held. From a barrow known as Adam’s Grave we looked down into the Vale of Pewsey with its patchwork of ploughed fields. Along the line where the chalk of the hills meets the fertile clay of the valley, they had found a huge midden, two hundred metres long and three metres high. It had been in use for perhaps one hundred years and they estimated it must have held the remains of a quarter of a million sheep as well as a hundred and twenty thousand cows and a thousand people.
We walked on, making a loop back towards the parking place. Soft rain was still falling. Apart from an old couple walking side by side with their Jack Russell on a lead, we had not passed anyone on the hills, nor had we seen any sign of life in the wide expanse of cultivated land in the valleys. Everything was bereft of the presence of human beings and even the sheep and cattle had been replaced by the silent cultivation of corn and wheat.
Time Song 15
I am walking with Bryony along a path
>
that runs above a narrow wooden road
that crosses a marsh
from one island to another.
This is what is left of Sweet Track,
the name derived not from the recollection of sweetness
but from Mr Sweet, who first discovered it.
The reeds enclose us,
the sky watches us,
the rest of the world is far away.
Bryony and her husband started work here in 1970,
digging down every fifty metres to uncover
a straight line of planks and pegs and poles,
over a mile long;
the wood blackened and broken by the passing
of close on six thousand years.
It is estimated that
twenty to thirty people built the track
within twelve months.
It is hard to tell if they were following the line of an earlier one;
it is also hard to tell if the track was constructed
For symbolic purposes:
for stepping across the still waters,
mists rising, reeds whispering,
the sudden shock of the cries of birds.
It could just as well be a simple means
of going hunting,
or a connecting link with neighbours
on the other island.
Curved pins made from yew tree wood
were casually dropped along the way;
Time Song Page 17
