The Buried Circle

by Jenni Mills

  ‘You’ve spent at least as much time watching him prowl the banks as you have filming,’ says Martin, coming up to stand beside me at the lip of the deepening trench. He’s lost weight; under the beard, his cheeks have hollowed. ‘Don’t play games, petal. If you like him, let him know. Life’s too short.’

  ‘I don’t mean it to be games,’ I say. ‘But how do you tell, Martin? Suppose you never have dreams about a Brushwood Boy. Maybe all you’re feeling is…just about shagging.’

  Martin’s face has that closed-down look again. ‘No point asking me. I’m one of the bloody dreamers.’

  The team has been excavating for a couple of days now, Harry and I wielding cameras. First, the skin of turf has been peeled away over an area the size of a small living room. Now the students are chipping away layer by layer at the soil. They’re a metre down, and still haven’t reached the stone. One of the men–rangy, bearded, bright red sunburn–holds up a fragment of something. Martin leans down and takes it from him. ‘Clay pipe,’ he says. ‘Seventeenth century, I’d say. Bag it, Reuben.’

  ‘Boring, then,’ I suggest.

  ‘No! Martin brightens as soon as the subject is archaeology. He pretends to tear out handfuls of hair. ‘Why can’t television people ever get it into their thick heads that the past isn’t about frozen moments, it’s about layers and continuities? That was Keiller’s mistake. He was only interested in prehistoric Avebury, so it didn’t strike him as vandalism to wipe out the later settlement that grew up within the circle. How’s your grandmother, by the way?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, watching Ed set down the wheelbarrow on the bank and strip off his shirt. ‘Look, he’s flaunting himself.’

  Martin sighs. ‘Petal, he’s hot.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And stop being jealous of the students. One of them’s engaged to Reuben, and the other two are lesbians.’

  ‘He’d think of that as a challenge,’ I say gloomily. ‘When are they going to uncover the stone?’

  ‘Patience,’ says Martin. ‘Serious archaeology cannot be rushed.’

  ‘It has to be when it’s Solstice next week.’

  Michael has insisted that all digging be suspended for the Solstice period, when the campsite and the village fill with pagans. He arrives on site shortly after Martin’s friend Kit, who is some kind of engineer, to discuss how the stone can be lifted.

  The upper surface has been revealed. It’s massive, nearly three metres long, diamond-shaped, buried in a pit cut exactly to fit its shape.

  ‘Like…a coffin,’ says Ibby. ‘Like it was alive, but now it’s dead.’

  ‘Or sleeping,’ says Martin. ‘One line of thinking is that the stones represent the ancestors. More than represent, perhaps–they’re the physical embodiment of them. They have to be enclosed within the earthen banks of the circle to prevent their ghosts wandering. So when the later inhabitants of the village at Avebury start to bury stones, are they making sure the spirits sleep even more soundly?’

  ‘Interesting,’ says Michael. ‘How long will it take to lift?’

  Kit shrugs her shoulders. She’s a petite woman, in her late thirties or early forties, with dark hair in a spiky cut. ‘We’re aiming to use the same techniques as the people who first put it here,’ she says. ‘So no modern ropes or pulleys. The students will plait hawsers from honeysuckle, which is the kind of material they might have used. Could take a few more days to finish that and wedge it upright in its original socket. Afterwards we’ll bring in modern gear and mix up a nice safe concrete base to hold it in place. No wandering ghosts, I promise.’

  ‘You have until Friday,’ says Michael. ‘Then you have to be off site.

  Solstice is the middle of next week, but people start arriving at the weekend. If you haven’t finished that afternoon, you’ll have to make the area safe and cordon it off. Ed and Graham will help.’

  ‘We’ll be done by then,’ says Kit, confidently. ‘Promise.’

  CHAPTER 31

  On Thursday morning, Adele and the social worker from the Geriatric Psychiatric Unit turn up at nine sharp to collect Frannie. The new social worker is called Bob. He’s in shorts. Frannie catches one glimpse of his thick white legs, covered with gingerish fur, and takes against him.

  ‘Okey-dokey, Frances,’ he says, in the jolly tone that men of his age–not much older than me, that is–reserve for elderly ladies.

  ‘I think she’d prefer to be called Mrs Robinson,’ says Adele.

  ‘I would have called you that but I was afraid you’d have the pants off a young chap like me.’

  Adele’s eyes roll heavenwards. As Bob helps Frannie into the back seat of the car, she jabs a finger towards her mouth and mimes retching.

  ‘Mrs Robinson, you know?’ Bob continues, oblivious. ‘Like in the film with Dustin Hoffman?’

  ‘No need to be fresh,’ says Frannie. ‘Thought all you social-work boys were poufs anyway. Where are we going?’ she asks, under Bob’s helping arm, as she sinks arthritically onto the back seat.

  ‘You’re going to the day centre,’ says Adele. ‘Remember? We did discuss it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To make new friends,’ says Bob, brightly.

  ‘Got plenty of friends here,’ mutters Frannie. ‘Nancy-boy.’

  Adele, a small dark woman whose eyebrows meet in the middle, clamps writhing lips shut to prevent a giggle escaping. Bob’s jovial expression has not shifted one millimetre. Perhaps it rolls off him, though he shuts the door with a little more force than necessary.

  Click: like a police car, the rear seat of his is fitted with childproof locks. Frannie’s imploring eyes meet mine.

  ‘Have a nice time,’ I say helplessly.

  The stone should have been raised today, but an emergency in the underground quarries where Kit usually works has called her away. Instead the morning is spent filming students plaiting yet more ropes from strands of tough, woody honeysuckle, and cutting timber props with bronze axes.

  ‘Can’t we lift the stone without her?’ asks Ibby ‘Don’t get me wrong, what you’re doing is art, Martin, but if I see one more shot of a honeysuckle rope I’m going to strangle someone with it. Or brain them with a bronze axehead.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Martin is unrepentant. ‘Can’t be done, unless you want to film squashed students. Wouldn’t trust myself to supervise without Kit around.’

  By late morning, there is still no Kit. The students are given a half-day off, and the film crew set up outside the Manor instead, on the paved pathway between two beds of fragrant lavender. Martin is explaining to camera that Keiller lived under this historic roof, when my phone rings.

  Ibby shoots me a withering look.

  ‘Sorry, sorry,’ I say. ‘Forgot to turn it off. Wasn’t expecting it to work here.’

  Martin tries to pretend he doesn’t care, but such is the perversity of mobiles at Avebury that I’ve wrecked what would have been a perfect take.

  ‘You might as well answer it now,’ says Ibby. ‘Harry, you ready for a tape change?’

  I retrieve the phone from my jeans pocket.

  ‘I’ve been trying you for ages,’ complains Michael. ‘Is Martin with you? Something I want him to take a look at.’

  Martin’s doing his actor bit, striding up and down waving his hands and repeating the lines of the piece to camera to fix them in his head. His face goes still and blank as he puts the phone to his ear. ‘Right,’ he says, after a minute. ‘Yes, I’d be delighted.’ There’s a twinkle in his eye.

  ‘Martin!’ Ibby and Harry have finished conferring. ‘We need to crack on.’

  ‘OK,’ says Martin. ‘We’ll head up there when we’re done.’ He peers at my phone, ostentatiously turns it off, and slides it closed.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I ask.

  ‘Tell you in a minute.’ He grins. ‘My favourite kind of archaeology. Poking around in mysterious holes.’

  The afternoon sky has turned grey by the time we set out for Windmill
Hill, and a sprinkle of rain dampens the air. Ed drives us in the Land Rover, parking at the top of the track. Martin unfolds a natty little rambler’s stick.

  Ibby was singularly unimpressed when we explained what Michael wanted.

  ‘So all we’re talking about basically is a hole in the ground? And not a terribly big one?’

  ‘With animal bone and flints,’ said Martin.

  Ibby’s face showed what she thought of that.

  ‘Think I’ll stick to Plan A,’ she said dismissively. ‘The crew and I will take the Steadi-cam to the Avenue. India can take the smaller camera and film anything…interesting in this hole.’

  The gate onto the hilltop is padlocked. Ed climbs over, then notices me struggling with the camera bag. This afternoon is the first time we’ve been in talking distance since his return to Avebury. ‘You want a hand with that, India?’

  ‘I can manage.’

  ‘Wasn’t implying you couldn’t.’ He takes the bag, then offers his arm to help me down. His hand is warm and dry, the palm roughened by his weeks as a warden. Outdoor life suits him: today he looks better than I’ve seen him since last summer. The cowboy boots have gone, replaced by a pair of hiking boots, his skin is tanned, and he seems relaxed. He gives me a smile and I feel suddenly shy, wishing I were as lithe and confident as the golden-limbed students in shorts.

  ‘You know where we’re going?’ asks Martin, jumping down after me.

  ‘Somewhere near the top end of the wood.’ As Ed turns to point the direction, the light reveals faint lines of strain around his eyes. Not so relaxed, after all. ‘This morning a woman walking her dog found recent digging under the trees and rang the estate office. She was vague about the exact spot.’

  ‘Is it exciting?’ I ask.

  ‘Possibly.’ Martin adjusts the strap of his leather satchel across his body. As we stride across the open hilltop, the first of the round barrows dotting its crown pops into view like a green pimple. ‘See, those are Bronze Age, but the occupation of Windmill Hill goes back much further, even before the stone circle. All the lower humps and bumps aren’t natural features: they’re older banks and ditches, forming what archaeologists call a causewayed enclosure. Probably a meeting place with ritual use.’ He waves at some shallow undulations in the field. ‘It shows up better from the air. This was where Keiller found Charlie’s skeleton, in one of the ditches, on his first dig in the Avebury area in the 1920s–the Marconi Company wanted to put a radio mast on the hill, and he led a campaign to prevent it. But he didn’t excavate the slope on the far side so we’ve no idea what’s under the trees.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Ed, ‘you have to ask yourself how the hole the dogwalker found got there. That’s what’s bothering Michael’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Nighthawks.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Metal detectorists,’ says Martin. ‘The illegal sort. Meaning they don’t bother to ask the landowner’s permission, and they don’t declare what they find. They’d be interested in Bronze Age barrows: chieftains, grave goods, swords, jewellery, maybe gold.’

  ‘There’s treasure up here?’

  ‘Well, probably not. The barrows were excavated long ago: gentleman archaeologists and nineteenth-century vicars plundered the lot. But nighthawks’ll still scavenge for anything that might have been missed.’ Martin glowers. ‘I spotted a hole in the side of one of the Hedgehogs last week.’

  ‘Meaning someone found something?’

  ‘Meaning someone dug a hole in the side of a scheduled ancient monument. If they did lift anything valuable out of it, it’ll be on eBay by now. Bloody thieves!

  ‘You really don’t like them, do you?’

  ‘“Nighthawks” makes them sound far too sexy,’ says Martin. ‘Dung beetles would be better.’ He spreads a molehill with his foot and crouches to peer at the soil.

  ‘Um…’ says Ed.

  ‘That’s different. The mole did the digging and, anyway, I’m a professional.’ He peers at the earth, picks up a flint pebble and sighs, drops it back, then straightens up, looking towards the trees. ‘I’m always hopeful I’ll find an arrowhead Keiller missed.’

  John says you don’t find arrowheads, they find you. He has half a dozen or more at his cottage. But I don’t mention this in case Martin says they ought to be handed over to a museum.

  ‘How are we going to tackle it?’ says Ed, as we reach the trees. ‘You take the bottom while India and I work our way along the top?’

  Martin scrambles down the hillside, and Ed and I walk slowly along the top edge of the wood. The stone circle and Big Avebury, a mile away, are hidden among foliage, but the church tower lifts above the green canopy and, further on, I can make out the houses at Trusloe.

  Lights, buggerin’ lights

  ‘If there were metal detectorists here at night, they’d be using torches, right?’ I ask, wondering if that was what Frannie saw from her bedroom window.

  ‘I suppose so.’ Ed steps carefully over a dead crow. ‘For Chrissake, don’t tell Martin, but I used to own a metal detector.’

  ‘Ed. Is there no end to your iniquities?’

  ‘I was still at school. My proudest find was a Civil War musket ball.

  At least, that’s what I told people it was. For all I knew then, it could have been a modern ball-bearing.’ When he flashes that conspiratorial bad-boy smile, he’s almost unbearably sexy.

  ‘Ed! Indy!’

  Martin has come to a halt below us.

  ‘You found something?’ shouts Ed.

  ‘Looks like it.’

  Ed waits for me to clamber over the wire fence, then follows me down the slope through the trees towards Martin’s red anorak. He’s at the bottom of a steep bank, a metre or so high, using his stick to probe between the gnarled roots of an old beech.

  ‘Not nighthawks, then?’ I sling the camera bag over a bush, and jump down to join him.

  ‘Careful, petal. Don’t want to cause any more damage.’

  The hole is impressive. Or, rather, holes, plural–I almost fell into another. Two burrow sideways into the crumbling soil of the slope: the largest, framed by tree roots, is wide enough to admit an Alsatian. A third cavity, smaller, is sunk into the plateau near the lip of the bank. All three have disgorged spoil heaps of fresh earth, mixed with dead bracken and grass.

  ‘That’s a relief,’ says Martin. ‘Definitely not nighthawks. Badgers, bless ‘em–too big for rabbits. My guess is this will be the work of a young male who’s been kicked out of the main sett, striking out on his own. There was probably an entrance to an abandoned outlier here, stopped up years ago by foxhunters. But the soil’s soft, and this lad’s dug it out again to reoccupy it.’ He pulls a trowel out of his satchel, and scrapes at the bank further along. ‘Very soft, in fact. Badgers are lazy buggers. They prefer places where something or someone has already done the hard work. Could be only the tree roots that have loosened the soil, but I’m inclined to think there was some sort of earthwork here.’

  ‘Lend us your trowel, will you?’ says Ed, looking at the nearest spoil heap. ‘Ind, why don’t you do the honours? There…’

  He passes the trowel to me. Delicately, I flip over a clump of dried-out bracken. Under it, shining greyish-white in the dull light filtering through the trees, is a perfect, leaf-shaped flint arrowhead. Magic.

  By the time Ed’s phone rings, we’ve amassed a small pile of finds.

  ‘Did you locate it?’ comes Michael’s voice, loud enough for us all to hear. ‘What’ve you got?’

  ‘Loads of stuff,’ says Ed. ‘I’ll pass you over to Martin.’

  ‘Animal bone, mostly,’ Martin tells him. ‘Probably pig, but I’m no expert. There’s even a couple of tiddly bits that could be human, small bones, finger or foot, but this really isn’t my field. Some of the bone’s charred, but not all. Worked flint, including a pretty little arrowhead that’s definitely Neolithic. At the least I reckon there could be a hearth site. Needs a proper dig bec
ause what we’ve picked up is a real jumble, obviously, having come out of a badger sett, but–’

  Michael’s ‘What?’ explodes out of the phone.

  Martin winces, holding the handset away from his ear. ‘Well, what did you think it was going to be?’ he asks, when he can get a word in. ‘Come on, Michael, you can’t be serious nighthawks would’ve been preferable…OK. Right…No, we only touched the spoil heap. We’ll leave it and come back.’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ asks Ed, as he hands back the phone.

  Martin sighs. ‘I never paid enough attention to law. Michael has reminded me the badger is one of the most protected species in the British Isles. It’s illegal to damage any part of a badger sett that’s in current use. Might be possible to get a licence to dig, on the basis that it’s so close to a scheduled ancient monument, but Michael isn’t sure. He thinks it’s probably too far down the hill’

  Before we leave, I borrow Martin’s torch to lie flat on my belly and peer into the hole under the tree roots.

  ‘And before you ask, no, I won’t let you have the stick to poke about inside,’ he says. ‘We’ve probably earned ourselves about four hundred years apiece in prison just for shining a torch up there.’

  Ed pats my bottom. ‘Come on up. There’s nothing else we can do today’

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ I ask, clambering to my feet and brushing bits of bracken off my trousers.

  ‘Well, Michael will want to get the curator involved, and English Heritage, and God knows who else,’ says Martin. ‘But I’ll make the point we should apply for a licence to dig, and soon, though almost certainly too late to be part of Ibby’s TV programme…What’s the matter, petal?’